All I wanted was to get my map of the Kingdom of Albareth from the box in the shed. I couldn’t find it – I don’t know if it’s even around any more. What I did find was ants. Lots of ants.
The back shed has for a long time been bad for ants. Over the years they have made nests in the wardrobe, the freezer, the fridge and I knew they were around on the shelves but I thought they were in the cutlery box. Turns out they were in my box of old software.
I’d put all my old C64, Amiga and PC software in the box that my first 3D printer came in, so it was a box in a box. I had to shift some timber to get at the box and as soon as I moved it I knew there was going to be trouble.
I took it down and put it on the ground outside and opened it up.
Ants!! All of the ants.
Now, it was getting late and starting to drizzle so here I was with a box full of ants and it’s raining on my software which is in cardboard boxes. Not ideal. I started pulling out boxes and spraying the ants which only had the effect of making all the ants stick to the boxes. After about half an hour, an hour maybe, I’d pulled all the the software packages out of the box and sat them in available spots on the shed floor. Then I took the box up to the house, pulled out the structural box from the packaging box and even more ants happened.
At this point I ran out of spray and had to find another can. So, more spraying later and I managed to clear my Times of Lore box and my Ultima V box of all the ants and took those packages inside.
The next morning I set to getting rid of all the other ants. It was awful. They had creches hidden away between boxes, inside the folded sections of boxes, in manuals and brochures. I intuited that my PageMaker box was going to be bad and, yes, it was seething. I managed to clean it up mostly but the worst bit was one book that I cleaned up and them more ants kept appearing. They had made a creche in the spine of the book. I blew into the spine and hundreds of ants and eggs spewed out. I ended up throwing the book out it was that bad.
Final Copy was seething.
Then there was my AmigaDos box. It’s made of corrugated cardboard. Guess where the ants had decided to live. Inside the corrugations. I still can’t be sure I’ve cleared them out. Just to be on the safe side I folded a couple of the boxes back into shape and threw them in the microwave. Sure enough I found a dozen or so new dead ants and a few running around inside the oven after cooking them for a minute.
Then there was my Black Crypt box. I cleaned it out okay but then put the disks on the bench where I have a tin of petro waste that has wicked out on a rag and spread out all over the bench, which I didn’t notice, so that the disks ended up covered in liquid oily ooze. I tried disassembling one of the disks but it was thoroughly saturated and the plastic split immediately. I am still blaming the ants for that. Also, the magnetic disc immediately separated from the metal hub, so after all these years maybe all of the 3 1/2″ disks are compromised. Perhaps that was due to the chemical action of the petro waste.
I ended up throwing out the 3D printer box because the ants had creches in the crannies of the structural box – it was made with hex cell cardboard and cardboard angle.
Once I’d eradicated most of the ants I took everything into the lounge room and scrubbed it with damp cloths. Brushing off the eggs had left smears of egg stuff and I guess there may have been an amount of ant exudate, frass, whatever. The boxes and manual covers mostly came out alright but I couldn’t apply moisture to the inside pages of course.
I’ve put back most of the boxes together again and will now clear a space on the shelves in the study for them, which is probably where they should have been anyway. I still have the AmigaDos box outside and the Demon Stalkers cover. I have one final job to do. I noticed some ants appearing from my VIC-1520 printer. I left that outside and opened it up to make sure there were no surprises. Only a couple of ants but what was surprising was how simple the printer is. It only has one large chip and the rest is support electronics.
When all was done I swept up drifts of ants from the concrete outside the back door. All in all an unpleasant and frustrating experience. At least the ants didn’t actually chew any of the paper but their presence has caused a good deal of damage to my meagre collection of software.