Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

I want you to do something for me.  Find a dollar bill, the denomination is unimportant.  Got it?  Okay, look at it with the portrait facing up.  Now, fold the bill in half so that the long edge is shortened.  Do that same fold again, so that the bill is its normal height but only a quarter its length.  Now look at the folded bill and imagine a brown wolf spider about that size, only the legs half off of the edges.  That's what I found in my apartment Monday morning.

[Pause for screaming and/or skin-crawling to subside]

I got up earlier than usual on Monday so I could go into the office and teleconference with the other technical writers in Denmark.  However, I was also expecting maintenance to come by to repair a busted closet, so I decided to tidy up a bit.  I'd kept my room mostly in order, but I had some jeans on the floor that I needed to fold and put in the dresser.  I picked up the jeans and saw the wolf spider on the floor.  I immediately dropped the clothes and shook my arms and legs -- not because I wanted to make sure I didn't have a spider on me, but because I had an extreme case of the willies.

I said a quick prayer and decided to suck it up with the hose of the vacuum.  Once the vacuum was set up, I attached the wand so I didn't have to get any closer than necessary.  I tried to suck the spider up, but it walked away a little, apparently only annoyed.  I was already feeling anxious, but after a failed attempt at eliminating my foe, my anxiety turned into panic.  The problem with finding arachnids on carpet is that it's really hard to smash them.  When I was in Oklahoma, Allison and I found two live scorpions in our apartment, both on the carpet.  I smashed the first with a hardcover textbook, but it took six or seven really hard whacks to kill it.  Allison sucked up the other one with the vacuum, which is probably why I thought to use that tactic again.  (In case you're wondering, I'll take scorpions over spiders any day.)

I said another prayer, this one while stuttering, and felt prompted to use the vacuum again, but this time I used the spinning brush.  The spider hadn't moved since the last attempt, but I was still freaking out.  I psyched myself up and quickly ran it over with the vacuum.  Well, I tried to run it over.  What ended up happening was I shoved the spider against the baseboard and smashed it.  Not what I was going for, but I'll take it.  However, the spider still wasn't dead!  I had busted it up pretty bad, but it was still trying to hobble away.  I switched back to the hose (and wand!) and sucked up the half-dead spider.  With the spider finally dispatched, I relaxed and let out a quick scream.

This was not the first spider I've found in my new apartment, but it is the first one that didn't spin a web.  Spiders with webs, while I don't like them, are pretty harmless.  And yes, I know that the only poisonous spider in Maryland, the black widow, spins a web.  I'm not talking about physically harmless but psychologically harmless.  If the spider is a spinner, it's going to hang out in the corner and leave me alone.  Wolf spiders don't spin and can get ridiculously big.  That makes it tough for a man who, for the most part, has conquered his arachnophobia.  I've called the apartment manager about the problem to see if we can figure something out because three-inch (plus!) long wolf spiders are not acceptable.