I was chatting with one of our new hires this morning when a dark little shape caught my eye. A biggish spider was scurrying across a wall and when she* noticed that we noticed her, she jumped off the wall and tried to blend in with the corporate blue carpet. (And, to be fair, she blended in a lot better than I would have.) So I grabbed a disposable cup and a paper towel from the kitchen, knelt down, and put the cup near her - preparatory to putting it over her - when she jumped into it. I praised her and would have given her a spider treat (if I'd had any) and covered the top of the cup with the paper towel.
As none of my co-workers wanted to admire our newest acquisition (average response: "Ewwww - no!"), I carried her downstairs, took her outside, and walked over to the shrubs. I gently turned the cup upside downish and set it down so that she could scurry out of her improvised cell. Instead, she came gingerly to the edge of the cup, looked at the wild, untamed suburbia, and scuttled immediately back to the farthest reaches of the cup. She doesn't speak much English, but I clearly understood her meaning: "Oh, no thanks. I don't want to be here. I want to go back upstairs." So I felt kind of bad about dumping her out of the cup and returning to the office, but what could I do?
And anyway, removing spiders and other miniature fauna has always been my job. When I was a teenager, Sara and Mom were the sort to hop from foot to foot and make girly distress noises while I got a jar or something and piece of cardboard and escorted the terrifying predator to the border for deportation.
*No, I didn't check her ID or absolutely determine her sex, but be real. Everyone knows that all spiders are female and named Charlottte.
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2 comments:
Glad to know I'm not the only member of the insect/arachnid catch-and-release club.
Speaking of spiders & Charlotte, I once had to kill a spider in Charlotte, NC. TW & I were honeymooning at a B&B there and one morning the woman in charge of breakfast asked for a volunteer to kill a spider for her. Dead silence and no eye contact from 6 or 8 tables of perfectly capable adults, so I volunteered. Turned out the poor woman was deathly afraid of spiders after learning the hard way that spider bites send her into anaphylactic shock. I don't like killing spiders (as I said, "catch-and-release club"), but in this case I didn't really have a choice.
We really needed you about a month ago, when I was re-threading the convertable car seat from toddler (the last owner) to infant.
It had been in the garage since approximately last Christmas, and a 1.5 inch, furry, yellow & brown spider, with a centimeter round egg sac had taken up residence.
I noticed this while I was sitting on the kitchen floor, car seat between my legs. Charlotte became annoyed by my disruptive activities and scurried from the dark underside of the car seat towards the dark opening of my shorts.
At the exact same moment, Jill stopped behind and above me to stroke my hair and tell me how glad she was I had started this project.
I bounced up, away from Charlotte, hit Jill's hand, bounced back down, bounced back up and forward, this time at a highly accelerated rate of speed, the likes of which Jill had never seen me move and would have sworn I was incapable of moving.
Since I was in full-blown adrenaline insanity, AND I was already working on the fixit task of dealing with the car seat, Jill had to deal with the spider. She did, in fact, kill it. We both felt bad, but it was sooooooo big and scary, we also felt like we had no other choice.
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