Spider Engineers

While I was still young and naive, somewhere in the third grade - What can I say? I blossomed late. - and had the beginnings of one weird and rampant imagination, I thought excessively of what the internet was, is. Not that I new much about it, or indeed had even seen any of it. We had dial up connection and paid a fortune on the hour. All I did was hear and play the preschool games I came to love so dearly when I was in preschool. Often the two happened simultaneously. The playing and the hearing when I was too busy playing to actually imagine. But on the rare occasion when I heard while doing my homework (incorrectly), I let my mind fly away to happier places.

So one day while I was busy doing my math homework, multiplication I think, someone mentioned a website on the computer, might have been my father, might have been the uncle who never visited, whatever. And WHAZZAM. My unsteady head flew to websites, or rather web-sites. Figuratively, of course. I thought of webs, nasty white pieces of string featured in a wonderfully gruesome illustration somewhere in between the covers of my environmental sciences text book. Then I thought of spiders, nasty creatures who somehow found immense pleasure in hanging themselves vertically on a thoroughly complicated array of strings that they manufactured out of things that came out of their bottom, while covered in things that came out of their bottom. Then I remember shuddering at the thought of being covered in things that came out of my bottom. Then I went to the toilet, where I continued my line of thought. Sites, I had learned in school that they build buildings on sites and judging by my IQ at the time, I probably also thought that engineers build buildings. Because I found a deep correlation between engineers and sites. I flushed.

I therefore concluded that spiders were planning on building a web, for which my computer monitor would be the site. I was horrified. Not so much of the fact that there were spiders in proximity, but of the idea that they were engineers too! Engineers are poisonous right? And spiders are smart?? Or something like that. So I scoured the house for Spider Engineers, or as I had coined them in a brief moment of personal victory, Spingeneers. But there were none to be found.

Strangely disappointed, I washed my hands.