It all started a few weeks ago at 2 a.m. one unfortunate morning. I was groggily getting ready for bed when I walked into my room, only to discover a gigantic brown blob on my wall. I wasn’t about to get up close and inspect it, so since I have bad eyesight, I got my glasses. 

The second I saw what the gigantic brown blob was, I wished I hadn’t. It was a huge hairy spider glaring down at me. Finding a creepy insect in your room seems like such a small problem for most — or at least for the people who make fun of me for my anxiety about them. Just grab a towel or cup and kill it, right?

So that’s what I did. I calmly walked to the kitchen, got a paper towel and killed the spider without throwing a tantrum or screaming for 3 minutes.

Just kidding. I threw a tantrum and screamed for three minutes. My neighbor literally came banging on the door thinking some disaster had occurred. You can imagine the eye roll he gave when he found out it was “just a spider.”

Obviously, my mom yelled at me for making a big deal over a tiny little insect that was “also probably afraid of me.”

And after everyone else had gone back to sleep, I still had this spider to deal with, since no one else was being proactively attentive to my issues.

So I sat there. For three hours. Don’t believe me? Ask my mom. She got up four times in the next few hours to find me still having a meltdown while engaged in a staring contest with the spider relaxing over my bed.

So, how did I get rid of the spider? I called my dad. He drove an hour to kill my “measly” little spider, and to maintain his sanity — and mine — began to bribe me to kill spiders by paying me $5 each time I killed one. Sounds like easy cash right? Wrong.

My first job was only days later, hovering on the wall. The spider was really tiny and appeared to be harmless. I didn’t realize at the time, but I would soon find that this spider was trained in gymnastics. As I got close to it with the paper towel, it jumped onto the towel and jumped again onto me. Obviously, I had yet another meltdown. Still got $3 for “participation” though.

Eventually, after days of pretending not to see every insect in my house, there was a huge one on the ceiling. My mom told me to kill it because I’m 3.5 inches taller than her. The ceilings in my house are 14 feet high. Gosh, my extra 3.5 inches are really going to help us here.

I was standing there calculating the cost of an exterminator when my mom decided to go shopping. She went SHOPPING.

After regretting looking up at the ceiling for a good ten minutes, I decided to rant about my insect troubles to my friend. She made fun of this and jokingly suggested that I poke it to death.

Desperate to continue with my day, I grabbed the long wooden stick perched above the sliding door to the backyard and climbed on the countertop. As I blindly poked at the general area of the spider, praying that I wouldn’t shatter the glass roofing, I realized that the spider was gone. 

I looked down to find the spider’s mangled little corpse on the floor and heaved a relieved sigh. 

From there on out, I always used the same long stick to kill all insects, which I dubbed “The Exterminator.” The stick allows me to reach high places and keeps me a good 6 feet away from my target, preventing any jumping spider mishaps.