Flies and such

Dear Hank,

Re: Flies and such

September 18, 2011

In the original Unix operating system they had little pithy sayings called “message of the day” or in geek-speak “motd.” One of them was “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas.”

Get it? No? Then you’ve never been attacked by a swarm of time flies obviously, similar to Hawkins time blackberries but different. Never mind, I digress.

Last evening a fly kept landing on me. It was a common ordinary housefly. It would land and take off. I could feel it. Sometimes I saw it and tried to swat it. I tried the direct slap approach, the grab just above it and watch it fly into my hand approach. Nothing worked. Then that night it kept up it’s assault. I decided to get out my latest weapon in the war on flying bugs, the electric flyswatter.

The idea is simple. It’s a miniature tennis style racket with strings of wire running horizontally in parallel to each other, load in two double A batteries and press the switch and the wires are turned into “wires of electric death” (my term not the company that made the device.) One swat, one contact and zizzz – he (or she) is dead. How cool is that?

The sheet that comes with this new fangled bug zapper warns you that this is not a toy and children should not be given it. I picture an episode of the Simpsons where they run around swatting each other and leaving red stripe parallel burn marks on each other. Or I can see trying to swat the fly and hitting myself, or my computer and shorting it out.

It turns out trying to have the swatter ready to go and seeing the fly is much harder than you would think. It reminds me of a scam ad I heard about as a boy: “kills insects on contact!” It was a block of wood and a mallet. Hold the insect on the block of wood and smash it with the mallet – simple. With my electronic swatter I end up “woofing” the air. The fly is still at large. But I haven’t put any burns marks on myself, or those around me, and I haven’t shorted out my computer. For all that I am thankful.

Gotta go, a fly is calling.

B