Next year it will be a decade that I’ve lived in New York, and one of the things I have come to love about the city is the ubiquitous union rat. It seems like almost every neighborhood I’ve worked or lived in has had a rat nearby for some period of time, and in fact there’s one near my new office right now. However, I only recently started to consider exactly how many union rats must exist in the world for me to have seen such a large number of them. There must be so many, in fact, that surely there’s a company whose primary business is the production of inflatable rats. And what about the people who work in the inflatable rat factory? Are they unionized? If so, what happens when the Inflatable Rat Makers Union goes on strike? Do they set up an inflatable rat outside the inflatable rat factory?

It turns out that there is, of course, a company that produces the union rats: Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights. And in fact there is a whole variety of union rats: small rats, big rats, rats with festering scabby bellies and rats without. For the union that’s sick of giant rats, there are giant inflatable cockroaches, inflatable greedy pigs with top hats, inflatable corporate fat cats, the works. Big Sky itself is, interestingly, a non-union shop, so I suppose the inflatable rat workers won’t be striking anytime soon. Even so, I am now convinced that Chris and I need a six-foot rat for our apartment. It could live on the balcony and scare away the pigeons.