Two years ago I wrote a post called Check The Ceiling For Spiders, after a spider dropped in front of my wife's face one evening while she was sitting in my office talking to me. At the time I talked about making sure you check things to protect your business and workplace against those little things that suddenly pop up and cause havoc whenever you can.

Last night, sitting at my desk in the proverbial dark, I had it happen to me. Suddenly something was dangling in front of my face, and I knew it wasn't something that flew. I blew at it and it swayed, and I knew it was a spider. I jumped up and went to quickly turn on the light, but by that time the spider was gone; freaked me out, as I hate all bugs, and spiders are near the top of the list.

It reminded me of my previous post, and also reminded me of a couple other things. One, after the first incident with my wife, I've become a regular ceiling checker no matter where I go. I already always check walls and corners, especially in bathrooms because, for some reason, spiders like damp places. I'm usually pretty vigilant at it, and I'm almost never surprised.

However, last night proved that what I also needed to do was remind myself that I need to put things into place to assist my trying to eliminate spiders from shocking me. For instance, I usually have a little bit of light on so that when I look up at the ceiling, I can see everything I need to see. It's not all that bright, but I can tell if something is up there. Last night I'd turned the light off; bad move on my part, and you can bet it won't happen again.

That's the next part about checking for spiders in your business. It's not good enough to try to check every once in awhile for those spiders; you also need to put something into practice to help you look for them, or keep them at bay. For instance, if you're running a business or department where information is constantly changing, you need to set up a process where you know that people are getting fed that information on a very consistent basis, as well as a way to verify that your employees actually know the information.

As for me, you can bet that with the second spider invasion (actually, twice in 10 years of being in the house sounds a lot better than twice in 18 months) I'll be checking the ceilings way more often. There's something out there that questions if all of us end up swallowing spiders in our sleep throughout our lifetime; I don't know if it's an old wives tale or not, but in business, one can't afford to pull the covers over one's head like I do when I head to bed. 🙂