The Wrong Number of Legs

My advice to you: invest in DDT.

I say this because I've found the downtown Cleveland area has been almost completely overrun by insects and arachnids. The midges are back. Twice a year, these little mosquito-like bugs swarm the town, thousands upon thousands of them. They land on any flat surface and stay there for about two weeks until which time they all promptly die and their corpses litter the ground for another couple of days. Birds and spiders get fatter, and people get grossed out. The midges are completely harmless, but also completely annoying.

This morning while fiddling with the backup tapes, I ran across a big bitch spider in the server room. The server room is an inhospitable place for bugs that has no small insects or anything else that a spider might find edible. And yet this thing was huge and on the move. I couldn't figure out how it got that big, or what it was doing traversing my server room, so I stepped on it out of fear that it might be a pregnant female. I can't be sure if it was, but I won't take that chance.

Just now at my desk I found a lone ant crawling around on my computer monitor. I stuck it under a piece of tape, but looking over at it a few minutes later I find it's escaped. There's a rogue ant on or near my desk somewhere, and that kind of bothers me.

So the creepy crawlies are out to get us. I've worked here for five years and I have had more bug encounters in three hours than I have in the last three years. Methinks our exterminator is slacking off.