Raining Spiders – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have read some of my recent posts, you know that I have been writing about my experiences while attending the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  While at Fort Lee, Virginia.  If you have read about my exploits at Fort Lee, Virginia, you no doubt read about my dealings with the commanding general.  For example, the commanding general’s invitational deer hunt that I managed to get invited to participate in, as a swamp dog.  Yay.  Or about how the commanding general wrongly promoted and then demoted me in the same week.  Double yay.  But not all of my dealings with the general were negative.  We had a love-hate relationship.  I loved to hate him.  But seriously, the old guy started to grow on me as time went on.  Fort Lee started to grow on me as time went on as well.  But all good things must come to an end and it was the same with the Logistics Executive Development Course.  My class had finally entered graduation week.  You may remember reading about the dining out that I talked about.  Well, I mostly talked about stains in that post.  You know.  Food stains.  Not the kind caused by food fights.  Cuz those are a different kind of stains.  You know.  Those kinds of stains are deliberately caused.  You may have read that the commanding general tried to con me into taking a teaching job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.  He said that he had heard that I was interested in becoming an instructor at the Logistics Executive Development Course.  While that was true, I wanted to become an instructor at Fort Lee not in Ohio.  No way no how.  There was no way in hell that I would sign up for a tour of duty in Ohio.  Cuz let’s face it Ohio is in the middle of nowhere.  As a result, I graduated from the Logistics Executive Development Course in due course, and my family and I headed for Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  If you have been reading about my adventures after moving to Arizona, you found out what happened when I initially signed in at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  I had been assigned to the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca.  JITC is a subordinate command of the Defense Information Systems Agency.  You may have read about an interesting situation with a temporary guard.  In that same post, I also talked about securing housing for my family.  Well, I had initially secured temporary housing on post at Fort Huachuca in the guest lodging until I signed for on post housing.  The housing branch guesstimated that it would take about two weeks for housing to be assigned to me.  Yes.  I know.  You’re wondering about that word, “guesstimated.”  That is an actual “kind of” word.  A “kind of” word is a word that has been adopted by a certain sector of society as an actual word.  In construction, there are project estimators that come out and estimate the amount of materials that it will take to complete a project.  Well, that is what they are supposed to do.  But estimators really guesstimate the amount of materials that it will take to complete a project.  As a result, the budget for a project may change ‘slightly’ as the project goes on.  I won’t bore you with the process of how that happens but believe me, it happens.  Remember what I said about housing ‘guesstimating’ that it would take about two weeks to assign quarters to me.  Cuz it actually took about eight days.  I guess if you kinda look at it in a lopsided, caddy-wumpus, twisted sort of way, that eighth day could be construed as a second week.  But you would have to have one helluva damn good week-stretcher to pull that out.  And I looked all over the damn place, and I sure as hell couldn’t find one (a week-stretcher that is).  What is a week-stretcher?  You know.  That’s a thingamajig that takes one or two or three days and stretches them into seven days a.k.a. a week.  But like I said, I couldn’t find one to save my ass.  But that’s beyond the point.  Once we were issued quarters, I took a couple of days off to move in and receive my household goods and hold-baggage.  The first thing we decided to do after we accepted the quarters was to clean the house from front to rear.  I was assigned to clean the bathrooms.  Go figure.  I got all of the easy jobs.  The place was supposed to be clean when we moved in.  But it wasn’t.  Suddenly, I heard screaming from the kitchen.  I ran out there and everybody was standing on the built-in counter.  I yelled the first thing that came to mind, “What the hell?!?”  My wife, daughter, and  son all replied in unison, “The house is raining tarantulas and scorpions.”  Okay.  There were a few sun spiders coming out of the light fixtures.  Sun spiders are damn near as big as tarantulas but they look different.  And I only saw one scorpion so I squished the sonofabitch.  Then I said, “look, these bugs die just like every other kind of bug.  If you step on them, they die.  Squish the little bastards.  Am I the only one in this house that can kill bugs?  Come on.”  Well, none of them was satisfied with my response.  After I got rid of all of the spiders and the scorpion, I put in an emergency work order to facilities to come out and fumigate the house.  I wanted to make sure that all of the little critters were gone from the house before we moved in.  After the facilities people fumigated the house, we didn’t have any more problems with spiders and tarantulas inside the house.  Notice I said, “inside the house.”  Yes.  The little bastards were still a problem outside.  And I haven’t even begun to talk about Jake and the cast with thousands of his friends.  Seriously?  Do I really need to explain who Jake is again?  Okay.  Jake isn’t a guy.  Jake is a snake, more specifically Jake is a rattlesnake.  Get it.  Got it.  Good.  But the stories about Jake will have to come another time.  Cuz even though the song lyric goes, “I don’t like spiders and snakes,” I was only talking about the spiders right now.  After we got rid of the bug problems, we were ready to accept our household goods and move into our house at Fort Huachuca.  Other than the fiasco with the spiders and the scorpion, my family and I encountered no other exercises in futility while cleaning our quarters in preparation for moving in.

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