My fieldwork lately has increasingly taken me into the underbelly of the city-- crawl spaces and the technical spaces underneath buildings. In the early hours of the morning, I find myself maneuvering between cables and pipes alongside a rat manager. The manager carefully monitors the presence of rats by checking each numbered trapping box for signs--bite marks in monitoring bags, or in a rare case, a dead rat in the snap trap inside the box. With a flashlight he locates the boxes in this badly lit technical space and tells me that the presence of rats can be viewed as a symptom for something else: a crack in the floor, a need to renovate or the often heard saying 'human behavior' [menselijk gedrag]. On another occasion, someone higher up in rat management tells me that rats 'gratefully take advantage of our 'human behavior''. In other words, our messiness such as the 'incorrect' handling of waste flows or leaving the windows and doors open is, as he puts it, 'a bed and breakfast for rats'. According to a colleague of the manager, I speak with during lunchtime, 'human behavior' is why the process of management is often a long one because human behavior cannot be changed very easily. To which he jokingly adds 'and the rat takes advantage and laughs at us [humans] in the meantime'.