Working a midnight to 5 am shift as Desk Assistant has its perks other than being paid. One is that I get a lot of homework time. I usually knock out a good chunk of British Literature and Japanese assignments throughout the shift. Another perk is that the few events that do occur between 12-5am are over-the-top and memorable. Enter Spider-douche.
I was sitting behind Womack front desk for probably the last time, since I will be graduating later this summer. I was living it up. I brought my laptop to the desk (a policy breaker) and wrote some of my essays due in the upcoming days(its a shame that "living it up" means writing essays all night). Eventually, your friendly neighborhood Spider-douche tumbled into the lobby to ruin my living it up.
She stood in front of the desk, wide-eyed and excited.
"Hey, is there something wrong with the phone? Because I have been calling the front desk all night."
"Really? I have been here all night since 12. Haven't heard a ring. What's wrong?"
"Uh yeah, there is a big brown spider in my room."
I knew what she would say next. If you live in the Murfreesboro area, you probably know what she's going to say next too. I'll spoil it: She claimed it was a Brown Recluse. She said she could not sleep until that thing was dead. I sympathized for her. If I found one of those things in my room, its over--everything is over. I would withdraw from school and start seeing a psychologist. I am very disgusted by insects but I loathe spiders. I hate talking about them more than anything...
Guess what she did next.
"It was so gross. It was moving so quickly. I saw all of its eyes. Don't you just hate those things. They hid anywhere. They are determined to get you, it seems. Ew. I feel all itchy now. Don't you feel itchy? Yuck. I hate that feeling. I also killed a big nasty roach..."
Oh god she wouldn't stop. It was like she knew I hated it. My stomach dictated and so I followed. I had to drop a hint to make her stop.
"Oh...oh god...I want to throw up. I hate hearing things like that," I said very not so nonchalantly. I don't even think this is a hint. Its a dead give away. An open invitation that says "hey, fuckin' quit it."
"I know, right? Its so nasty. I crushed the roach and there is now, like, 12 inches of roach fluid across my floor."
Now, I am going to take a little time to describe the girl's appearance. I don't want to be rude, so I'll just say it was obvious she was ready for bed. She was not extremely attractive..at all...but that was probably because it was morning. We all have our days. I could tell this was her's. With that said, You'd think she'd be a little self-conscious--at least I would be.
Wrong.
She then started to show me all of her spider bites. On her chest, face, legs, shoulders, back and arms. I really felt like she was on a mission to see projectile vomit. She had too. She described the nasty feeling of spotting a big roach crawl up her leg and how unclean she felt afterwards. She claimed that all of the marks--including the zit on her face which was not a bite at all, it was a zit--were bites of a brown recluse.
Nope. I called bullshit inside my head. Her logic was that because she saw a brown spider, it must have been a villainous, deviously plotting brown recluse that has been biting her for the past few months. Each night the spider would plan to annoyingly nibble on her skin--which would hospitalize most human beings--and crawled away, planning its eventual return.
"Its so nasty. I have never lived like this before. You should have seen that roach. It was so big. I couldn't even such it up with my vaccum. Its a new brand. It sucks up a lot of dirt. The vacuum chocked on the roach. I had to stop the vacuum and shake the roaches dead body out. It was so gross. Just talking about it make me sick. Anyways, Can you like, call somebody and get them to kill it for me. The spider ran away though. I don't know where it went. But I know its still there. I can feel it. I can't sleep until I know I am safe, ya know? And plus, I have finals in the morning."
I looked at the clock and saw that it was 4:08am. Any DA will tell you that it is hard to get a hold of an RA at 4:00 am--which means, who ever I would call instead was going to be very unhappy. Plus, why was I calling someone to kill a spider at 4 am? Why couldn't she kill the spider? After all, she had just killed a roach. When I asked her if she had a roommate that would kill it, she said "Aw, no. She has finals tomorrow. Plus, why would I wake her up to kill a bug." She failed to see the irony. Why couldn't she feel that.
I went through the motions anyways. I called the RA 4 times and no one answered. I really hate calling anyone that is not the RA because it seems like calling the RD and AC (people higher on the Residential Life and Housing hierarchy) because it seems like I am going further than just one step up the totem pole. Every time I wake up one of those higher ups, they make your reason for calling seem trivial and you ultimately feel bad. This was actually a trivial situation which means the chance of phone call assholery were going to skyrocket.
I called the RD who was actually not that bad. She wasn't happy to be woken up, but she just asked me to call that RA one more time and if I didn't get a hold of them then I should call her back. When I got off the phone again, the strange girl harassed a young man in the lobby explaining the same story, remarkably, almost word for word. The only noticeable change was the uncertainty from before of not knowing whether or not it was a brown recluse or just a brown spider had gone. She was now claiming it was definitely a brown recluse...For sure. She was trying to get this guy to help her kill the spider. After the guy gave me some smug smirks, mocking her paranoia, he finally declined, resulting in me calling the RD again.
Until the RD arrived, the girl talked my ear off more about how the spider may have been laying eggs in her afro--which would explain her itchy feelings. I barfed in my mouth a little and tried to the change the subject...she wasn't having it.
Eventually the RD showed up, tired and unamused. The RD met with the spider obsessed girl who refused to read RD's body language of trying to quickly leave the lobby to go kill the spider. Spider-girl stood stationary until she retold her story and reshowed her weeks old brown recluse bites--that for some reason had not killed her.
No greater joy have I received than the joy of watching the Spider-girl leave with the RD to go kill the spider.
The only thing that sucked was that the RD returned saying they couldn't find spider. Luckily, 5 minutes after the RD left, Spider-girl returned exclaiming that the spider came out right after they left... Then showed me a picture of a crushed spider along with a crushed roach. Thanks, Spider-Jerk. Goodnight.
Arachnid Villainy.
