Alexander's

Ants!

The other day I found a column of ants marching through my room. Actually column is a bit misleading. I’m not talking about a nice single file of ants walking neatly one behind another — my ants build a 5 lane highway starting in my bathroom, through my bedroom, right into the kitchen.

There is not a single speck of food in my kitchen — this kitchen has been unused for years!^[1]

Why don’t these stupid things raid my trash? That’s full of yummy^[2] things.

Something had to be done! Lucky for me there still was an old canister of dubious origins and suspicious content lying around. The label — at least the part that I could still read — said:

Ant poison — kills the queen and eggs as well

The next morning there was carnage. The highway looked like Godzilla took a casual stroll along it. Dead ants lying wherever I looked.

The deed was done and now it was time for a major cleanup.

A few minutes with the vacuum cleaner and the only thing that reminded me of these pests was a strange kind of “anty” smell in the air.

Turns out the “anty” smell was caused by the ant poison that my vacuum cleaner ground up into a fine powder and spit out again — trough the allergy filter.

Soon I too felt like an ant. Splitting headache, nausea and slightly distorted vision. I wonder if these ants really made it back to the hive to feed it to their queen — if I ate a chunk of that I’d definitely not be able to drive home anymore.