There have been times in my laboratory animal career where I’ve been convinced that I’m trapped in an episode of Candid Camera.  Candid Camera was a popular TV show when I was a kid.  Video cameras were hidden to catch people reacting to unusual or surprising situations that the show set up.  Though the situations were set-ups, the people’s reactions were real and oftentimes hilarious.  One of my most memorable Candid Camera moments came when I was working in a University laboratory animal research facility.  Most of our animal rooms and offices were in the basement of the building.  Outside of the basement, a few labs containing animals were sprinkled here and there, strategically placed to ensure that different types of research didn’t cross paths.

Late one afternoon my office phone rang.  It was a male voice with a foreign accent.  The man informed me that he was lost in our building.  He was trying to make a delivery to the cafeteria and he had my name and number as a contact.  Though I love to eat, I assured the man that he must have the wrong information as I was in no way connected to the cafeteria’s deliveries.  He seemed quite frustrated, but as he couldn’t tell me where in our large building he actually was, I couldn’t help him navigate to the cafeteria.  Most of the time, I still had trouble finding my way to the animal rooms that were outside of the basement.  All of the hallways looked exactly alike and there were so many entrances that I wished him well and hung up the phone.

The next day was business as usual until a colleague phoned to tell me I just ‘had to hear’ what he’d found during ’rounds’.  Another veterinarian, this day’s rounds took him to one of the outlying animal rooms–the quarantine facility–to check on a mouse there.  The animals (in this case mice) received from outside Universities were held in quarantine until we established that their health status was good enough to move them to the basement.  The quarantine facility had a set of double doors, required badge access and special clothing to enter, and special procedures to exit.  We considered it a ‘dirty’ room and the signs on the doors all made that pretty clear.  My colleague found the most unusual thing in the quarantine room–a tray of donuts!  Three dozen donuts in bright pinks, whites, browns, yellows and other colors and flavors were found resting under a sheet of plastic wrap on a cardboard tray.  In the ‘dirty’ mouse room!

My colleague brought the donuts to my office as we almost couldn’t believe their existence.  Really, someone had to be playing a joke on us.  Were we on Candid Camera?  Who brings donuts to a room that’s way off the beaten path, a room that requires a special badge for access, and has signs everywhere making it clear that it not only contains mice, but that the mice are considered unclean?  That’s when I remembered the phone call from the evening before.  The phone call from the man with a heavy accent who was looking for the cafeteria.  There was a slip of paper attached to the donut tray that had a name and number on it.   We called the number and it rang to a manager in the cafeteria.  Sure enough, he’d been looking for his donuts.

The cafeteria had chosen a new donut shop as a supplier and the delivery man must have become lost in our building.  When he arrived at the mouse quarantine room, it was long after the cafeteria had closed.  My name and office number were listed on the signs and desperate to reach someone, the delivery man phoned me.  Completely unhelpful to him, he left the donuts and then left the building.  What we never figured out was how the donuts came to be inside of the animal room.  That’s still a mystery.  I was quite sure our animal care staff wouldn’t willingly take a ginormous tray of donuts and place them in the animal room.  They’d have eaten them!  The cafeteria manager was thrilled I’d found his donuts.  He even wanted us to bring the donuts to the cafeteria.  It seemed the gravity of the words ‘mouse room’ weren’t sinking in so we explained to the manager that the donuts were no longer fit for humans to eat.  Our animals, even the pigs, were all on special diets so we sadly had to dispose of the donuts.  They’d had quite the journey around our facility.  My colleague and I had quite a journey of our own, realizing that our everyday experiences in the lab animal medicine facility were even more surprising than an episode of Candid Camera.