Please Read - For Your Sake

I’ve been traumatized. There’s no going back. I’ll never be the same Kelly that I was yesterday at 4 in the afternoon.

Let me share with you the events that unfolded, causing this irreparable damage to my psyche. I share this so that you won’t fall victim to the same ordeal.

Zoe’s mom got a job so to celebrate I told her I’d take her out to dinner. We were going to go at 6:30. I had a serious case of the nibbles (like the munchies but minus the drugs) so I stopped at Dominicks for some Ghardettos.

At home I opened the bag and began milling around my room, tidying up, moving the mess from one spot to the other before settling down on my bed with my spiffy new knitpicks needles and alpaca yarn, planning to start a shawl. I only got 4 rows in before I noticed a small bug on the tip of my finger. And another on the yarn coming from inside the ball.

Dear gods, the yarn is infested! Was my first thought, so I threw the yarn away from myself and did the heebie jeebie dance before calming down. I picked up the yarn again, the little bugs were gone, so I went inch by inch through the entire skein. No bugs. I figured maybe I’d seen the fuzzy halo of the yarn and jumped to conclusions. So I picked up my yarn and started again.

Again, only about 4 or 5 rows into the project I reached in to grab a Ghardetto. Now I’m not fond of those weird, stumpy little things with the sesame seeds, so I looked into the bag to pick around it. I grabbed a pretzel and pulled it out. That’s when it happened…

The pretzel was COVERED in tiny little reddish/brown ants. The entire bag was infested with bugs. I had EATEN that!!! Worse even then that, the bad was sitting on my pillow! I ran out of my room, grabbed a big Ziploc bag and shut the bag inside of it. My pillow was positively crawling with bugs. The floor where I’d set the bag while I was tidying up was swarming with these little ants. Within a few seconds there were hundreds of the little ants crawling out of the bag and along the plastic of their Ziploc prison.

I stripped my bed, threw everything into the washer, pulled out the vacuum and sucked the little buggers right to hell, then picked up my phone and dialed the 800 number on the back of the bag.

“Thank you for calling General Mills, how can I help you?”

“Yeah, I was just eating a bag of Ghardettos and it’s infested with bugs!”

“Ok ma’am, are they small reddish/brown ants?”

“… yeah…”

“That’s fairly common, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

Insert long, dull conversation where UPCs and date codes are exchanged.

“Well that bag was packaged fairly reciently, so it’s most likely a problem at the packaging plant, not at the grocery store. Can I get your address ma’am?”

So I gave her my address and she tells me again that they’re sorry and that they’ll mail me some coupons good for free food from their company. What in the hell makes her think I want to eat more bug infested food?

I’m still traumatized… I may never recover.

So if you’re a fan of Ghardettos…. May I suggest you give them up? Unless of course you enjoy eating bugs. Free protein I suppose…