“I showed up for my job interview at [restaurant name redacted], but the guy who was interviewing me was late. It was dark out, and I sat watching cars go by outside. There seemed to be some kind of animal in the road, near a huge pothole. Cars were driving over it, and actually hitting it—but it was still moving.

“I looked closer, and I saw that it wasn’t actually one animal but a pile of animals—a pile of rats. The pothole was so deep that they might have come up through it. They were all tangled together, and they were eating each other alive.

“I looked it up online later—it’s called a ‘rat king.’ Somehow the rats get tangled together, and they can’t escape. They just eat each other until eventually they all die. The Egyptians used to mummify rat kings.

“The cars were hitting the rat king as they passed, and knocking rats out the pile. When rats were knocked out of the pile, they wouldn’t run away—they’d stay there and eat the bodies of the rats that had already been killed, or who were too weak to escape.

“Someone at the restaurant called animal control, and eventually two huge trucks arrived. One of them had a giant vacuum hose hanging off its front, like an elephant. They didn’t suck the rats up, though.

“First, they deliberately—strategically—drove over the rat king, to break it up. Then, the trucks parked, and two guys got out. One of them had a crowbar, and the other had a sledgehammer. They started hitting the rats—just hitting them, all of them, with the crowbar and the sledgehammer. As they killed the rats, they’d scrape them down into the pothole or the sewer. Finally, they’d killed all the rats and scraped them away, and the trucks left.

“My interviewer finally arrived, 40 minutes late. I told him what I’d seen, and he said, ‘You’re hired.'”

– As told last night at a bar to a horrified Jay Gabler