I have a strong aversion to most bugs. Many people do, but my aversion can be a bit extreme. For starters, I can’t kill them. I’ve reached a point where I can relocate bugs via getting them to climb onto something like toilet paper and running it outside, but if it’s dead? Someone else has to pick it up for me. I just… can’t. My brain rejects the idea wholesale. I’ll avoid areas with a dead bug because I’m afraid I’ll step on it.

Another example of the severity: one day, when I was in seventh grade, I moved a pillow off the living room armchair to sit down, and a spider quickly shot across the cushion. I am now thirty, and I still avoid sitting in that particular chair and hate seeing pillows propped against the backs of chairs in general.

My fear is irrational, I know. The best I can figure is that bugs’ jerky movements and small size trigger some part of my brain to be on high alert when they move, and that triggers the paranoia of stepping on or otherwise crushing them. And my brain further protests any contact with bugs, especially if they’re dead. After years, I’m able to coexist with at least spiders in the same room since they get rid of the worst ones. The key detail is to have a general idea of where they are, so I can ensure I don’t accidentally step on/crush them.

Which is why I did NOT react well when I turned on my bedroom light and saw a spider on the wall right next to my bed.

I immediately called for one of my parents, but by the time they came upstairs, the spider was out of sight. My bed was pushed up against the wall with the spider, limiting their ability to search for it. They weren’t going to move my bed and nightstand JUST to look for a single spider.

Like rational people, they just said, “Welp, nothing we can do about it now. It’ll be fine.”

Very rational and probably correct. My brain did not care about being rational, though. My brain instead decided to barrage me with visions of this spider crawling in my bed at night, and me rolling over and crushing it in my sleep. The idea of waking up to a dead spider in my blankets or clothes gives me the willies even now, and with that spider’s location unknown, the possibility of it happening was WAY too high.

My brain also pointed out that we had a lovely tent where no spiders had been seen.

A while back, my aunt got me a camping tent as a present. I don’t really know why she got it for me, since I never camp and am not the outdoorsy type, but we decided to try setting it up in the basement. It took our entire family of three to set up this two-person tent, and in the process, we bent at least one pole. So, we sort of concluded that once it was disassembled, it might not be possible to reassemble it, so we just left it in our finished basement for years. It was a cozy little place to hang with our dog while she hid from storms, and I’d even recently slept in it.

So that night, I took my pillows and some blankets to the basement and slept in the tent. And I slept there the next night. And the next.

I refused my parents’ pleas to go back to my room while that spider’s location was unknown, even while fully aware how ridiculous this whole thing was, because phobias just don’t care about logic. The last place I saw the spider was next to my bed, so until I could confirm its status, sleeping in my bed risked waking up to a dead spider under me, at which point I’d probably need a new bed. (I wrote that as a joke, but then realized that might have actually been true, given the “avoiding a specific armchair for years” thing.)

The stress from it got bad enough to even bleed into my dreams. I’ll spare the details, but… Well, to this day, I still sometimes wonder whether something is a severed spider leg. So far, thankfully, the answer has always been “no”, but that also obviously didn’t help the irrational anxiety at all.

Finally, on day four of (literally) camping out in the basement, my mother told me they’d found a dead spider in their bathtub that resembled the one I saw. It was pretty distinctive compared to the ones we usually saw, so that was enough to satisfy my irrational brain that it was likely the same one. Relief came over me now that the spider was no longer in a nebulous bed-adjacent state of existence, and that night I finally slept in my own bed again.

This memory has become one of my go-to stories for how bad my fear is, and definitely the worst it got. Not many people can say a spider chased them out of their bed for three nights!

Years later, while recounting this tale for a college assignment, though, a thought occurred to me: my bedroom and my parents’ bathroom were on literal opposite ends of the house. It would have had to run down a hallway and through my parents’ room to get to their tub. So I asked my mom: “Did you REALLY find a dead spider in your bathtub?”

The answer was no. They just wanted me to finally go back to sleeping in my dang bed instead of the tent.

Well played, and I fully agree that was the right move in the face of my irrational anxieties. I wonder now how long I would have kept sleeping in that tent if they hadn’t lied to me…

When I was seventeen, I worked in a discount grocery store. This story takes place during a particularly long day when I was working from open to close. Due to a combination of tiredness and an underlying smart-a** sense of humor, the following interaction occurs while I am stocking frozen items into the upright freezer:

Customer: “Excuse me, sir, by chance do you have shaved nuts?”

Me: *Without thinking or turning around.* “I used to, but working in the freezers, you need all the insulation that you can get.”

I then turned around to see the sweetest little grandmother with this very confused morphing into a very embarrassed expression. She then fled the scene of my apparent crime.

Ten minutes later, I am running the cash register, and lo and behold, Grandma is in my line.

Customer: *Meekly.* “I found the slivered almonds.”

After she had paid and was heading out the door.

Customer: “Hope you stay warm, young man.”

I was in Bible study the other day, and the verse “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” came up.

Pastor: “Obviously, this is really good advice for couples. You know, don’t go to bed angry with your spouse.”

An older lady in the back piped up.

Older Lady: “Stay up late and fight!”

My sister and I are in the kitchen, getting breakfast. My sister is struggling to open a new jar of Nutella and asks for my help. With a bit of effort, I manage to twist the lid off. Sis wants to call me a “strong thing”, but what she actually says is:

Sister: “Oh, you’re such a thong string.”

She didn’t realize what she had said, and I remained diplomatically silent.

A guest wanted to use our ice machine to get ice. Now, ice machines are actually pretty gross, and they very much don’t get cleaned out as often as they should. I don’t really understand why someone would want to use it, especially as there’s a fridge in each room.

Anyway, he wandered the hotel looking for the ice machine, then came to the front desk to complain to me about how he couldn’t find it. I gave them fairly precise directions, and he disappeared for a bit, only to return and complain that I gave bad directions. He called me useless, which is not the worst thing I’ve been called in my job.

I offered to walk him to the ice machine, but he demanded to show me the way according to my instructions to show me it wasn’t there first. I didn’t have a whole lot to do; it was 3 AM or so, so I walked with him as he followed my directions. We ended our trip in front of the ice machine.

Guest: “See! No ice machine!”

Me: *Pointing.* “It’s… right there.”

Guest: “What? That’s an ice machine? Doesn’t it take cash? How do I get the soda out?!”

He had meant vending machine. He wanted to buy a soda.

We don’t have a vending machine, instead, we sell small things like sodas, toothbrushes, and TV dinners at the front desk. I walked him back to the front desk and sold him a Mountain Dew, which was what he wanted to begin with.