on occasion, i browse the clearance racks at overpriced hipster-y boutiques cause from time to time you can find amazing deals, but being in Rich People Places always makes me a little nervous– and today when i was picking up a layaway from one of these shops, my nerves resulted in a story the shopkeepers are probably gonna be telling for quite a while.
i’d just come from the feed store for lizard food (ie: bugs), and it was like 95F out so they were slowly being smothered to death in my backpack. so when the clerk, who i’d overheard was only on her second day working there, gave me my fancy sundress in a bag way too big for it, i pulled out two dozen crickets in a plastic bag and a tub full of mealworms from my pack and set them gently on the bag so they could breathe better till i got home.
this girl’s eyes go wide and she looks imploringly back at the equally startled-looking manager helping her through the transaction, and i realize that this might look a little weird to folks who aren’t reptile keepers. so, instead of doing the logical thing and explaining that i’m feeding leopard geckos, i sorta chuckled and shrugged apologetically, and just said “dinner, y’know?”
for the briefest of moments, there was an awkward silence so sweaty and suffocating you could drown in it, and then, in true daytime comedy fashion,
the fucking crickets started chirping.
so i guess i’m never going back there ever again.
This is gold.
We once kept a pet lizard who ate live crickets or locusts at different points of her life. The only issue is that I am from a tiny Scottish island so we had to order them in by mail.
When we went away on holiday our neighbours would collect the locusts for us and feed our lizard.
So we’re away for Christmas and at the time we were ordering locusts from a shop on ebay. We get a phone call from said neighbour who tells us that instead of 500 locusts we have received 5000 crickets. Said crickets have eaten their way out of the plastic sack and have escaped into our kitchen.
Through some kind of monumental effort our neighbour and her son manage to seal the bag and recapture the crickets. They call us and we decide the best thing to do is return to sender. Our lizard got picky and would no longer eat crickets at this stage of her life so they were useless to us.
Next day or so we get another phone call. Apparently these crickets had once again eaten their way out of their confines. This time they escaped from the post van to descend like some kind of biblical plague on our local airport. They had to close while an exterminator was contacted.
My father calls the airport to apologise. However, at the time he was the editor of the local newspaper. Also, the airport did not know that the crickets were ours. So their reaction was to say “oh no please don’t print this story”. He explained the situation and did not put it in the paper.
i regret this post every day of my life but your addition makes it worth it
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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