News about the “rat” problem spread like wildfire all over the region, and the company decided to host a tasting event when they determined they were past the point where threatening their workers was effective. They came up with a plan where workers and their families, people who lived near the facilities, and most importantly, the pillars of the community and other important persons of the region were plied with spirits from the warehouse and shown how there was no problem with the sanitation or quality of their product and how much the company was contributing to the local community.
The event was held on the lawns of the headquarters. The CEO himself attended, as did his son the vice-president who had a child in elementary school. The CEO’s grandson, bored with the long speeches, the loud music, and most of all the drinking the adults were indulging in, slipped away to wander around the company grounds. The CEO’s daughter-in-law found him crouched before an open door of the warehouse. “I was playing with the bunnies.” She asked where they were. The boy dragged her into the warehouse by the hand. He pointed at a bunny lamp perched on top of a dusty steel filing cabinet and begged her to let him take it home.
His mother said they needed to ask his grandfather because the object belonged to the company, and she quickly forgot about it as she dragged her son back to the outdoor event. But the boy didn’t forget. His drunk grandfather, upon hearing what the boy said to him about wanting a strange object in the warehouse, told him to go ahead before turning back to drinking with the important adults.
The PR event was a success. Everyone stayed late, drinking the free alcohol into the wee hours of the night. Having endured it for as long as she could, the CEO’s daughter-in-law left with the child when he began whining from exhaustion. The boy hugged the bunny lamp tightly in the car that took him home.
The “rat” rumor seemed like it had finally been laid to rest, and the fundamental reason for the rumors—the bunny lamp—had been moved from the warehouse to the house of the CEO’s son.
But the bunnies that had already spread throughout the company’s branches and retailers’ warehouses did not go away. The ones that had moved into the offices with the documents didn’t go away either. They continued to multiply and chew up everything in sight.
Every night inside the drawers and steel cabinets, all manner of documents—order forms, contracts, business performance reviews, account books, and financial statements— were chewed to shreds.
Even when the most important documents were moved into the vault, the cash, cheques, and promissory notes within began to get chewed up as well.
The company undertook a building-wide professional extermination, dumping all of their things on the lawns including the contents of the vault. As all this went on, the CEO’s grandson did his homework by the light of the bunny lamp at home and slept in a bed right next to it. The boy loved the cute lamp of the bunny sitting beneath a tree and bragged to his friends that his grandfather had been gifted it from overseas. The CEO’s grandson touched the lamp several times a day, stroking the bunny’s back in order to switch the light on and off.
The bunny did not chew up the paper in the house of the CEO’s son.
It chewed up something else instead.
The CEO’s grandson was in his last year of elementary school. Aside from being smaller than average for his age, he was a strong boy with no history of illness. According to his mother, he was a nice enough child who enjoyed going to school and did well in his studies, albeit a little too enthusiastic about kicking a ball around instead of doing his homework or cramming for exams.
No one paid much attention at first when he began to forget his homework and school materials. He was the grandson of the brewery owner and had always been a good student; the teacher didn’t scold him so much as nag him. But the child soon began to forget not only his homework but the fact that he had been assigned it in the first place, and in a burst of irritation he lashed out at his teacher, prompting a call home. “Please keep in mind that children enter puberty early these days and can get moody,” the teacher said to the mother, and the mother acquiesced.
Around the end of winter vacation, the boy began obsessing over food. He insisted he hadn’t eaten when he clearly had, stole food from the fridge, hid snacks around the house, and threw screaming fits when his mother tried to take the food away. His family assumed it was because he was a growing boy. Thinking he might be going through a growth spurt, they bought more food, and a greater variety at that, but the boy’s greed, paranoia, and temper only worsened.