Living in Texas, I should be used to bugs. My parents house has always had a minor scorpion problem. My college apartment was a seasonal breeding ground to what looked like small wasps, but thankfully turned out to merely be large flies. Ants have found the kitchen everywhere I’ve lived. But, for some reason, I panicked the first time I came home to find ants all over the kitchen counter of my current house.
Whatever the psychological underpinnings of my reaction (it may have been the first “Bad Thing” that happened in/to my house), it was…energetic. I squished ‘em, I drowned them, then I squished ‘em some more. Yet, there were still so many. So, I grabbed a paper towel, and started squishing with that. I suppose I thought it would have more surface area, so I could squish more at the same time. I failed to realize that paper towels are far too soft to kill ants, and soon they were running around the paper towel. A few started to find their way onto my hand and arm. So, I threw the paper towel in the microwave and started it. It seemed like a fitting vengeance. Then the paper towel caught fire. I slammed the button to open the microwave door, after which I intended to dash to the sink to get water, but the draft of the door opening wafted the burning towel out of the microwave, and onto my counter. The next few seconds, as I stared at the fire on my kitchen counter, in a house I’d be paying off for 30 years, were long indeed. The first thought I had after “aaaaaagggghhhhhhhhh!!!!” was that you put a fire out by depriving it of air. So, that’s what I did. With my hands.
For quite a while afterwards, I thought to myself, “How stupid were you to put a paper towel in the microwave! It’s paper, and paper burns very, very well when it gets hot!” Since then, it has occurred to me that I’ve been putting paper towels in the microwave my whole life, albiet ususally to cover what I’m trying to heat up. I still don’t know if a lone paper towel in the microwave would catch fire, or if the ants were the key ingredient. In any case, I now keep bug spray under the kitchen sink. It’s much more effective than the microwave.
