This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone did as he was told. He visited the competitor company’s CEO and said the lamp was a gift from the subcontractor company, demonstrating the on and off switch with gloved hands. The CEO simply nodded his head, distracted by some papers he was signing, took a call passed on from his assistant, and abruptly left his office saying he had a meeting with a member of the National Assembly.
This someone who knew someone who knew yet another someone had no choice but to leave the bunny lamp behind in the CEO’s office. On his way out, he implored the CEO’s assistant sitting outside to not let anyone touch the lamp except the CEO, but as he was merely a nobody who worked for a subcontractor, the assistant simply nodded her head like her boss had done and went back to reading her magazine.
Grandfather, having heard what had happened, sighed as it occurred to him that the course of the curse would be altered slightly.
But he figured as long as the cursed bunny was somewhere in the CEO’s house or office it wasn’t a complete failure.
The bunny lamp stood on a table in the CEO’s office for a day until being moved to the company warehouse when the workers were preparing to go home. That night, the bunny nibbled at any paper in the warehouse—cardboard boxes, crumpled newspapers used as packing filler, stacks of old documents, account books going back years, all of it. No one came to the warehouse at night, so the bunny nibbled away undisturbed.
The next morning when the warehouse guard opened the doors, the floor was strewn with bits of paper and rabbit droppings. The guard muttered something about rats and buying rat poison as he cleaned up the mess.
The bunny, still unnoticed in the corner of the warehouse, nibbled at archived papers all through the next night as well. The guard occasionally passed by outside as the bunny munched through the warehouse, and the night watchman also went about as usual with a flashlight in his hand, but the two men only glanced into the small window of the warehouse door; no one could imagine what was happening inside. Once the bunny had chewed up every bit of paper in the warehouse, it started on the wood.
A guard glimpsed something white in the warehouse. It looked like a fluffy bit of cotton, but it disappeared as he approached it. He figured a draft had blown it away. The next day, the little white object had become three, and then six the day after that. The guard thought the retreating white figures seemed to hop just like rabbits, but wild rabbits couldn’t possibly be living in that part of the city. He thought nothing of it—there were trucks that needed to be loaded for deliveries to branch offices. The guard, branch worker, truck driver— none of them noticed the white-with-black-tipped-ears-and-tail bunnies that hopped aboard with the crates of alcohol.
Soon after, the warehouses of both the headquarters and the branches, as well as retailers, reported some kind of infestation that resulted in chewed-up paper and wood and pea-sized droppings everywhere. Mousetraps and rat poison were of no use, not even cats helped. Someone glanced at the droppings and remarked that they were too large for rats and looked more like the work of rabbits. The woman who presented this accurate opinion worked as a clerk and had a niece in elementary school who raised rabbits for some kind of nature class, and she had visited the hutch a few times to feed them dried grass. But no one in the branches and no retailers had seen any rabbits inside the warehouse, and the clerk was no rabbit expert, just some woman who spent her days taking inventory and fetching coffee until she would inevitably quit to get married. Everyone ignored her.
The company headquarters and all the branches forced every employee to participate in a rat-catching campaign across the warehouses. Many rats were indeed caught, and the campaign, while leaving the workers exhausted, did result in cleaner warehouses. But all it took was another night for the warehouse floors to be littered with shredded paper as well as animal droppings too big to be from rats.
As paper kept getting damaged, the company decided to move their most important documents, like old account books and factory blueprints, to their offices. While they did so, no one noticed that the white bunnies with black-tipped ears and tails, invisible under the daylight sun, were also moving into the office.
A rumor spread that the distillery was overrun with mice. As so much of the local population worked across the company—at the headquarters, branches, warehouses, and the factory—it was inevitable that word got out in the area.
One branch fired a warehouse worker as a warning while another division brought all of their workers together in one room and begged them to be careful about spreading rumors. The dismissed worker happened to be taking care of his old, bedridden mother as well as three sons and five younger siblings, and he was later caught by the night watchman when he broke into the warehouse with a container full of gasoline to set fire to the place. Meanwhile, in the region where they had gathered workers to lecture them on spreading rumors, a full-page opinion piece appeared in the local newspaper about the dangers of rats when it came to food sanitation.