Every Sunday I take my youngest son to the local pet shop to buy food for his snakes. Over the past year we have gotten to know the shop assistant and he is always keen and eager to help us. We make a little trip of it and myself and my sons walk around looking at all the animals on display before we head off into the reptiles section.
On this one particular morning it was very quiet in the pet shop and not all the animals had been brought out for sale, so we headed off to the reptile section. Paul was happy to see us as usual. We were looking and talking about this snake and that dragon while we were still making our way around to the spider section. At this point I noticed that Paul eager as ever had already headed over to the spider section, all happy and excited he tells us to come look at this very rare pink sock tarantula. Ok! so how bad can this be!! We walk over, Paul turns around and on his hand is this furry hand size tarantula, looking at us!!!! You know they have eight eyes!!! So this tarantula could see us very very clearly!!! No glasses needed!! He can see us perfectly fine however, Paul on the other hand, feels we should squint our eyes and come in closer, so we can see the pink socks and points at the tip toes of the tarantula’s very hairy legs. Ja foken nee!!!, and as doff as this may sound, like the children that followed the pied piper we move in closer to see!!! Not the cleverest move I must say!!
At this point the hand sized pink socked tarantula, with its eight eyes, decided that it is time to launch into the air, maybe she needed a little space!!!!! Paul, the idiot, of cause forgot to mention that tarantula’s are jumpers.
Well people it was absolute chaos!!! All three of us screamed at the same time!! And we are loud!!! All three of us jumped at the same time each trying to push the other out of the way so as not to block the route to the exit, each pushing and shoving and doing a freaky dance, and while all this is going on the fucken hand sized pink sock tarantula is still jumping and it can jump dam high!!! At one stage I thought of stomping the pink sock tarantula, but at a price tag of R1500 this kinda stopped me!!!
In all this drama I glance over to see what the hell Paul was doing, seeing he was the cause of my sudden heart rate elevation and he was on his hands and knees trying to catch the bloody pink sock tarantula.
Needless to say we made it past the counter and exit in 5 seconds, but it felt like forever, and no one got hurt, the pink sock tarantula got caught by Paul and put back in its glass cage and we buggered off shaken but not stirred, cause we would be back next week to buy my sons snake food. I had to look on the internet at a picture of this tarantula to see the pink socks and may I just add you would have needed a magnified glass to see the socks.
