More Ants! (Best Story So Far)

I've blogged before about ants. A lot.

I've blogged about ants at Xcaret, ants in our cereal, ants in our hostel, ants on our pizza, ants in our fan...

Some of those stories are worth reading, but yesterday we had an ant experience like no other...

I was sitting in our living room, merrily adding anecdotes to our website (anecdotage.com - home to thousands of funny anecdotes), when suddenly I heard a scream. It was Jen and there was a problem: ants in the bedroom.

Actually, that wasn't really the problem. We've had ants in the bedroom before. Big ants, medium-sized ants, and little ants. But this time, the problem was wee, teeny, tiny ants. And they weren't in the bedroom per se...
See, when I raced into the room, I discovered that they were crawling all over Jen's HP tablet, which was in its handy faux leather case. No problem. I grabbed the whole thing, took it outside, removed the tablet, dropped the case on the ground, and started blowing the ants off the tablet (and off my hands and arms). There were dozens of them tiny critters, and the strange thing was, every time I blew one off, two more seemed to take their place.

I soon discovered the problem. My blowing and shaking wasn't generating new ants (I'm still looking forward to that particular nightmare!). It was disturbing something: the colony living inside the tablet!

Eeeeek!

Sure enough, it wasn't long before I saw the little buggers streaming out of the headphone jack. After about 2 minutes of shaking & blowing & waiting, the stream slowed to a trickle (it kind of reminded me of waiting for microwave popcorn), & finally stopped.

I put the tablet back inside, thinking I had licked the problem.

Only later did something occur to me: don't ant colonies have a queen!? Oh crap! I picked up the tablet & shook it again. No doubt, there was a giant queen ant in there, somewhere. I huffed & I puffed & I blew inside, hoping to blow the queen's house down (so to speak), but nothing happened.

What if it couldn't (or wouldn't) come out of the jack? I'm not even sure a queen ant can move on her own. (I'd google it but I'm too scared to lol..)

I gave up eventually & that's where we are today. We still haven't powered up the tablet again. I'm a little worried that all the lights will dim & buzz & we'll hear a gruesome sizzling sound, followed by the sound of dripping ant goop as the room is plunged into darkness!

OK. That's unlikely, I admit. And we may never know: Jen still doesn't know there might be a queen inside & she hasn't (yet) seen this post. When she does (& she will!), we may have a shiny new HP paperweight.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. If we do fire it up... please wish us luck!


Ya, that's an expensive paperweight...