I have a new band crush. It’s Metallica.

Something about survival is sexy to me. Clawing your way to the top, and then clawing your way back after you fall from it. Plus I can’t decide who’s cooler, Lars Ulrich or James Hetfield. Intelligence and ego, that’s what really gets me.

The Aggravation of the Day Award goes to the family of brown recluse spiders living in my office. In actual fact this award should be the Aggravation of the Month, because this whole tangled web (pun intended) seems to have no end.

About a month ago, a technician for my company was under my desk to install a caller id box. We have a strange phone system (like most of the technology at the firm) and I had to have another jack installed, so I was at the mercy of the tech. (I’m not that mechanically inept.) While he was under the desk, he caught a spider that was about two inches across.

It was my lucky day, because that spider was found to be poisonous. The most poisonous in Missouri, actually. The brown recluse spider will bite when cornered, and you won’t feel it. You’ll only notice the pain when the venom begins eating your flesh from the inside out. It will then create an ulcer-like sore resembling a volcano which can run anywhere from half an inch to ten inches in diameter. The fantastic thing is that there’s no anti-venom for it. Doctors will merely pump you full of antibiotics, look very apologetic and cluck their tongues in sympathy, and send you home for a month to let the venom run its course.

The sore will never heal. Some people have lost hands and feet from the sores.

Needless to say, I was unhappy. Our pest control company of choice told us they are hard to get rid of, and we’d have to have the office fogged and sprayed once a month for a year to kill them all.

I scoffed at the idea. Yeah, sure, a year. Just another way for the pest control company to make a buck. So Kristi and I spent an entire day cleaning out the office and covering every surface with plastic bags. I lost a weekend of productivity while the fog settled in, supposedly killing the critters that remained.

The bug guy put down sticky boxes that would catch any remaining live spiders, and we scheduled a return visit so the guy could check the “traps” for what he called “activity.”

Three days after the de-bugging, we scoured the floors for dead spiders and found nine. Yes, nine. None of them were as large as the mama, but they were there nonetheless.

All month I’ve checked the traps, and I’ve only found a few little baby spiders. This made me feel better. After all, kill the momma and just wait for the babies to be born, then die. Right?

A month passes, and the day of reckoning arrives. It had been a while since I checked the traps, so Kristi and I made a production out of it. Mostly I just wanted some peace of mind.

Unfortunately, peace of mind was not visiting today. My office came back clean, but when I went back in the storage room it was a different story. The first trap I checked had a couple of babies, mere millimeters across. The second one had two spiders of medium size - not more than an inch. I was growing unhappier by the minute. The last trap I checked made me scream like a sissy. Kristi dove about three feet back from me, shouting all the while not to shout like that.

The spider was larger than our original find. The violin shaped mark on its back was clear and large. It was so big it just had to be a mutant brown recluse. That frigging thing has been sharing office space with me. If I’d found it before it found the trap, I’d have started charging it rent.

I almost feel bad for the bug guy. I was less than pleasant when he arrived. I told you they were hard to get rid of, he tells me as he flicks spider-pieces off the glue trap. I shrieked at him to not flick spider-pieces in my office and he looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “I have to clean that shit up,” I shouted. He gingerly set the sticky trap back on the floor.

As I picked up my bag to leave the office, I carefully opened every nook and cranny. There’s no way in hell I was going to bring one of those home with me.

Kristi has decided she’ll never again wear sandals to work. I’m wondering if my firm’s insurance covers poisonous spider bites, or if my clients will sue me instead. And all the while my clueless bug guy whistled while he worked.

My motto is “Bug Free in 2003.” If I never see another brown recluse spider in my life, it will be way too soon.

Wondering where the blood-curdling scream came from,

michelle