Spider Time

I believe that spiders have no business spidering around the areas I frequent, like my OFFICE, my DOORWAY, my PANTRY, my DISH DRAINER, or my WORK BATHROOM. And I believe that it is my mission and duty in life to alleviate my own personal suffering by killing these spiders whenever I encounter them. Personally, I feel that the best and most effective way to get rid of them is to bash the everloving hell out of them with something large and heavy, like a phone book. As a matter of fact, I currently find phone books useful for exactly nothing except spider-bashing. I have the internet. If I need to look up a phone number, I’ll use the internet. If I need to bash the everloving hell out of a spider, I’ll use the phone book.

The spider’s size is irrelevant. I’ve been known to whack the fuck out of spiders the size of a baby’s fingernail with my trusty, deadly phone book. When I kill a spider, I need it to be taken out with one shot. I can’t miss, or hit it gently, because in either case it could survive and be aware enough to run, and then one of the two most horrible things in the world could happen as a result:

1. The spider might scurry off somewhere where I can’t see it, and/or
2. While trying to reach its hideout, it might crawl across a portion of my body.

And then I would die.

I don’t know if it’s that time of year or what, but I have been running into spiders EVERYWHERE lately. And they aren’t harmless little bitsy garden spiders, either. They’re those big bad black spiky-legged mofos. And with the exception of the first spider, the office wall spider, they kept showing up in places where the phone book method wouldn’t work. The office wall spider was taken out quickly and efficiently with a slap of the phone book that had colleagues two doors away asking if everything was all right in my office. By that point, it was.

The second spider appeared in the upper right-hand corner of my back door. I couldn’t use the phone book, and couldn’t reach him even if the phone book would have worked. So I slammed the door a bunch of times until he got startled and started looking for a better place to hang out, and when he got far enough toward the floor, I showed the cats where he was and let them torture him to death and eat him. That worked pretty well.

The third spider this week was in my pantry, at the very very tippy top of the door frame. Again, the phone book was out, and my pantry’s in a weird place so I couldn’t count on keeping the spider in my line of sight if I startled him down to the cats. I knew I had to suck it up and just squish him with a paper towel like a normal person would. So that’s what I did.

But first I put on an oven mitt and wrapped paper towels around the mitt and my forearm just in case it fell.

Spider #4 had built an elaborate web in my dish drainer while I was out of town last week, and as the focal point of her dream home, she barricaded herself in layers of web inside the Dutch oven I’d left drying upside-down when I left. I couldn’t put the pot in the sink because I had other dishes in there and what if she escaped? So I drowned her in Dawn.

The fifth spider was the master, possibly the leader of them all. He was in the work bathroom this morning, and he almost – almost! – made it out alive. I was in the far stall, and someone else had just come in to the near stall. I was doing that thing you do in the work bathroom where you stay really really quiet and wait for the other person to leave so you can finish up your business uninterrupted, and as I sat there and tried to stay absolutely silent, Grandmaster Spider Five came tearing out of nowhere toward my foot.

I couldn’t step on it because I can’t just step on a spider, I have to GRIND ITS ASS INTO THE GROUND, and grinding its ass into the ground would have called unnecessary attention to my presence in the far stall, and might have caused the other stall’s occupant to SPEAK TO ME, which is like the thing I hate the most in the whole world about going to the bathroom at work. I generally do not want to chat with you when I’m going to the bathroom at work, especially when I barely know you and you’re not very nice to me when I say hello to you on campus. Really. You don’t have to chat just because we’re two feet away from one another. Wipe, flush, and leave me in peace, please.

Issues!

So yeah anyway, I couldn’t step on the spider. So I had to keep my eye on him while I waited out the other stall’s occupant. And for a while I worried that he would go into her stall, and then she’d have to kill him, and then she’d speak to me or otherwise react because he’d obviously just come from my stall and I obviously didn’t kill him, so WTF mate? But the risks of action were worse than the risks of inaction in this case. So I kept my eye on him until she left, and I kept my eye on him while I finished up my business. And I turned around to flush and when I turned back, he was gone.

The bathroom was empty, so while I washed my hands, I looked around for that sneaky bastard. He was nowhere to be seen. Finally, I moved the trash can with my foot and there he was, hiding out behind it. And I was like, DIE! DIE! DIE!

So I ground his ass into the ground and I dried my hands and I went back to work.