It seems like I never get visitors at my desk. I used to get hot guys (okay they had issues, but eye candy people… work with me!) and people I knew (yes issues but some were going to the medical assistance place, you know, alcoholics that don’t get caught). I guess I get a few, the odd gardener with his leaves or a farmer with some branch the size of my car. And the people with the bugs. People bring bugs and they want to know what they are. I do not want to know what they are. Living creatures, yada-yada-yada I want them away from me and my general area so I don’t start having phantom itching and the creepy crawlies. But certainly these people never match the psychosis I saw at the votex… until last week a lady came in (I think she escaped the mental ward under the vortex… really) with a vile of “bugs”. It was one of the little glass tubes that your mom used to get samples of perfume in from the Avon lady. She had her “bugs” in alcohol. That would be bad if there were, in fact, bugs in there in the first place but became a big bone of contention when she was trying to show us the “bugs”. She said they were all over the floor of her car and biting her to the point she was drawing blood she was scratching so much (“do you want to see?”, “no thank you, we have the idea”). This was not some sweet little old lady with dementia either, she was loud and angry because the environmental health department wouldn’t help her and sent her to us.
So I used the tactics I learned at the vortex for dealing with difficult people and told her we’d be happy to have one of our gardening experts take a look under the microscope and let her know what they found. (nothing!) “No!” This wasn’t good enough. She wanted to know “now damnit” and we were going to help her this is what we’re here for and if we don’t she was going to public heath and sit there until someone told her what the hell was eating her skin. By now the department across the lobby is staring and one of the farm geeks (the wino, that likes bugs) wander out to check on us. He calmly asked how he could help her and we got to hear it all over again. All the while watching her itch and scratch and getting that phantom feeling. He calmly took her “bugs” back to the lab and looked at them under the microscope – really. He found nothing but one teeeeny dirt particle. By now she’s pacing and pissed and muttering about mites and chiggers, itching and scratching, going on and on about how we just don’t want to admit we have them. So he tells her that whatever she may have caught, he can’t find. It’s just not visible except one small particle. She went frickin ballistic! Asked him if he wanted to pull up his pants and sit in her car. See how he likes his goddamn feet getting eaten. This went on for a while. Finally she storms out the door at which point we look at him and he just says “new sample”. Apparently “the alcohol in the vile must have disintegrated the damn things, Even though that’s what you people told me to do”.
She brings back the big cloth gauzy thing and we all freak out because she made comments about the doctor. She proceeds to scrape some of the “bugs” into a new sample jar. He labels them and assures her that the lab will contact her with the results of their findings. He will send them the next day. She is calm now and thanks him and leaves. We still can’t see anything. But none the less, he’s gonna pass the buck, I mean, send them along for analysis… to the university entomology lab… with an email outlining the situation in advance. He’s sure they’ll make up some invisible bug with a name that only means something funny to them. Yay, farm geek. You get to handle the crazy people from here on out.
So this afternoon the farm geek walked past my desk when I happened the be rubbing my arm, as if it itched. He asked me if I was itchy from the invisi-chiggamites? I calmly replied (while scratching my head) no, I’d gone to the doctor for better drugs so I can come back with a new psychosis…
