ANTS & SPIDERS

There was a spider in our planning meeting today. Junko jumped out of her seat while Chris went to fetch a bit of kitchen roll. It's fair to say that the spider contributed more to the meeting than I did.

Chris came back with the kitchen roll and scooped up the little blighter. Then he scrunched it up and slipped it casually into the bin. That, quite matter of factly, was that.

I don't much care for spiders - they seem a little devious to me, and of course, from childhood we're told that they belong in the murky world of witches, filthy cabins and the dark dark forests: realms where no sensible child should ever stray. Their webs are traps and the hundreds of gleaming eyes give away a silent skulking intellect that lurks in the shadows, ready to pounce when the time is right.

Nonetheless I did feel a bit sorry today for that bulbous little arachnid at its sticky end in the meeting room. One moment it was scuttling across a nicely woven carpet between a plug socket and an Ethernet cable, not really paying attention to the gigantic planning meeting going on above, the next thing it knows, a Japanese translator is recoiling in horror and it's being herded onto a bit of kitchen roll by a performance engineer cum executioner. It's not the nicest way to go.

Later, when I got to my car, I found it covered in flecks of dirt. Only it wasn't dirt, it was ants and they were moving about. For some reason my car had become a sort of shiny fascination in the ant world and all the local ants had come to explore it. There were hundreds of them. I very gingerly opened the door and lowered myself inside. The windscreen was moving. I started the engine, flicked on the windscreen washer and wiped a whole load of them out of existence.

"Sorry ants," I said, "But I've got to go home. Hold on tight if the rest of you want to live."

See I'm no better then. You can't feel sorry for spiders who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and then murder a load of ants. And anyway, why did they choose my car? I did look around the car park to check whether it was some sort of ant apocalypse and everyone else's car was home to an infestation. Nope, just mine. Alrighty then.

Chris was less philosophical about squishing a spider and throwing it into the bin.

"I'm a tester, it's what I do," he said, "I kill bugs."