SSSSSSSpray

The following was originally posted on June 21, 2018. Enjoy!

I wanted to get rid of some pesky annoyances, but it didn’t work because I failed to put on the proper man boots.

I’ll explain.

I had an ant problem. They got in everywhere they possibly could, even in my pants, where they definitely don’t belong… kinda like sand, or Republicans. I’ve been avoiding calling pest control because I don’t like poison and care about the environment… to a certain extent. I mean, don’t ask me to give up my plastic shopping bags, take-out containers, and fossil fuel or anything.

So I’ve been trying to keep them at bay, unsuccessfully. It got to the point where I finally couldn’t take it anymore and had to dig in deep to fight the bastards with everything I could (which is probably how Planned Parenthood and women’s rights groups feel under the Trump administration), so I called The Exterminator to get an estimate.

I envisioned a giant, robotic beast of a man resembling Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up wearing khakis and big, black boots with a fire-thrower slung over his shoulder, but all I got was a millennial, aka “home-dweller”, with a beard, sunglasses, and inked-up, scrawny body (look up millennial in the dictionary, that’s the exact description). I guess it’s fine, it is just ants, after all, we’re not dealing with Armageddon or anything. 

Anyway, he talked me into spraying the ant poison, which really wasn’t that hard considering I was at the end of my soap-on-a-rope, so he said he’d come back the following day and spray the perimeter of my house.

Now this is where it gets weird: I gave explicit instructions on where not to spray, because of my two cats, so when I got home, I could immediately smell the stuff he used, and it was where I instructed him not to spray. Okay, I was very clear in my instruction when I texted him a reminder in the morning… or so I thought. But I guess there’s a discrepancy in the way a bright, attractive, young(ish) woman and a scrawny millennial dude communicate through text: I use all my vowels, punctuation and emojis… and he doesn’t.

im sry i dnt mk mysf clr a*hole 😠

I was dumbfounded that he couldn’t even follow simple directions. As I was texting instruction on where he was to avoid spraying, I thought to myself, “Okay, he’s a man, so you gotta keep it really simple, don’t complicate things and it’ll be just fine.” You see, when you need to explain a job to a man, you have to put on your man boots; you have to think like a man would. That means you have to pare down any extraneous information, don’t make the language too flowery or cute, and allude to the possibility of sex afterwards if the work is done properly.  

ahem…

Anyway, apparently this reasoning was not enough, because you have to figure in visuals too. Why do you think all those stupid manuals have pictures in them? Because they’re designed by men, and men like pictures… Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Cereal boxes… I had completely forgotten to draw a schematic, silly me!

Plus, if I were really thinking like a man, I would realize the first thing he would’ve noticed as he approached my gate would be the bungee cord I use to hold the gate closed, because his thought process would go something like this:

See bungee cord… *grunt*

Bungee cord good… mmmm….

Me go to bungee cord… unga bunga!

Why do I use a bungee cord to hold the gate closed? Does that question really add any value to this one-sided conversation? I don’t think so. Please, let’s move on…

The only place I didn’t want him to spray was my patio area, which is a garden, really, and I instructed him not to spray in the “garden”. But then the damn bungee cord fucked it all up! A man sees a bungee cord and immediately thinks of strapping something down, consequently getting excited. The section of his brain that controls reason goes offline and the amygdala, or “serpent brain” kicks in (really, that’s what it’s called, I didn’t make that shit up). That’s the section of the brain that is the most primitive, in case you didn’t know, and there is a direct correlation between the word “serpent” and a bungee cord producing excitement in men, like ants in the pants.

I’m even getting kinda hot writing those words together.

So instead of putting up signs with giant lettering and arrows pointing the guy in the right direction, which I seriously considered, I failed by leaving the bungee cord where it was, assuming he would figure it out by the text. I can’t even say for sure that large signs would’ve been sufficient, I probably would’ve needed to completely remove the bungee cord from view; you don’t want to leave any temptation or distractions for the simple mind to get swayed.

So I failed to fully think like a man, which is totally natural considering I do not have a serpent in my pants.