I have had issues with spiders in my apartment. I rarely see them, but they build webs really quickly.
Just this past weekend, I engaged in my morning routine. Made coffee in my french press. No problems. A few hours later, I decided to have another cup. I grabbed the kettle in order to fill it with water for boiling.
I remove the lid, and in the opening, is a spider web. It wasn’t there when I made the first cup. Gack. The kettle got an extra-thorough cleansing before I used it again.
[quote=“YogSosoth, post:38, topic:549120”]
You don’t think I’m falling for that old trick, do you? 
[Actually, I’ve already seen it - even more bizzare is that video of cave-dwelling centipedes hanging upside down to snatch bats out of the air and eat them!]
[quote=“Malthus, post:42, topic:549120”]
Yes, we got David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, which is all about insects, and digustingly, horrifyingly fascinating. I love Attenborough. That man fears nothing. He was in that cave with the centipedes, with those night vision cameras.
Yeah, that was the one. A great show, visually stunning.
There was another show that really made me itch - it was a self-proclaimed “bug man” who, among other feats, did a program where he was filmed being bitten and stung by various insects, to demonstrate the effect - thugh I think even he found the “bullet ant” a trifle mutch!
My husband told me this story about one of the other firefighters. FF1 was driving the big, red bus, FF2 was riding shotgun. FF2 found a big spidy on the side of the truck as he got in. He wrapped it in a napkin and held it.
See, FF1 has a well known case of arachnophobia, FF2 thought making his buddy jump would be funny.
Not so funny when FF2 dumped the spidy into FF1’s lap and FF1 jumped… out of the truck… while it was moving … down the road. Luckily, they were almost to the event, so the truck was only going about 15 MPH. No one was hurt, except the spidy. The incident they were going to turned out to be nothing.
All in all, it turned out for the best. No one bothers FF1 with spiders anymore.
Do you understand now, Sailboat? If someone is willing to jump out of a moving truck to get away from a spider, my being willing to aim a flamethrower to my own face to get rid of one that is running on it… is not much of a stretch. 
You know the urban legend about the “breathing cactus”? Short version: people buy fancy cactus, cactus looks like its breathing, call the plant store, plant store demands return of plant… Shymalanesque double-shocking secret twist: OMG, cactus was full of baby tarantulas!
So, this is similar, except 100% true as witnessed by me. My very first girlfriend, VryFstGrlFnd, was articling at a law firm. Her co-worker, another articling student, had bought a used car from a local dealership. For weeks she was plagued with the sudden appearance of big nasty spiders. The kind from science fiction movies. The daily drive was all about “Who to Squash Next?” and would have made a riveting reality TV series, with some of them sliding down a thread in front of her face, flipping her the bird, and bird, and bird, and bird, and bird, and bird, and bird, and bird, leading to high-pitched screaming and car careening through traffic. It would have been a highly rated thriller kind of show! “Where will the nasty appear next!” She visited us for dinner and when she left we heard her being murdered. Or at least we thought, due to her screams, she was being slowly skewered to death by Jack the Ripper and a BBQ implement. It was no murder… it was a half-dozen spiders that we proceeded to mash with various rocks, paper, and scissors.
Eventually, she just couldn’t take it anymore. She drove the car back to the dealership and said : “WTF? There are, like, a thousand spiders in the car I bought from you!” She had not yet mastered lawyerspeak. She sounded like she was from Scarborough. The dealership was actually a good one. They took the car back and had it fumigated. VryFstGrlFnd went, as the chauffeur, with her co-worker to pick up the freshly fumigated and detailed car. They saw the corpses of no less than three to four dozen big, nasty, mutant arachnids of doom. :eek: The dealership had killed everything, then detailed the car once more to restore it to a semblance of newness, everything was polished waxed and perfect.
The following Monday, during the morning commute… Big, nasty, mutant arachnids of doom: the next generation!!!
In the end, with VryFstGrlFnd’s co-worker and VryFstGrlFnd standing in their offices, and both working for the Wolfram Hart and Kickyerass LLC law firm, the dealership - who, in their defence, genuinely tried to deal with the problem the best they could - opted to give VryFstGrlFnd’s co-worker a different and slightly better, non-infested car.
Edit: For Canadian Dopers… I don’t know what happened to the car. If 15 years ago your grandmother was mysteriously eaten by bugs while sitting in a 1992 Honda… Now you know.