Long Day at the Office

Since several years ago, I have more or less made friends with insects. This happened in Hungarian Scout Camp, where there were enormous, skinny spiders scampering all over the place. After a while, I just didn't even notice when they were crawling all over me in my sleep. If it's true that you eat 8 spiders a year, or your lifetime, or something (it involves the number 8), I must have eaten 15 during this time. Long, skinny spiders. Sort of as a substitute for spaghetti, because when at Hungarian Scout Camp, you don't eat spaghetti. You eat MEAT and EASTERN EUROPEAN THINGS. So MEAT and SAUSAGE. Up to this point in my life, I had an unholy fear of insects in me, to the point where I'd look on the curve of the toilet bowl and in the toilet bowl to see if one of the spiders my mom had flushed down there was not crawling back up to finally get the revenge he dreamed of on his way down the drain.

In any case, since then not many insects have phased me. Spiders? Meh. Bees? Meh. Cockroaches? Me...eh. I can deal with these things, and part of it is that I survived Hungarian Scout Camp. The other is that, well, I'm basically a Grown Up now.

Last week at work, I noticed that there were a few bugs here and there. They weren't cockroaches, but looked remotely related to them. It looked like if you gave them a hamburger, side order of fries, and a milkshake they would baloon into bonafide cockroaches, but they weren't much to worry about. My boss, however, would interrupt phonecalls by running out into his adjoining room and smashing them with his shoe, bellowing "BUG BUG BUG BUG BUG BUG," nearly frothing at the mouth, and then return to the phone with an apologetic "Sorry, there was a bug" to the person on the other end, just in case he hadn't heard the crunching of the exoskeleton.

I had seen a couple of these little things, but hadn't thought it worth the trouble of jumping out of my chair and rabidly run toward them with a newspaper to kill them. They were just there, no big deal. Yesterday, when I was working (with my shoes off) I kept on feeling something tickling my toes. I figured it was just a hair or something until I looked and I saw these little suckers running around my feet. Then I decided that ok, fine, I should just kill the things, and when I went to dispose of the bodies, I rounded the corner of my desk to see that there was a veritable little colony of these guys hanging out, lounging on couches, watching tv, and asking for beers.

My boss has been in Paris for the past 2 weeks, so I didn't have anyone to complain to. I haven't yet performed the mass execution, but I don't know how to go about it yet. Electrocution? Hanging? Use the guillotine? Torture first? Give them a trial? Because if I've learned anything at this job, it's that there is nothing tiny, seemingly insignificant enough to not spend at least an hour on.