In high school, cleaning my room, I decide to take all my posters off the walls. I lived on the top floor so the roof slanted over my bed. As I’m ripping a poster off this slanty wall, I feel some resistance from the middle of it. It doesn’t want to come off. I tug harder.
A HUGE EVIL SPIDER suddenly pops out from behind the mirror and goes DOWN MY SLEEVE INTO MY SHIRT. I am now screaming hysterically, ripping my clothes off. Finally I’m naked and I see the spider on the floor and proceed to JUMP on it and destroy it.
Then I see the egg sac. That’s right, folks. Big ol’ sac of babies dangling from the wall. Imagine if that had hatched and thousands of baby spiders had swarmed down to my bed! The bile is rising…
Same year, out mowing yard. Feel something crawling up my leg. inside my pants.
Panic. Fleeting visions of black widows, brown recluses, scorpions, etc. Crush the critter through my pants, and shuck out of’em faster than on a date.
Demo, I remember Pierre very well. As you can see from my registration date, I lurked here for quite some time before I dared to post (I’m shy). Pierre’s thread was one I followed very closely. I was sad when he died, especially since the pictures made me feel like I knew him. I was too timid at the time to take up the rallying cry in his honor, but his demise brought a tear to my eye. Personally, I only kill bugs when they decide to take a holiday inside my shirt.
Me & my best friend eating wild blueberries near Chattanooga, Tenn. He asks me “why are some of these crunchy?”. I tell him “spit them out if they are crunchy”. He fishes his tongue around in his mouth for a second, them spits out a japaneese beetle. This was 17 years ago and I still bug him about that. (NPI)
OK, you asked for it. As a pest control technician, I probably have more disgusting stories than most Dopers, but the one that really sticks in my mind as the most heebie-jeebie inducing was the time I had to do an initial service for rats at a store in the Bronx.
It was a tiny little store squeezed into a whole block of stores, and they all shared a common basement, even though they had slapped up some drywall to try to create individual spaces under each store.
I had to get into the basement through a trapdoor in the back of the store, and the room down there was covered with broken display cases and dozens of cardboard boxes, some broken down and piled flat, others just sitting haphazardly in untidy piles. There were rat droppings everywhere, and no wonder with all that harborage. I was poking around looking for a likely spot to start laying down bait, and the store clerk, apparently embarrassed at the unholy mess down there was sort of apathetically readjusting the mess.
Suddenly, from the open box he’s got his hand on comes a scrabbling sound and a rat the size of a Shetland pony leaps out of the box and runs to the rear wall, where it disappeared through a hole (there were holes all over the walls). The guy decided he better go upstairs and mind the store, so he left me alone. Shortly thereafter, another rat jumped out of the same box (or from the same vicinity) and ran out through the same hole in the wall.
I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough. Not only was it cluttered, small and claustrophobic, but at least two large rats with attitude (this was the Bronx, remember) had decided to settle down and pick out curtains and china patterns.
Ok, against my better judgement, I’ll tell you just one.
Background: In Nov '85, just home from a month in the hospital with 3 kidney surgeries, I was home alone <kids at MIL’s, hubby at work>.
Scene: Our bathroom, mid-morning.
After looking carefully around for any unwelcome ‘visitors’ <house sat empty for months before we rented it>, I sat down to take care of business. Since I was still weak from the surgeries, I leaned against the sink counter. Suddenly, I feel something on my neck. I reach up with my hand to brush it off, and discover shudders a HUGE R**ch!
Stopping in mid-stream, running <well, as fast as I could, anyway> from the room, screaming.
I wouldn’t say I’m arachnaphobic, but the sight of spiders makes me bring out a lighter or a blowtortch and burn them,
or catch them in a kleenex and burn them… ever saince I was a wee-little kayaker, and a BIG-ASS water-spider (slightly poisonous) decided to hop a ride in the kayak!!
That did it for me, I jumped up and started yellin’ (and you are NEVER 'sposed to STAND UP in a kayak) smashed the thing to LITTLE pieces with the oar… then I realized I smashed the BABY pouch, so there were little BABY WATER-SPIDERS IN THE KAYAK!!! I had to take it out in the middle of the lake, and 10 eskimo rolls later I was satisfied the freaks-of-nature had been flipped out…
now you know why I would not mind commiting genocide against the spider…
Arachnid family…
BTW, I burn everything… spiders are just lucky I don’t hate them enough to Superglue M-80’s to them…
ALSO, the spider in my kayak gets to 1.5 inches across at the middle kneejoint, so they get HUGE!
and it’s called a FISHER spider for a reason… it kills fish…
that worries me…
I worked a couple of summers as a pest control tech to make money for college (an odd career choice, as I am a decided arachnophobe).
My worst story from that experience, however, had to do with cockroaches.
We went to a house that was so infested, roaches were running around in the light. If you know anything about roaches, you know this is highly unusual.
The reason they were running around in the light was *there was no room in the walls, cracks, crevices for any more cockroaches *
We found millions and millions of them. I sprayed the hinges on the mirror to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and a small cockroach came out.
When we thought we were done, we flipped over the couch and ripped away that thin veil of fabric. Sure enough, thousands more, writhing all over each other.
The fact that there was family with children living in that house still haunts me.
On a funnier note, I once was driving slowly past one of those road signs with a blinking yellow signal at the top, and a spider had built its web in the housing of the signal.
Wouldn’t that cause spider-insanity?
EVERYTHING IS REALLY BRIGHT YELLOW EVERYWHERE!
dark.
EVERYTHING IS REALLY BRIGHT YELLOW EVERYWHERE!
dark.
P.S. “Spider Insanity” would make a killer band name.
When I was five we lived in Texas, which is one big spider heaven. My mother found a black widow in the garage, and thought it would be cute to put it in a jar and keep it on a shelf in the living room for a while. Yeah, real cute, Ma. I was even less impressed when it laid eggs, and then the damn things hatched. So I was downright nonplussed when the cat knocked the jar off the shelf and it shattered. Oh, boy.
I’m still terrified of spiders, poisonous or not. I can’t even stand to get close enough to kill them, usually. I killed a really big scary one with a shotgun once, and that was satisfying, but it’s just not economical on a large scale.
Once in my former apartment, rent-controlled and run-down, an enormous nest of termites hatched behind the refrigerator. Early in the morning I heard this strange “plop-plop” sound. I turned on the light, and thousands of wet, squirming baby termites were dropping out of the nest to the floor. Then they were drying out their little wings and taking flight. You ever seen termites swarm indoors? I went running out of the house at 2am to buy bug spray and killed thousands of the damn things, crawling and flying.
i lived in australia for a year (1999),and down there, there every freaky ass thing alive! the most poisonous spiders and snakes in the world live there damn it!
anyways, the very FIRST day we got there my mom was sitting on the couch, and as she was reading her book, this huge hairy spider that looked like a tarantula was walking along the top of the couch. so of course i said “hey mom, there’s a real big spider right behind you”. my reputation for making up stuff like that is quite well known in my familly, and of course she didn’t belieive me, and kept reading her book, without even looking.
“really mom, there’s a huge spider right there!! im gonna get a box for it”.
It was then that she finally turned her head, and proceded to jump 5 feet in the air.
She was fine after that, ispose it was just the shock of seeing a hairy thing that was about15cm across(form toe to toe). Turns out that it was just a big Huntsman that wasn’t poisonous or anything, and we had heaps come it and out of our house that year. Great fun esspecially when ur little sister doesn’t like spiders, and the spiders quite happily stay in someones bed till their disturbed…
