Respect Authority

You can search for everything online these days. With just a few mouse clicks, it’s within my power to find out all of the Gap stores, Bank of America locations and indicted sex offenders within a five-mile radius of my apartment — and office! And now, thanks to New York City’s latest backhanded attempt to take piles of money and set them on fire, I can find out where the rats are too.

The Rat Information Portal, complete with a searchable map of rat inspections and violations, debuted yesterday on the city’s Web site. The site gives advice on getting rid of rats and encourages residents to act as “rat watchdogs” (seriously), using the map to track trouble spots and pressuring property owners slow to address the problem. Really thorough readers can even find photos of rat droppings on the site, ostensibly to identify similar droppings in their vicinity. Though, really if you stumble across unidentified droppings in your apartment, you better hope it’s only rats.

I can’t say I understand this Web site, or why the city would put significant resources behind it. For one, there are rats everywhere. I expect a map of rats in New York City would look like a map of Starbucks in New York City, except multiplied by a billion. I would also expect it to correlate very seriously with a map of homeless people hangouts in New York City which, consequently, I would much prefer. I would love to map out (and avoid) areas of condensed homeless populations and learn to identify homeless-person droppings.

I suppose in some way I appreciate the city’s effort to thwart the rat population. After all, I was pretty peeved that one time a mouse/rat found its way into my office stash of hot chocolate packets.

Still, I can’t help but feel that money and time could be better spent on other things — like you know, crime, or drugs, or those weird centipede creatures that keep showing up in my kitchen.