My office here at school is full of ants. In the past, Daniel, the government professor to my right, took care of this recurring problem by spraying the ones on his side of the wall. Fooosh! Fooosh! I would hear from his open door as he used Raid to massacre the intruders. Since the long trail of ants walked through the poison next door, I didn't have to breathe carcinogenic chemicals in the confines of my small office or acquire the bad karma from killing useful insects. But Daniel left the hallway last semester when he scored a "charter" office in a newer building. [Because my school is 30-something years old, we had, until recently, faculty who had taught here since Day 1. Several years ago, they were rewarded with roomier, well lit offices in a new building. The last charter faculty member retired two years ago, and now senior faculty battle for these special spaces, Daniel having won the most recent bout.]
A new hire—so young that people on campus must frequently mistake him as a student—got Daniel's office. Either he doesn't have ants [perhaps I've left an open bag of chips in a drawer and alone have the problem?], or he is tolerating them as I am. Ants don't bother me. In fact, I like all insects except the huge palmetto bugs we Floridians call cockroaches, common pests in neighborhoods full of old trees [like mine], pests that my Terminex guy can keep under control but not completely eradicate. [Cockroaches are the most impolite bugs I know; they crawl across the ceiling at night and drop into my lap uninvited while I am watching TV.] But ants I adore. I have always identified as the hardworking ant in the Aesop fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper."
But I am starting to find one [or two, or sometimes several] every time I lift a stack of handouts or scoot a book over. Right now, two ants are confident that they will discover a way into the Altoids tin on the computer table. I haven't seen any of the critters crawling on me yet, but I imagine that they are. I keep brushing phantom ants I feel at my throat [Oh, wait, that's just my shirt collar], or in my hair [Oh, wait, that's just air blowing from the cooling vent], or in my shirt [No, wait, that's just a hair loosened when I thought I had ants crawling on my scalp].
I keep hoping that the cleaning crew will notice the line marching beside the baseboard. They keep insecticide on their carts and can do the "dirty work" late at night when I won't have to witness the murder. I so do not want to kill the girls on my own when I am working to develop the good rapport I need to get close enough to take insect pictures for the Flickr stream.
