Last Thursday evening I settled in to do some video gaming. I booted up my game on my desktop computer and then left to go to the kitchen to get a drink. I placed my glass back on my desk and then sat in my chair to spin back towards the monitor.
As I was rotating towards the screen, I saw out of the corner of my eye a dark mass with legs descending down from the ceiling. In that split second, I realized two things: it was a spider and I was rotating into it.
I immediately jumped up and darted away from my desk and in doing so, I turned my back on the spider. When I turned back around, the spider was nowhere to be seen. I was immediately creeped out. Where the hell did that thing go?
My initial thought was that it had somehow dropped into my computer chair. I grabbed a flashlight and brought out my vacuum. I pulled the chair away from the desk and began inspecting every inch of my chair, from top to bottom. Nothing.
I then moved onto my desk, starting first on my desk. I flipped my keyboard over, examined my mouse, looked behind my monitors, basically turning everything over on my desk to see if the spider had hidden somewhere. Just to be sure, I turned on my vacuum and used the hose attachment and just sucked up every nook and cranny on my desk.
I then started working below my desk, where it was dark, and had lots of spaces for the spider to hide. I stuck the hose attachment in as many corners and hiding spots as I could possibly get at, short of disassembling my desk and computer. Even with the flashlight, I couldn’t see where the damn thing went.
Resigned to my failure and still wanting to game, I soldiered on and played for about an hour. Those it was enjoyable, my skin felt like there was a spider on it the entire time. After about an hour, I decided I wanted to watch TV instead and I retired to the living room.
After some time watching TV, I returned to my bedroom. Cautiously, I looked for the spider again. In the corner of the ceiling, above my desk, I saw the spider. It was the same size and colour of the spider that was mere inches from my face earlier in the evening. It had somehow escaped and crawled back up into the ceiling.
Normally, I’m sorta indifferent to spiders. In the past, I’ve captured many of them and released them onto my balcony. This spider, however, did not do itself many favours by basically descending almost onto my face. It had to go and by go, I did not mean the balcony.
i grabbed the vacuum hose attachment again, turned on the vacuum, and raised the wand towards the corner of the ceiling where the spider was. Even though it was at full suction power, I was surprised to see the spider was still holding on tight. It had pulled itself tight into a ball to protect itself. That’s when I angled the wand more tightly against the ceiling, providing a greater seal. That did it, the spider got sucked into the vacuum.
I kept the vacuum running for another minute or so, just to be sure that it wasn’t just hanging around the mouth of the wand attachment. I kinda felt bad for it but it should not have invaded my personal space like that.