About a bug

David and I don't kill bugs. If we find one in the house before the cat eats it, we gently move the tiny creature outside where it belongs. Now, I don't know if we would act like this if our house was infested with, say, cockroaches. But for the harmless random insect roaming in our house, we let them live.

Call us weird. I just think we're pro-life.

Last summer we had a spider that wove an intricate web in the corner of our kitchen ceiling. We named her Charlotte, and soon we spotted little round sacks filled with her eggs. We were amazed at the number of small gnats she caught in her web -- she had a feast everytime we opened the window a crack and those little gnats sqeezed through the screen.

We let Charlotte feast in her corner web for most of the summer. She wasn't hurting anything. But soon I noticed dead gnats dropping into the dish drainer. And I started wondering what guests would think when they spotted the web on the ceiling filled with dead insects. Then I wondered about all of the baby spiders we would have building webs in our kitchen, and I decided it was time for Charlotte to go.

I told David. He reluctantly agreed. So one evening he gently captured Charlotte in a plastic cup and put her outside. Then he took the hand vac and sucked up all of the remnants of the web and dead insects and the egg sacks. It was sad.

All of this is background to what happened in the office of one of my clients yesterday. There I was, sitting around a table with 5 khaki-wearing, corporate, materialistic, conservative, MBA-holding men who I'm sure are members of the NRA. You know the type. They're cocky....they're competitive....they wear polo shirts...they communicate through PowerPoint presentations. They play golf and brag about their weekend hang-overs. Yeah, those kind of people. The VP of Marketing is the kingpin of this khaki-wearing gang. He can be curt and brash, and I put up with him because the company pays me a lot of money. Once he made me cry (but I was safely out of his office when the tears started, so no one saw me).

So we were sitting there yesterday and suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, he stomps his foot on the ground. "There! I got it!" he yelled. He lifted his large, loafered foot and there on the carpet was a squished, innocent-looking bug. Really, this thing was only a half inch long, a tiny beetle that wouldn't hurt anything. It was just crawling along the floor minding its own business when this jerk stomped on it. Everyone looked at it, laughed a little, and moved on with the conversation. Except me. I was traumatized. What did this little bug do to deserve a violent death?

I kept looking at it out of the corner of my eye. I kept thinking about how I could relate to that little bug. Being stomped on by the VP of marketing.

Then, suprisingly, I saw it move! It twitched a little, and then it pulled itself up from the tuffs of the carpeting. Apparently, the stomp had just pushed it into the rug and little damage was done. I was trying to follow the conversation, while at the same time watching the bug out of the corner of my eye. It looked injured. It limped. But then it started crawling, and after the first few steps, it looked perfectly fine. I was cheering for it in my head "Go little bug, go! Run for the hills before Mr. Jerky VP notices you survived! Go!!" The bug crawled under the VP's chair without anyone noticing...

SCORE:
Little Harmless Bug: 1
Big Jerky VP: 0

That spunky little bug made my day.