Centipede Excitement

Early this morning I was startled by one of my coworkers shouting, "Quick! Come look at this!" This isn't a phrase you hear very often in the computer nerd department at KUEA, so I jumped up from my chair and went running into the hallway. As my friend Everett was walking into his office, he had spotted a large centipede crawling around the corner into the office next door. This thing was by far the most enormous bug I've ever seen in our building (although we do have a lot of bugs in the nerd department since we're on the ground floor), and it was absolutely disgusting. He moved super fast and was adept at quickly finding a hiding spot under the door where it was nice and dark. I grabbed my Palm Pilot so I could take a picture, but I could only get about half of him since he always darted back into the darkness when someone moved the door, and my Palm most certainly doesn't have a high resolution or high speed camera! Although you can't see him very well in these pictures, we guessed he was 4-5 inches long. That's a huge amount of creepiness!

As my brave coworkers Brian and Kiran attempted to capture the poisonous creature in a large envelope (I wouldn't have touched that thing with a ten foot pole), Brian emerged from his office with the centipede at arms length perched on the end of the envelope, right in front of my face. I'm sure I looked like a complete idiot, but I screamed like a little girl and ran the other direction. Thankfully, Kiran pushed it completely into the envelope somehow and then released it outside, so the disaster was averted relatively quickly.

After our bug crisis, we stood around for a few moments pondering the disturbing question of how many other centipedes were hiding in the dark places of our office building. For the rest of the morning, I most definitely had that creepy-crawly feeling you get when you've had a bug of some sort crawling on you. I kept looking under my desk at all the wires and cables keeping my computer alive, wondering how many centipedes were making their home in there. Needless to say, I sat cross-legged in my chair for most of the morning to avoid any huge centipedes crawling up my pant leg. Thank goodness the pest control people will be coming in soon!!!