I’ve spent the last week smooshing, swatting, squishing, flattening, crushing, and obliterating every gnat I could find in my office. I took the two worst offending plants home, cooked one of the pots of dirt in my car for a few days, dumped most of the soil out, rinsed off the plants themselves, and brought everything back to work. Yes, there were still a few gnats about, but as I got things together and put down a layer of sand on the most tempting pots, I felt pretty confident about my successful annihilation.

Then I made that fateful mistake. I opened Pandora’s box (or in this case the bag of violet potting soil).

As I unzipped the ziplock-type closure on the bag of potting soil, a cloud of gnats shot up into my face and scattered to the four corners of the office. I shrieked! “CLOSE IT! CLOSE IT!” And I frantically tried to rezip the bag. A friend who was in the office practically jumped out of her chair, “What? What? You want me to close the door??”

“Noooooooo! Don’t trap us in here with them!!”

In the time it took me to reseal the bag and my friend to run out the door, all billionityeleven of the freed gnats were gone. Where are they? I’m a little frightened.

Also, I saw an albino fungus gnat. I called my friend over to see it. She’s all, “That is NOT an albino gnat. That is a piece of lint.” I think she’s just trying to reassure me that the gnats have not begun to mutate. This is a research facility after all. Who knows what sorts of wild gnats could have escaped from a lab to mate with my fungus gnats.