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How Not to Kill a Spider

So it's a little after 8:00 PM when I get a call from my best friend. She's had a horrible day, with all the trimmings. Car trouble, fight with her boyfriend, came home to a disaster in the kitchen (her roommate had been cooking again), and then...

A spider.

This is central Florida, so we have those big wood spiders, you know? They've got long bodies, fuzzy legs, and range anywhere from the size of a silver dollar to as big as your hand. You always see them sitting up at the top of a wall, wondering how on earth they got there and what's up with all the screaming?

So. I can tell when she spots the spider. She goes from somewhat coherently relaying the latest drama with her boyfriend to sputtering and squeaking, and all I can make out is something like, "It's big! It's big!"

Finally, I get her to clarify. The spider is big.

"So, kill it," I tell her, truly a sympathetic ear. "Get a shoe."

She squeaks something along the lines of, "No way! I can't!"

"It's just a spider," I tell her. "It's more scared of you than you are of it."

"Yeah, right," she says.

"Just kill it." I'm over it. She's starting to become hysterical. Now I feel bad. "All right, all right. Do you need me to come kill the ferocious spider?"

She vehemently insists.

So I pack up and head down to her apartment. I knock on the door, and she shouts for me to come inside. I walk in, expecting the spider to be somewhere overhead. Hopefully it doesn't drop on me.

Then I see it, over in the corner above the entertainment stand. That's uh... quite a bug. I was expecting a fair-sized spider for all this fuss. But seriously, I've seen smaller rodents.

No matter. It's still gonna die!

I take off my shoe and hop onto one of the dining room chairs we lugged over to the corner for this task. Curse vaulted ceilings. I still have to reach WAY up to have any shot at smacking this thing. It's at the top of the wall. I hate how spiders do that. It's like they do it on purpose, so that now you have to get in the most precarious position possible to even have a shot at them. They've evened the odds.

So there I am, perched precariously atop a wobbly dining room chair that is now positively unstable from the tremors of fear and adrenaline shooting through my veins (Can we say, "Try decaf"?), holding this girly shoe with some ridiculous waffle pattern on the bottom of it and hoping to God it will be enough to squash this mammoth arachnid. What's worse than that is the fact that whenever you try to smash a spider,

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