By Charles Schnell, Survivor of the Fire Ants
Funny camp story. So, I walked into the dorm room after eating dinner. Two of my four roommates were in there. We’ll call them Andy and Jerry. So, we were in there for about an hour, just us three, until Andy said that he was going to take a shower. When he opens his suitcase, he noticed some ants crawling around. Bewildered, he lifted up his suitcase and his nearby laundry bag to discover a dead moth covered and surrounded by maybe fifty ants. They were everywhere: the carpet, the wall, the bottom of the legs of the bunk bed, the moth.
He shouted a word I can’t post on this blog and started hitting the ants with his laundry bag. Little did he know that the ants had already invaded the laundry bag. They started flying out with all of his flinging. Andy was screaming, “Get out! Get out! AHHHHH!” and, by this point, Jerry was up flailing his arms everywhere. Then, Jerry’s all like, “Hold on! Let me go get a vacuum!”
After Andy savagely whipped around his laundry bag (full of smelly clothes and fire ants), Jerry came back to save the day with a vacuum. He plugged it in on the other side of the room and turned it on. But, here’s the thing–he didn’t use the vacuum like a normal person; rather he started slapping it against the floor repeatedly. Yeah, that’ll show those ants….
The thing is, it actually did.
Jerry was lowering their numbers; however, they never died out completely. And, after about maybe five minutes of them screaming like it’s the end of days, Andy and Jerry eventually found the source of the ants: a little, puny hole in the wall. So, they came up with a grand plan to stop the ants.
“I’ll go get some bug spray!” Jerry yelled as he ran out to the hallway, vacuum still running. Andy decided it was his turn to slam the vacuum on the carpet (and against the walls where the ants were crawling). During the time Andy and I were the only ones in the room, there was a moment where I looked out the open door into the hall to see Jerry being chased by boys a foot taller than him with cans of bug spray.
“Here’s your bug spray, Jerry!”
“AHHHHH!”
I was thankful to find out that Jerry survived, but he came back empty handed. But, it was fine because as soon as he did come back, Andy put down the vacuum he’d been smashing against the wall and whipped a cylinder out of his bag: “Look, Jerry, I had some ALL ALONG!”
Andy started spraying practically everything in the room with bug spray, while the room’s portable fan carried the spray further. Jerry ran out again and came back with some thick, heavy-duty scotch tape and sealed up the bug-spray-drenched hole. Then, in overkill enthusiasm, Andy started spraying the scotch tape. “You never know, man. You never know,” he said shaking his head.
So, the tape and all the bedsheets were drenched in bug spray. I didn’t want to sleep in bug spray; the can said it was poisonous, but Andy and Jerry complained about a much more serious problem: the smell. The room reeked of bug spray. Then, Jerry got another brilliant idea. He went over to one of our other roommate’s bags (we’ll call him Dave) and pulled out his big can of Febreeze–which was only half full. To suppress the bug-spray stench, he sprayed it all over the room. The Febreeze didn’t really do anything other than add on to the stench, rather than suppressing it.
So, let’s take a look at the room in its new form: a carpet now clean of ants; a wall with a bunch of dents in it; wet, bug-spray-stained pieces of scotch tape; a vacuum that no one bothered to turn off for the whole dilemma; bedsheets laced with bug spray and Febreeze; and two idiots bragging how they saved the day.
So, here are the morals of the story: I’m horrible for not helping in the slightest and I’m sorry (although it did make for a good story); don’t use a vacuum like a moron would; and a job that could take one person ten to fifteen minutes to fix took two teenage boys almost an hour.
Editor: Brennan Nick
