So, at work, I'm sitting working on meds or something in the office when I hear a shriek from downstairs. As it pretty much was followed by that almost screamy laughter from the same person, I basically ignored it. Then that same resident comes barreling up the stairs, another male resident in tow, with whom she has been building a relationship, yelling that there is a ginormous bug in the laundry room.
I sort of give her a raised eyebrow look, questioning her interpretation of huge and tease her a little bit about her jump-on-the-chair-and-scream behaviors. She takes it in stride, laughing back but then is very firm that there is a large bug downstairs. The boyfriend client agrees, a bit bemused by her reaction to said insect. Okay, so I get my keys and go downstairs.
I walk straight into the laundry room, no hesitation. I don't mind bugs, spiders, snakes, reptiles, whatever. I'm not very squeamish around animals. Except ferrets. And cows. Long story. The ferret one, I shall impart at this time.
My mom wanted me not to be squeamish. And she knew that children model what their parents do. Of course, she probably wasn't so aware that children will pick up feelings in any case. But bravely she went forward to evince being okay with slimy critters and such in front of me. Come one day when we went over to visit a family friend, Ken, who owned ferrets. We walk through the door and Ken is like, "Here, mom!!", plopping a ferret in her lap. And she reported that she held her shit together fairly well, gingerly patting the ferret, "Oh, how nice." while freaking out on the inside. Well, I must have picked up the freak out, not the attempt to not be freaked out. So ferrets have creeped me out to this day.
I didn't see anything in the laundry room right off the bat and the resident led me to where she had seen it last. And lo, an alien.... thing skitters out from under the washing machine. I even jumped. I didn't recognize it and had never seen anything like it before. It looked vaguely cricket like but then with a sort of wasp striping. Weird almost human like head. And boy was it fast. The male resident said he thought it was a potato bug. I disagreed, I thought potato bugs were those little grey rolly poly things.
Since I had a houseful of people I am responsible for and since I'd never seen the bug before, I was in a quandary because I didn't want to kill it but I didn't know if it was poisonous or not. I was thinking how to remove the bug, first, but it was quite fast. I told them I wanted to try to remove it but she wanted to kill it. There was a bit of a discussion about this and then the female resident sort of made all my plans moot by pushing over a very large box onto the critter. And it still didn't die. I mean, it was a bit squashed but kicking. Then the male resident stepped on its head a few times and it was still kicking. I was feeling pretty ill at this point. As in "I really didn't want it to suffer" ill, not the "Eww, a bug." ill. He gathered up the twitching bug with some laundry dryer lint and flushed it down the toilet.
In any case, even after this violent death, I went online and started my search. Since I thought potato bugs were the small pill bugs, I didn't start off with that word but I did start looking for crickets. It was actually a short search. Said alien creature is called a Jerusalem Cricket, or otherwise known as a Potato Bug. Well, okay, so not those little grey rolly poly things. Apparently, they are native to the west coast and in Navajo, are called "Old bald-headed man", as well as "Child of the earth"or "Child's face" in Spanish.
When I told the female resident these nicknames and the actual name, she clapped her hands over her mouth and then yelled, "Oh my god, we killed an old bald-headed Jew!!!" and then she felt bad about having instigated its death. I know I already did.
I learned a valuable lesson myself. One, potato bugs are not those little grey rolly poly things. Two, hold fast about saving bugs and don't let crazy people drop boxes on them.
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