Month: December 2012

Yesterday I had a spider incident. In the text of that post, I mentioned a snake incident. This particular snake incident will probably top all other pest-related stories in my lifetime (it has so far) so in order for you to enjoy it, I went and found the email that I sent to friends on the evening that it occurred. This is the story as it was written the night of January 5, 1998, with only the correction of some typos.

Enjoy.

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From [dead email address] Mon Jan 5  23:15:37 1998
Subject: <unprintable> <deleted>

Another addition to the List Of Things That Suck:

Once there was a man.  Let’s call him Bill.  Bill was home from work and
tired.  Rather than do the innumerable chores that awaited him, Bill decided
to get into his PJs and curl up with a book on his bed.  Bill piles the Pillows
behind his back and sits up, reading.

Bill is enjoying his book but Bill hasn’t twitched for about an hour and his
back has a muscle spasm.  Not a big one, just a small one, right under his
shoulder blades, across the width of his back.  No big deal, just readjust.
Then Bill has another spasm.  Is it his imagination or does it feel like
there’s something moving underneath him?  Must be his imagination. 

Then Bill felt it again and before that cesium atom could vibrate 6E18 times,
he was out of bed, breathing hard, staring at his pillows.  What *was* that,
he asks himself.  He leans in a bit closer to look at the pillow…and it
moves.

Bill is understandably unhappy at this point.  He very gently picks up the
pillows (two of them) by the opposite corner and carefully tiptoes into the
hallway where he drops them on the floor and jumps back.  Nothing happens.

Bill carefully reaches down and picks up the pillow that he thinks does not
have the “thing” in it and shakes it.  Nothing comes out.  He tosses it against the wall and nothing goes “thud”.  He kneads it *particularly* carefully and
there’s nothing in it.  One to go.

Bill, even more carefully, one might even say frightfully, but we know Bill
better than that, carefully picks up the closed end of the other pillow
and gives it a small shake and A SNAKE DROPS OUT, LANDS ON THE FLOOR AND JUMPS AT HIM, HOLY FUCKING SHIT AND THE FCC CAN BITE MY ASS.

Bill is rather perturbed at this point.  He gets more perturbed when he
realizes that he jumped away from the snake, not toward his apartment door,
but away from it.  So, now Bill is situated ten feet down  the hall from
his front door with a pissed off orangish snake hissing at him in the
middle.  Alas what is out hero to do?

One must not forget that Bill is armed with that most deadly of weapons:
A pillow.  Using his trusty weapon and wielding it excalibur-like, he
fends the evil foe off as its eight and a half foot hissing length
(well, maybe a foot and a bit) lunges at him time and again.

The herculean battle continued until Bill managed to bat the damn
thing down his stairs a few steps, enough to enable him to jump back
into the relative safety of his apartment, dress in snake-proof clothes,
ditch the pillow for a hockey stick, and gather up the phone.

Several calls were made.  Oneonta police found it amusing and nicely
called animal control for me. (oops, sorry, Bill)  Animal control came
down (a very nice woman named Julie) and laughed alongside the slightly
harried Bill who by this time had evidenced his astounding hockey skills by
wrist-shotting the pesky reptile down his stairs, through the entrance,
and out the door, where the damn thing could freeze for all I—um,
Bill— cared.

Bill is now (hypothetically, of course) debating the wisdom of going
back to bed tonight.  He knows that there will not be a single piece
of clutter in his apartment when he’s done cleaning up.  When that
will be, only time will tell.

This is All true, I shit you not.
Bill

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As the story mentions, I sent the email, and then spent three hours cleaning the apartment. I don’t think that place was ever as clean as it was that night. Not a single piece of furniture was left unchecked. No clutter was left unpicked. I had a wonderfully clean, snake-free apartment.

As it turns out, the snake was from the apartment down the hall. The woman had left it alone for three weeks, so the critter had crept out of its cage, slithered under her door, down the hall, under my door, and then curled up in my pillow case, which had been lying on the floor next to my bed. The snake was a Corn snake, completely harmless, not that I had any way to know that.

That’s my snake story. I sincerely hope that it never gets one-upped.

The worst thing in the history of the world happened to me today. I’m talking worse than the Nazis and worse than asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It was a thing of such epic ickiness that I’m having difficulty not stripping off and taking a shower right now. Here’s what happened:

I’m driving to work. My route to work is generally easterly so at this time of year there is a very low sun that fouls up the morning driving by inconsiderately sitting right on the horizon in front of us commuters. In order to address this blazing, eye-searing ball of fusion flame, I pull down the visor that is installed in the vehicle for just such an occasion. To my horror, a spider was hiding on top of the visor and now that I’ve swung it down the little eight-legged death machine decides to dangle on its silk, not 12 inches in front of my nose.

I squeaked like a little girl and reached up to kill the monster. I grasped it between two of my fingers and squeezed as hard as I could.

An important point to make at this time is that it was chilly out this morning, thus I was wearing gloves. Gloves reduce tactile input (and protect fingers when they are squeezing the life out of little arachnid monsters) so while my eyes reported that I’d seized and killed the spider, my fingers were reporting not much at all.

I opened my hand to check the corpse and discovered…nothing. There’s no squished bug guts on my glove. There’s no smear or spider legs. There’s not even one leg that was torn from the body of the perpetrator as it escaped. There is absolutely no evidence that I had succeeded in my plan to slay the savage beast. The spider had escaped.

The situation therefore was this: I’m driving to work on an interstate highway, doing 70 miles per hour in 5 lanes of traffic, and there’s a spider loose in my car. Said spider is obviously looking for some payback.

I kind of freaked out. I’m glad no one was killed.

In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a big spider fan. I don’t flip out when I see one, and I can happily coexist with a spider in my house, but I will not tolerate one on me and here I was in an enclosed box with nowhere to go and a ravenous deadly spider hunting my blood. ((This reminds me of the time I found a snake in my apartment. I will have to dig that one out of the archive and repost it here for everyone’s entertainment.

Update: Here’s the story of the snake incident.))

The rest of the way to work involved the biggest case of skin-itchiness imaginable, and every time I had the slightest sensation on my scalp, or my cheek, or anywhere for that matter (no matter how covered in clothes that location was) I was sure it was the damn spider. I managed to calm down and drive like a normal person after a few seconds, but…ugh.