This is a rant. Not a rave. This is not a thread to post unexpected pictures of spiders.
The previous sentence is not an invite to hilariously post unexpected pictures of spiders.
There's only so much predictable a forum can take, and I'm using most of it.
This is not a 'But they're beautiful, man! So elegant and perfectly adapted and blah blah why won't women talk to me?' discussion. If you want to extol the virtues of spiders, go make your own thread. And then put a glass over it.

My house is infested with spiders. House spiders. I know you probably live in the US and routinely have to push child-sized tarantulas over on the couch before you can sit down but this is civilisation and house spiders are quite big enough for me, thank-you very much. Size has nothing to do with it. A badly-equipped nocturnal rapist sliding into your bed does not become less terrifying just because his penis is only 2-3", with skinny legs and a tiny body.

I'm terrified of spiders. Terrified. Every part of them fills me with a primal dread. I'm perfectly willing to accept that my fear is irrational. Fuck you. Fuck them. Fuck all of us. I can't wait until 2012 if the end of the world spells the end for these horrific things.

Skittle-skittle they go, racing across my laminate. The cats are fucking useless. I've had to kill about half a dozen in the last few days. From a distance usually. With a thrown slipper. Death from above. And the woman downstairs, yesterday, commented about how she's having the same problem. She reckons it's from the basement. I didn't need to know that. She's going to get some sort of electical device to get rid of them. Where do you think they'll go? Out into Scotland's wintry Autumn? Or upstairs to where fat, cowardly pickings make easy prey for their independently moving myriad of eyes. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Spiders.

So I too have invested thirty notes in a spider repeller. I suppose now it's a race against delivery time to see whether I can beat my neighbour to it. Or whether the spiders can get organised and launch a combined strike against us all. I'll leave them, you know. Leave them both without a thought. Move to Alaska and no, I never had a family. Cold here isn't it? No spiders then? Nice one.

I'm finished. Sorry for the massively pointless ramble but I'm teetering on the brink of complete mental breakdown and looking at the screen means I'm not looking at the floor, where I'm likely to see something that will frighten me. Truly, this is hell.

Oh it's not so bad. In Guatemala, in addition to big hairy tarantulas and flying stinging insects that would carry off small dogs, we had creepy crawlies that would give you proper nightmares. No joke. One of them I saw years later featured on "Fear Factor" if that tells you anything.

PS Those spiders in your house are harmless. Worst case scenario you get a little bug bite.

Yeah, I know. I did a little reading on house spiders last night and the general consensus is that they have mouth parts so small that most of them would even struggle to break the skin. Even if they wanted to - that's really only a last-resort reaction if there are no means of escape.
It's irrational. I'm well aware of that. I'm also well aware that I'm thousands of times bigger than they, but I'm still petrified.

Interestingly, pretty much all of the 'Scared of spiders, huh? Here's some comforting advice' sites feature huge close-up pictures of spiders.
Again, not an invite.

Ugh, I really do sympathize. I have this recurring nightmare where there are spiders crawling all over my skin, and every time I try to brush them off more spiders start crawling on me where I've brushed. So I'm quickly covered in spiders and I can't get them off and they're crawling up my nose and down my throat.... Really, fuck spiders, just fuck them. Even the ones that I KNOW aren't dangerous scare the shit out of me. And the ones that are dangerous (I mean, you get bit you RUSH to the hospital IMMEDIATELY do not pass go do not collect $200 immediately) well I see those and I run screaming like a 6-year-old girl.

Have you considered a bug bomb? I know that they make them to kill spiders as well, just lock the cats up in a bathroom with the window cracked and the door sealed and bomb the rest of the house. It won't get rid of all of them but it will DRASTICALLY cut down on their evil army.

Don't come to my house. We have a lovely little Black Widow problem. I absolutely loved the time one repelled from the ceiling to assault my neck as I watched TV. These days they mostly just hang out in my deck box on the patio.

Rors, man, I so feel your pain. I can't even kill them with a long stick I'm that scared of the fuckers.

