When you hear the old adage "Bad things happen to good people" you never expect it to apply to you. Oh that I had known what dreadful terrors lie in the shadows, waiting for us to cross the edge of light; perhaps I could have been spared the horror that befell me on a hazy Saturday morning.

* NOTE: Since I wrote this account, science has come up with an amazing way to kill Argentine ants: Chemical Cocktail Turns Argentine Ants Against Each Other

Just in time, too ... because computer-eating ants have now been sighted in Texas!

Our story begins in the living room, with me about to sit down to a hot bowl of minestrone. There wasn't anything good on the discovery channel, so I reached for the remote in the hopes of finding neat cartoons elsewhere. It was then that I noticed the line of ants marching across the living room.

We'd been having ant problems for a while and had laid traps around the house, but obviously the poisons weren't doing much good. Following the advice of an old chemistry professor, I picked up some Windex and resolved to exterminate the little fiends once and for all. The ammonia in Windex has the remarkable property of turning acidic ant blood into water without harming small pets and houseplants.

The ants seemed to congregate most heavily around the base of a cordless phone. I soaked the space around the base with Windex but this only seemed to bring out more ants. Soon I was killing them by the dozens, but the beasties just kept coming. I cleared the area, looking for a hole leading to the outside that I could plug perhaps ... instead I discovered a pile of ant maggots stacked directly under the phone base!

At this point it hit me that the ants were breeding inside the phone, and my small chemical assault was not enough to destroy the colony.

Armed with a vacuum cleaner in one hand and Windex in the other, I poisoned and suctioned ants for fifteen minutes. I chased after them like they were terrorists, but even the vacuum cleaner wasn't enough. I tried to unscrew the phone and vacuum inside, but the thing was completely full of ant caviar. It was truly sick. I was forced to pick up the phone and rush it to the kitchen. I ran cold water over the phone to rinse it off but the ants wouldn't stop coming.

I know you're not supposed to mix household cleaners, but I threw caution to the wind and filled the sink with bleach water, then left the phone to soak, but somehow the hive continued to operate unaffected; things were starting to get creepy. I thought perhaps the bleach water couldn't penetrate the natural waxes coating the insects' hides, so I added soap to the mix and this finally took care of the job. The hive was dead.

I read somewhere that a species of ants in South America has been known to eat the dark coating we use to protect the chips in our laptops. After fighting this mighty hive, my heart filled with chilly fear, what if these ants could do the same thing? I would have to inspect every square inch of that phone to make sure the queen was dead.

Picking apart the phone offered me some unexpected insight into the organization of the hive. The ants had turned each crevice of each phone part into a nursery; I found little corpes of ants frozen in various states of development. In the end, my forensic examination yielded only a few large, oddly shapped ants. These behemoths lacked wings and obvious ovopositors, none of them were likely to be the queen.

Perhaps you think it paranoid of me to fear the escape of the queen ... but Argentine ants are resilient little bastards. Even after the colony is destroyed, the workers can flee with some of the brood and move to another colony. With some luck they might even live to raise another queen. Fortunately ants and other wasp-like insects carry out their own versions of ethnic cleansing. While the exiled workers might find a new home in a distant hive, the larvae will probably end up in the belly of an alien ant.

Just to be on the safe side, I ziplocked some captives for future use. Amazingly, all but one of the big ants I caught came back to life. Also remarkable is the fact that the phone continued to work once I pieced it together, even though it had been left to soak in soapy bleach water for several hours.

What's really hard to believe is that a week later, the damn ant bastards came back again, and colonized the same damn phone a second time! To this day I'm still wasting time pluging holes and setting ant stakes to thwart the invasion ...