What's all this about "putting them outside" and removing them "humanely"??
One of those horrible fuckers gets in my room and it gets flattened with the biggest book or shoe I can find. That's fucking it. No chance I'm attempting to pick one up, glass or no glass.
I spent about 6 months in Australia about 18 months ago now and did a few months of fruit picking. Spiders were my biggest fear prior to doing that, especially when I moved to a ginger farm and my job basically consisted of gathering the ginger from recently turned soil. Absolutely riddled with them. The Aussies were pissing themselves at the sight of me screaming and jumping out or my skin every time I spotted one in the vacinity. We did see a couple of red backs (think that's what they're called?) as well, which prompted one of said Aussies to regale a tale to me of how a farm he worked on in the outback a few years before, issued all of its workers with a mobile phone. Not exactly a perk of the job, more to do with the fact that if you got bitten by something deadly out there, there was no chance an ambulance was reaching you in time. That was for your last goodbyes.
Speaking of Huntsmen as well, one morning about 6am, after I'd just arrived on a Strawberry farm I was working on, I was helping load the trays onto the back of the truck to take down to the field. They were basically green plastic trays, maybe 4" deep, stacked on top of each other. Anyway, the top tray was above my eye line. As I grabbed the bottom of the stack, ready to lift them over to the truck - with my face pressed against the top tray - one of the girls (who was stood on a couple of pallets behind me) put out an ear splitting shriek straight from a horror film and grabbed my t-shirt, pulling me backwards. I fucking shit myself, not knowing what the hell was happening.
She was pointing at the top tray when I looked up at her so I turned round to have a look and sat in the top of it, against the side nearest to me, with a leg appearing over the top, was the biggest, ugliest fucking Huntsman you've ever seen. My face was literally pressed against it. Now, if that thing had reacted to me moving those trays and jumped out onto my face I can honestly say I would have just passed out there and then.
And then there's the jumping spiders. One day in the hostel I was hanging the washing out and I saw a relatively small spider on the floor. Feeling brave(ish) after having been on the farm a while now and seeing them almost daily, I decided to prod it with the long stick thing that holds the washing line up. What happened? The fucking thing - in the blink of an eye - jumped onto the stick about half way up and raced towards me, fangs flaring!!!
Needless to say I dropped the stick thing, hurdled the fence behind me and proceeded to sprint round the hostel screaming like a girl. I didn't mess with any of 'em after that.
