The Scream Heard 'Round the Office

An albino spider about the size of an American dime just fell from the air vent above my head as I sat at my desk editing my 26th consecutive paper on hip replacement. It landed on my keyboard.

What did I do? I screamed; what do you think I did?

So the gig is up. The co-workers all know I have my voice back. Margaret rushed in to help me. An experienced camper from a young age, she is able to pick up spiders with superheroine strength and crush them beneath a single paper towel.

I now blame my parents for not taking me camping as a child, therefore enabling the cultivation of my paralyzing fear of anything with more than four legs, which now has cost me the two extra weeks of not speaking at work that I was going to win that Oscar for.

Briefly, I shall explain my fear of spiders. As a kindergartener at Gwynedd Mercy Academy (the name itself just it just stinks of snobbishness, doesn't it?) I came home from school one afternoon and went into the yellow bathroom on the first floor of Marge and Tom's (Mom and Dad's) house. I pulled down my tights and panties, hiked up my plaid uniform dress, and commenced peeing. Mid-tinkle, a spider "ran out of my underpants," which were resting around my ankles. Too terrified to think clearly and horrified that spiders lived in my panties, I jumped off the toilet and fled the bathroom screaming a scream that can only come from the belly of a six-year-old, still peeing as I ran.

It was not my finest moment. And my mom never did find the underwear-dwelling spider and thought I might finally have lost my young mind, succumbing to the perils of my overactive imagination and penchant for embellishment, as she had always suspected I would at some point.

But there really was a spider living in my underpants and if I'd gone camping more (or at all) as a kid like Margaret did, maybe I'd have been able to handle things a little better then and today.

Share spider-killing techniques with me: pilarrrgh@gmail.com