The Beta News

One of
the perks of being a big-time ehmmm… (I would say celebrity nut I'm not) involves using a vacuum cleaner to get rid of ants in the kitchen. Before I I got got a vacuum cleaner I had to shout at the ants to scare them away. In retrospect, I don’t think ants have ears, because yelling never worked. Sometimes I had to keep my snacks in a wooden bowl floating in the bathtub. Eventually, when the ant army built up to the point where they could lift me in my sleep – but before they could get
me down the ant hole – I would give notice on my apartment and find
another.

Now I can afford high tech vacuum weaponry. It’s sweet. I’m not
allowed to use the “good” vacuum cleaner obviously. That one is only
for the carpet. I use the one that no longer stays locked in the
upright position. So I suck up a few ants, then the vacuum cleaner
falls over and impales my thigh. I curse, return the vacuum to its
unlocked upright position and repeat. Suck-ow-%$&*#.
Suck-ow-%$&*#. Suck-ow-%$&*#. Someday I hope to buy a new
vacuum cleaner exclusively for ants.

Eradicating ants in the utility room is exactly like being attacked by
zombies, except the zombies are very small, and the worst thing they
can do is walk on your crackers. As you know, when zombies attack, you
can kill several hundred of them with your automatic weapons and flame
throwers and stabby things, but additional zombies keep on coming as if
they hadn’t noticed. Ants are just like that. They really aren’t good
at pattern recognition. You can vacuum six hundred ants in a straight
line and yet ant 601 won’t see it coming. He’ll be all “Hey, why am I
suddenly in this bag full of dust? Carl, is that you?”

I get a perverse pleasure out of every ant that goes down the hose.
It would bother me if they screamed in pain or begged for their lives,
but they don’t, so it’s all good. Every time a new ant appears on the
cabinet door, I delight in sending him to dustbag heaven. Ahhh, good
times.

The only other household chore I enjoy as much as ant eradication is
cleaning the cat box. It’s like panning for gold, except the gold is
cat poop. That inconvenient fact doesn’t detract from the thrill of the
find as much as you’d think. There’s something in our basic DNA that
likes to find free stuff, even if the stuff is turds. Arguably, I paid
for the cat food, so the nuggets aren’t really free. But as long as
there’s some time lag between the paying and the prospecting, it’s
still a low grade thrill. (Its not entirely true actually - We have a rather clever litter box that you just have to turn around and then its clean, but we USED to have the old model)

What’s your favorite chore that shouldn’t be fun but is?