THE DEAD SQUIRREL ON THE ROOF

THE DEAD SQUIRREL ON THE ROOF

When I get a Friday afternoon call from one of several owners of commercial rental properties that I’m under retainer to it’s almost always because of a late reported problem from a tenant and the implication is that the tenant and their employees expect the issue to be corrected before they return to their office on Monday. In this case, based on the information provided to me by the landlord, the owner of a telemarketing firm complained that they were receiving little circulation through the vents and what air they could feel produced a strange, difficult to define, odor.

From my experience, including extensive knowledge of this building, I felt safe to surmise that the squirrel living on the roof directly above their office had finally met his demise after a long, robust and active life and his death was the cause of both the lack of air flow and the odor.

As I scaled the extension ladder to the flat roof of the two story office building, while pulling my bucket full of tools carefully up by hand, I was thankful for the mild, still cool morning weather and hoped I could remove the squirrel before the mid-day temperature rose enough to make working on the flat, white asphalt roof too hot to the human touch. I also knew retrieving the squirrel could be simplistic or complicated, depending on the circumstances. Until I knew for sure I could only silently pray for Sunday morning easy.

Laying my bucket of tools on the not yet too hot asphalt I again tried to imagine the difficulties in bringing the heavy squirrel cage units onto the roof of this two story building, of which there were dozens of them on this roof, each containing their own squirrel. And the specific squirrel that was the source of the complaint and the odor, I noticed as I examined his environment, likely pushed his expected life span far beyond average expectations. And I offered a short, admiring eulogy to him because he seemed to have willed himself to thrive beyond the norm. And though caged environments did have their limitations, I’m not aware of any case studies pointing to the expected life span of such squirrels living in the wild and this departed, caged squirrel held on to the end in such a way that he earned the respect I was giving him. 

To those of you reading this, to clear up any misconceptions, the squirrel in question, as well as all these squirrels living in large, heavy squirrel cages, is a metaphorical name, a common name, given to the motor inside a round tumbler that rotates a blower fan that sends a continual flow, as needed, of cold air into the ducts that lead to the offices below, both of which are enclosed in the metal housing of the AC unit. And the odor in this case was produced by the smell of the burnt out wiring as the motor, using it's last breaths of life, still tried to rotate.

So don’t blame me for the intended misconception, a creative and hopefully witty ploy, if a few of you don’t realize the common slang trade name for the round tumbler is a Squirrel Cage and equally the common name for the motor is Squirrel. My day job may be what it is but I still aspire to a certain height of notability as a barb, questionable or not, of dry humor.