No story about WalMart would be complete without an unusual event. As I was leaving there was a flash of motion. A mouse went careening down the mostly empty aisle. I hopped to the side as the mouse zipped past, banked around the corner, and accelerated out of view.
“Did you see a mouse?” The checkout girl asked.
“Did you see it bank?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was really moving.” She agreed.
“How does one bank like that on a flat floor?” I pondered.
Suddenly the truth dawned on both of us. The checkout girl reacted first. She grabbed a radio and barked into it “Jeff! The damn bat is back!”
I started to laugh. Some guy (presumably Jeff) came charging in from the cart racks. He stormed down the aisle, yellow vest and all, on a bat containment mission. The bat, unconcerned by Jeff, circled around and flew by in the opposite direction. It was 6″ off the ground and moving deliberately back and forth. It appeared to think the flat cement floor was a body of water and Wal Mart checkout lines were good places to hunt mosquitoes. It presumably considered Jeff nothing more than an obstacle like the cash registers and no matter how fast Jeff was moving the bat avoided him. The bat was an ace flier and poor Jeff was hopelessly out gunned.
The checkout girl and I enjoyed the antics of Jeff and the bat for a while. I couldn’t help but root for the bat. The checkout girl reported that yesterday’s chase had lasted an hour. (The bat won!) I didn’t have time to watch the whole show so I left. I hope Jeff and the bat both had a fine evening.
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When I worked for Home Depot we had bats fairly regularly. Though I don’t recall one ever that close to the floor lol. It was always good for a laugh though to watch the various male employee’s freak over the bat zooming over their heads….
Nice.
My mom works at Meijers and one day she came home telling a story of the store director running around the store with a BB gun after birds had invaded the store and set up a latrine system over the clothes section.
Same thing happened to me in our local wal-mart a couple years ago. I wound up grabbing a beach towel and trapping the bat as it flew past. Other customers gaped. One of them scolded me for ‘hurting’ the bat. The wal-mart employees told me I should let them catch the bat.
So, I let it go.
In the store.
Hah!
Excellent!
Some years back I live for a while in a converted 1860’s bank barn. It was a nice house, with great spaces, but it had a rodent population. They had been there since (one assumes) roughly 1860, and seeing that the conversion dated to about 1985, I figured that they would get the message that the people (and their cats) were there to stay sometime about 2525. If then.
The resident rodents didn’t have an air force, per se, but they did get occasional visitors from an outside bat population which we encouraged (because they eat midges). And one day one of the cats caught a bat on the wing, in the middle of the living room. You could have knocked me over with a feather! I took the carcass from her because a) getting a cat de-parasite-ed is expensive an annoying and b) when left to their own devices the cats tended to stash choice parts of their rodent catches for reference later, with results that were as pungent was they were hard to get to and clean up. She was annoyed, until I gave her enough treats to put her in a mild kitty-coma.