I took my ant-infested keyboard out into the yard in back of the office this afternoon and snuggled it into the dirt. After more than 24-hours ants were still coming out from between the keys and up my fingers at a steady rate. It was like a keyboard clown car and looked like it wouldn’t end. I figured if I plopped it in the yard we could begin our very own Developing Country Technological Trash Mountain right here! Out of respect for Earth Day I didn’t douse it with chemicals.
A few years ago when I checked into a cabin on a nature reserve in El Salvador I tried to stop the owner from spraying some horrible-smelling liquid over a giant line of ants that flowed from the porch into the room. I’m in the tropics telling a native not to kill the ants! What an idiot. The next day our guide showed us a twenty foot wide path in the forest that ants had gone through and stripped bare. I don’t know if they were the same kind of ants, but I thought that I should apologize to the guy from the night before. He tried to make me comfortable and I got save-the-animals snotty.
The next morning, he was very nice and said that he was worried that so many tap-dancing ants would have kept me awake all night and their top hats tended to fall off and make a mess. It was, after all, the tropics and the ants can get pretty big.
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