A 26-year-old man discovered that there had been mice living in his New York City apartment when he was making a snack, capturing the exact moment in an Instagram video.
Sale strategist Alexander Mutammara is originally from Houston, Texas, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and discovered his “NYC villain origin story” when he realized the rodents had been nibbling on his bread.
“You know when you have a really intense realization and your heart sinks?” Mutammara told Newsweek. “When I saw the hole in the bread bag, my first thought was ‘Oh! I must have ripped it by accident,’ but when I saw the chunk taken out of a piece of bread, it took me a second to remember exactly where I am (Brooklyn), and then I connected the dots. I swear I got dizzy and my vision started narrowing, I was like ‘There’s no way.’”
Mutammara shared a video to Instagram on September 12 of the exact moment he discovered he had mice in his first-floor studio apartment where he has lived for two years, with the clip receiving over 5.6 million views and over 144,000 likes since it was first posted.
In the video, Mutammara speaks to the camera, about to make a snack with two slices of bread, when he realizes that there is a hole in the bag.
“Hold on, I’m really triggered right now,” he says in the video. “Why does it literally look like there was a bite taken out of this?”
“I pulled out all my appliances to see if I could find any evidence of mice or holes in the walls,” he told Newsweek. “I didn’t find any mice that day, but I did see some damage in the walls and some mouse droppings. I tried to ignore the issue for a few days, until I woke up one morning to find a mouse trapped inside my bathtub. I have horrible eyesight, so I just saw a big dark figure in my bathtub in the morning, said to myself ‘Damn that’s a big roach’ while I went to get my glasses, then came back to realize it was actually a rodent.”
He added: “I hired a professional to patch up any holes in my walls. He came over, did a full sweep of my apartment, and drilled some metal plates into all the ‘entry points’ he saw.”
Rodents such as mice and rats in the home can carry a number of diseases that are harmful to humans, says the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Through bite wounds or eating food contaminated by rodent droppings, humans can develop rodent-borne diseases such as leptospirosis, salmonellosis, and hantavirus, among many others.
Fortunately for the young professional, the issue seems to have resolved since the video was recorded.
“I haven’t heard of or seen any mice since then,” Mutammara said. “I always say now that if the mice are still out there, I genuinely just do not want to know. They can take whatever they need, as long as they come at night, act silently, and leave no trace. I still live with the trauma though, like every morning I have to take a deep breath before I step into my bathroom because I’m afraid I’ll see one again.”
Instagram Users React
Instagram users took to the comments section, with their thoughts on Mutammara’s unfortunate realization. One of the 26-year-old’s favorites is “someone saying something along the lines of ‘I love how you can see him processing what happened in real-time.’”
“And it’s so true, it’s so rare to capture moments like that on camera, but it really is such a genuine reaction to what happened and I think that’s why the video did so well. It’s like you can ‘see the gears turn,’” Mutammara said.
“Damn. That bread looks so good and soft too. I hate that for you,” @_everlizaaa wrote.
“You convincing [yourself] that you tore it is the funniest part,” @ioveafro commented.
“Nothing has ever made me laugh more than the mouse,” @nadine.akkawi posted.
“I put mine in the fridge for this very reason, I am traumatized,” added @t_cloetta.
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