The Huntsman

"OH MY GOD, ADAM, I'M SO FREAKED OUT RIGHT NOW!!" These were the panic-stricken words Sharon cried out when I answered my phone at 7:00 in the morning. A nervous breakdown sounded imminent. My mind jumped to all the awful and unlikely things that might have happened: someone trying to break in, a finger lost in a kitchen accident…. 

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"There's a Huntsman in the apartment!" Sharon said, near tears. My brain was still fuzzy from waking up and I couldn't make sense of what she said. I kept picturing a guy in a red plaid jacket with a bright orange vest and hat, walking through the woods with a rifle. "It's soooo freaking big!" Sharon cried.

Then my neurons connected: the Huntsman is without a doubt the king of spiders in Australia. Adult males can grow to a foot in diameter. They don't build webs to trap prey, but actively hunt insects, hence the name. They're actually a good spider to have around because they eat cockroaches, which plague Sydney. For this reason, many people will simply put the spider outside rather than kill it.

Sharon is not many people. She has what might be called an insect phobia.

On a good day, she freaks out about a moth flitting around the room. I am immediately ordered to destroy it and Sharon becomes incensed when I tell her it'll leave on it's own and I'm not going to bother chasing a moth around the apartment. She once killed a cockroach with my flip-flop when I was away for work, and then left my flip-flop resting on top of the bug for two days because she was too afraid to move it. (The dialogue from that gem of a conversation is at the bottom of this post.)

So now Sharon was alone in the apartment with a live spider as big as her hand. And she was hysterical about it. "It's so freaking big! It's so freaking big!" she kept repeating. "You have to come here and kill it!"

I didn't think flying home to Sydney to kill a spider would be looked on kindly by my manager.

I tried to calm her down a bit. "Look, it's big…but we know it's not poisonous and they don't attack humans."

"How do you know?!"

"Because everyone in this country has told us that."

Sharon wasn't buying it. "What if this one's different?!"

"That's not very likely."

"I can't stay here! Adam, I can't stay here with that spider -- I'm freaking out!!" I didn't have much hope of calming her down so I figured it might be better to extract her from the situation entirely.

"Well, look, what if we get you a hotel room and I can deal with it when I get home tomorrow?" I suggested.

"Okay."

"Alright, I've got Marriott points so let's see if we can use them."

"Actually, I don't think going to a hotel is a good idea. What if it moves while I'm gone and I'll have no idea where it went?! My heart's about to come through my chest. I think I've aged 10 years!"

So the extraction plan wasn't working either.

"Okay, here's what you're going to do. Get your laptop, go in the bedroom…"

"I can't go in the bedroom…what if the spider moves? I have to watch it."

"Okay, don't go in the bedroom,  get your laptop, Google 'exterminators', and see if one will come get rid of it, okay?"

"Okay." Sharon said. She seemed like she was coming to her senses, but it was short-lived. She returned to exclaiming, "But it's so freaking big!! It's so freaking big!!"

"Sharon! Calm down and get a grip," I ordered. "Google 'exterminators' and get one to come to the apartment, okay?" I could only imagine how an exterminator would react to a call to come kill a single, innocuous spider. "Call me back later and let me know what's going on."

About fifteen minutes later Sharon called me back in much better spirits.

"So you got an exterminator?" I asked.

"No, none of them answered their phones. I went down the hall and started knocking on doors, and I got two guys from another apartment to come kill it."

"How did they kill it?" Huntsman are pretty fast so I was curious what the strategy was.

"They kept whacking at it with their shoes."
I pictured the remains splattered across the wall of the beautiful apartment we're staying in until January. "Sharon, are there guts all over the wall?"

"No," she said, "But I do have to vacuum up some of its legs now."

And that's why we'll be putting screens on the windows of our apartment.

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Phone conversation from several months ago about a cockroach (I was away for work and it was two days before I'd be returning to New York):

Sharon: "Sooo…I did something and I don't want you to get mad at me…"

Me: "Okay."

"Sooo…I saw a cockroach and I didn't like it…and I decided to do something about it…  So I hit it with your flip flop…. …."

"Okay." So far I hadn't heard anything that could possibly make me mad.

"But I'm too scared to look at it, so I'm just going to leave it there under your flip flop until you get home."

"Sharon! That is so ridiculous, just pick it up and throw it away." This was completely ridiculous.

"No…I'm just going to leave it there. I put a note next to the flip flop so you know which one it is."

"Jesus Christ."

Here's what I came home to:

"Don't move dead bug under"