I feel you raptor. I dislike spiders. I'm not at Rors level (my profoundest sympathies sir), but I possess extreme distaste for most of them. The poisonous ones though. They will make me jump up and down, running in circles squealing like a 13 year old girl with a bat in her hair.
We moved into a new house.
There are spiders there.
Poisonous ones, with little red hourglasses.
ugh. All my muscles clench thinking about it.
They live in the yard.
In places I would like to stick my hand in to tear out the weeds.
I fear for my life.

Man, you ought to see the spiders we have here, there's huge ones and poisonous ones!

Those black widows live under the house. That's fine, so long as they stay there but we need to repair the ducts. Under the house. Where the spiders are. And Steve is too big and I'm the right size to get under the house.

I called the heating repair guy.

spikegirl7 wrote:Have you considered a bug bomb?

I've ordered one of these which, if effective, I will consider the zenith of human invention and technology. I don't necessarily want to kill the fuckers - for all I know they might just be transmigrating souls and eternal consequences is the last thing I need. No, I just want to nudge them out the door. And I'm having to get this because my downstairs neighbour is getting one too, so all of her spiders will naturally head upstairs for leggy party time otherwise.

raptor9k wrote:We have a lovely little Black Widow problem. I absolutely loved the time one repelled from the ceiling to assault my neck as I watched TV. These days they mostly just hang out in my deck box on the patio.

And at that point, I would have died. Literally died. My subconscious would had said 'Fuck this for a lark. I'm not hanging around to suffer these kind of horrors' and shut down my vital systems.

'Aza, your spiders don't count. The worst thing that can happen there is that they kill some Australians.

Holy crap, I love this part:

But does it really work?
Is it really going to clear my whole house of spiders?
The amazing results are that, for every 100 people who have bought our spider repeller, less than 2 have returned it for a full refund. Which suggests very strongly that the device is effective in almost all situations.

98/100 people won't spend the 6-8 weeks to receive a "full refund" $27* on their after we recoup "shipping and restocking" costs, so it MUST work!

*I don't have a "pounds" button on my keyboard, and fuck you I'm not looking it up. You know what I mean.

FireAza wrote:Man, you ought to see the spiders we have here

Oh, we have a pretty good idea of what you get down there. In the US, we have no fewer than two channels that use "holy crap Australia has a lot of things that can murder people" as the sentiment that drives their programming.

One of these days the Australian Tourism Board is going to get an idea of how their country is portrayed elsewhere. That will be an unpleasant day for them. "You mean the two things most people know about Australia is that it was founded as a penal colony and it's full of ridiculously deadly animals?"

spikegirl7 wrote:Those black widows live under the house.

That freaking tears it. I'm never leaving New England. ...Actually, revise that. I'm never leaving southeastern New England, where most of the "deadly animals" I have to worry about are safely confined to the Atlantic Ocean. I am perfectly cool with living in an area so cold and inhospitable that nature takes a look at it and says "suddenly rural New Hampshire looks pretty damn good." My apartment sees maybe three spiders per year, all of which are harmless, which does all of no good toward stopping me from freaking out, putting everything on hold and hunting them down individually. I can't sleep with a spider in the apartment, because you just know it's waiting for me to go to sleep so it can slip into my slightly opened mouth and bite my insides. Any more than that and I wouldn't ever be productive.

Rorschach wrote:

spikegirl7 wrote:Have you considered a bug bomb?

I've ordered one of these which, if effective, I will consider the zenith of human invention and technology.

It is effective at separating you from your money. At best it will give you a placebo effect. Maybe it's worth it then, but that's your money and therefore your call. I would say that money would be better served getting help to conquer your phobia.

A cursory Google search turns up some possible household items that can be used to keep spiders at bay. I can't vouch for any of these myself, but see http://howtogetridofspiders.blogspot.co ... llent.html for instance.

Yeah, thanks for that. It'll give me a placebo effect but you're telling me it won't actually work. Which makes the placebo effect kind of unlikely. Leave me to my blissful ignorance.

Yeah. Chestnuts. Who'd have known?

[edit] Again. Another fucking site for spider phobics full of, guess what, loads of close-up photos of giant fucking spiders.

We have a Daddy Long-Legs problem, which is better than having a fly problem. Which is not as bad as having a raccoon problem. But that is for another thread.