Thursday I filled up my huge, metal water bottle one of my NASA colleagues had given to me prior to leaving for the night. I put the cap on thinking "I'll drink it tomorrow." Now, I did NOT screw the cap on, but I just put it on there.
At 10 am, when I was taking the last swig of water, I felt something in my mouth. It had the consistency of a wad of paper or wet popcorn. I quickly spat the contents back into the water bottle and looked. I was honestly expecting to see paper. I mean, there's a TON of paper at NASA. It's totally possible it was paper.
The picture in this post is what I found.
To my credit, I didn't freak out as much as you might imagine I would. I calmly seperated the creature from the water. Then it was sticking to the inside of the water bottle, so I had to bang it a few times to get it out onto a paper towel.
Then I counted the legs. Four times.
I shivered, threw it away, and asked a coworker for gum. She and I talked for a bit about the incident and then I had to vomit.
Needless to say, this event left me traumatized and I couldn't stand the thought of drinking anything for the rest of the day. This fear spilled over into Saturday, causing me not to drink until about noon.
Since then, I have been plagued with a sore throat. This has caused a nagging thought in the back of my brain that I might have some sort of exotic spider sickness. Not the cool kind which renders me the female version of Peter Parker, but the kind that leaves me dead. Or vomiting spiders. Or some such horrific scene.
Lessons Learned: ALWAYS cap your drink, and never use a container for drinking if you can't see through it.
1 comments: