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.
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