Are you "Gas Man" or Mouse?

When I was a student, in the days before student loans and student debt, I rented a room in a shared house. It was very cheap. It had to be as we got very little grant money to live off. The result was plenty of sub-standard accommodation available for students. I think I paid about £10 a week. It was an old terraced house. Very draughty and no central heating. There was a one inch gap under the back door in the kitchen and a strange smell. We often had mice problems, one running across my bed with me in it on one occasion. The good old days, how we laughed. The gap under the back door saved our lives it later emerged, as the strange smell was a permanent gas leak emanating from the gas cooker. It became evident one day when I lit the gas and a tiny gas flare emerged from the side of the gas burner rather than the burner itself. I called the gas board out and the gas man took the cooker apart to find a dead mouse under the top panel that fitted around the burners. It was curled up in the insulation like it was asleep. Gassed to death. The gas man isolated the cooker and condemned it. The landlord came around and took it away and brought another one just as old but not leaking. Jump forward four years. I had just started my first proper job after leaving college and being unemployed for a while. I walked into the staff canteen at lunchtime and the first words I heard were………. “and you’ll never believe it. He took the top of the cooker off and there was a dead mouse just lying there. The house was disgusting and occupied by students.” It was a fellow work colleague regaling her story about the terrible things her husband had seen as a gas man over the years. I think I must have blushed and for some reason felt very ashamed, don’t know why. We actually kept the house very clean and tidy (for students). It was all we could afford after all. What were the chances of us working in the same company and of her telling that story the exact second I walked in?