Splat. Dang. Blat. The story of the bat.

On Friday afternoon as the day was beginning to wind down at Viapoint headquarters Aaron walked into my office to ask me if I had heard it. At first I puzzled as to what I was supposed to have heard but in moments it became all to clear that above me in the ceiling tiles was a scurrying and living thing scraping along the ceiling tiles above us as it meandered from room to room looking for a way out. My first instinct was to leave for the day since it was Friday and let Aaron and Chris fend for themselves with the beast. But since I am a reasonable person I instead stuck around doing work to hear it wander about. I recommended that we could lay a trap for it and if it were a large rodent or raccoon that it could be captured and released. I was making a ruckus above us and was able to traverse three rooms seemingly in an instant. That led me to the conclusion that there was a family or an entire armada of these evil beings living in the ceiling waiting to thrust their way down through the fiberglass tiles to reach a hungry alien claw down to snatch me up and eat me for a late afternoon snack. Chris managed to confirm that the beast or beasts were dinosaur-like in fashion with a clear long beak that had protruded down in an attempt to thrust it’s head into his office.

Finally the animal broke free from the large crawl-space cage and the entire Viapoint animal removal unit sprung into action to attempt to free a very agitated European starling from the office. European starlings are not the most loved of birds among ornithologists of the area and I am inclined to agree with them that they are vicious and cruel bloodthirsty creatures with no redeeming quality even as a dinner in a Brittish pub. If you have ever had a birdfeeder, as my family did in Newton, you come to dislike certain breeds of birds for their ability to drown out all the other breeds of birds. Among the nasty birds are pigeons, blue jays – nasty little f*&#%ers, and the European starling. The starling is not a native bird as is suggested by the European attitude and like many Europeans they have a really bad attitude. They tend to colonize large areas and kill native populations. Imagine the Brittish and Spanish knocking out the native Americans. That is what the Starling does to native populations of birds. They are also not very attractive birds. They have an iridescent black coat that looks like they emerged from an oil slick.

So this particular Starling was swooping about in the office trying to peck out the eyeballs of the architects and brain trust behind of the best smart organizer (www.viapoint.com) on the planet. My main role was to hunch down and duck for cover as though I was under mortar fire in Iraq and scurry into my office to grab my digital camera. Aaron was hard at work opening the window in his office. As I took hold of the Canon Powershot Digital Elph S400. I ran to Aaron’s office to hear the door slam in my face. Hector, the heroic Starling had flown into his office and Aaron had decided to act alone to defeat the beast alone with the door closed. So I was stuck with a camera and a closed door hearing screeching, screaming, cawing, and Aaron inside and I was wishing I could report effectively on this defining moment in the start-up venture. By the time I got the courage to burst through the door with the camera ready to document the event Hector had flown into the wilds of Burlington.

This story would seem to be an incident unique to Friday but I first learned the power of the Internet one dark night in Cambridge when Ron and I were living and working at 930 Massachusetts Avenue. I was sleeping in the upstairs apartment and Ron was up late trying to program a statistics package for VirtuMall so that we could calculate and report how much traffic had come to the site. He ran excitedly up the stairs to awaken me from a great dream as I was sleeping in my tightey-whitey underwear because it was the heat of a summer night. Ron was petrified and breathing heavily because there was a bat on the second floor flying in eery silent circles. Because I am larger than Ron and older by a few years and my family owned the house Ron elected me the chairman of the bat removal organization.

Now we realized that we couldn’t just go down with our skin all exposed to a potentially rabid bat since we didn’t want to get rabies and since none of the other employees were in the office as it was the middle of the night there was no problem wearing whatever outfit we saw fit to wear. In our case we first worried about our legs. Ron chose to wear a robe tied at the waist. I wore a long sleeve shirt and a towel tied around my waist. The next key body part to protect were our faces. To protect my face in the basement I found a reflective metallic firefighters asbestos soft hood that looked like something out of a B-horror movie like the robots in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Ron wore a black and orange striped ski-mask. We locked ourselves in the second floor to do battle with the bat. Our weapons of choice were open windows, an open fire escape door, a large piece of cardboard and a broom handle.

The bat spun around the house at top speed for about fifteen minutes and we would yell loud noises at it hoping to disrupt it’s sonar and direct it to the open door. When that didn’t work we tried using the cardboard card by pushing it up when it seemed to be going in the wrong direction to trick it into turning around to go back to the doorway. The broomstick was also used in an attempt to hold up the card at one point then was relegated to mere waving like an old lady with a cane who has been splashed by a passing car as the bat passed from room to room. The bat grew tired of this activity after about fifteen minutes and decided to rest on the edge of the open door to the outside world.

We quietly snuck up to it with the broomstick while it was resting and paused to make a plan. At this point I finally got a chance to see a bat up close and it has a very human or monkey-like face. It looked at me with it’s little eyes without much fear while wrapped in it’s web-like wings. We decided our best bet was to nudge the bat with the broomstick because it would likely understand that as a cue to awaken and fly out the window.

So as I pushed the broom handle into the bat it did awake and it let out a bit of a squeak that was enough for me to panic in fear that it was going to come at me and strike. So I pulled back the broom handle only to see this bats mate fly through the open door full of vigorous energy. So rather than having removed the first bat Ron and I were faced with two bats actively flying about in the second floor with the prospect of more bats to come.

At this point in time we weren’t particularly entertained by the rapidly multiplying bat population and it wasn’t the first time we had dealt with wild animals in the house at 930 Mass Ave. Only a few months before we had been treated to a large raccoon the size of an eight year old child that was happily munching on waste from a failed attempt to make Pad Thai (too spicy due to a massive dose of unneeded jalapeno peppers) our garbage can full of food in the third floor apartment. The raccoon had been easy to get rid of. We just needed to yell at it for about half an hour with low menacing voices. The same technique was only making the bats seem like we were in a scene in the middle of gremlins II. I expected one of the bats to start talking to me with a Brittish accent.

After conferring with each other Ron and I decided that our MIT educations had not prepared us in any way for this eventually of death by bat infestation so we felt that it was time to confer with the outside world. So we called the animal control department in Cambridge hoping that they could send a bat removal S.W.A.T team that would descend from the roof and throw large nets around the bats. As it was 2:30 in the morning the bat removal S.W.A.T team was apparently fast asleep after having watched Conan O’Brien. We probably only missed them by a few minutes. So I went to the next best thing. I called my dad. He was ecstatic that I had called him at 2:30 AM and after groggily yelling at me for waking him up he offered this great piece of advice. “Go to sleep. If the bats are still there tomorrow morning then you can do something about it.” I informed Ron that the advice from the best expert on the matter had been to let the bats exit on their own but he was not ready to concede to a growing colony of bats invading the 2nd floor and claiming it as their own new Cambridge residence. We did live like cave men but the cave didn’t need to come fully stocked with bats.

So Ron did what I found to be the most ingenious example of the power of the Internet to change human lives. Ron searched the Internet using Alta-Vista for the word “Bat Removal”. Through this search he found a site from a zoo in Florida that described for curious tourists learning about those wonderful insect eating bats how to remove them from your home. The instructions boiled down to this. Bats when they get tired will perch on a wall to rest. When they are on this wall they are quite docile and can be removed by taking a coffee tin and a piece of cardboard to trap behind them. First you cover them with the coffee tin, and then you slip the cardboard behind them. You can then safely remove them from the house and release them back into the wild.

While most people drink coffee prepared from a tin, my preference had been to go to the 1369 Coffee House or Au Bon Pain down the street. Thus we did not have a coffee tin. Cardboard was not handy either. So we improvised with a piece of Tupperware and an LL Cool J album cover. We had a brief board meeting for VirtuMall and Ron elected me the chief bat removal officer so I had to walk over to the bat with the Tupperware in one hand and the album in the other, still wearing the silver fireproof helmet.

I covered the bat with the Tupperware which went fine. When I then slid the record over it the bat decided that it would prefer to be flying around the second floor instead. But it was trapped in between and ready to be nicely released into the wild. The bats impression was that his best bet was to claw and flap inside of the Tupperware and make evil screaming sounds as I rushed down the stairs to the first floor to the door. He decided that there was a small gap in between the two objects that he could widen with his bat claw so he slid his claw up through them into my world slowly reaching more and more of his webby arm out to grab my fingers with his claws. This action caused me to rush even faster out the door because one chink in my otherwise bat proof armor was that my hands were not protected. Ron held the door open and I threw Tupperware, bat, and record out the door for them to all separate and fall onto the ground together figuring that although I didn’t want to kill him, he would be free to kill me if I waited another few seconds. Ron slammed the door behind him.

A few minutes later Ron wanted to check if we had a dead bat on the front steps. He opened the door and walked out into the warm night air. He saw the Tupperware and the record on the ground but no bat was to be seen. The suddenly the bat swooped down right in front of his face and looked him in the eye while floating just to give Ron one last spook to declare his disappointment at his eviction.

After all this excitement Ron and I decided to heed my dad’s advice and let the other bat escape on his own. By morning it was gone but we still don’t know if it really left or if it is still in residence somewhere in the roof.

On Sunday the Pats played and won the Super bowl against the Eagles. Just before the game, as we were watching in my parents attic I heard the rustling of squirrels living in the crawl space in the roof who were probably excited that they could watch the game through a peephole and gorge themselves on chestnuts and acorns gathered from the fall.

The basics are clear. Bats, starlings, raccoons, squirrels, and all the other critters that like to come in and visit us unannounced make for interesting times, strange wardrobe choices, and are an integral part of running a zero-stage start-up.