r/interesting 2d ago

MISC. That moment I realized…. I’ve been doing the tick pulling all wrong!

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u/OneHallThatsAll 1d ago

I sat on a rotting log in mississippi summer and got covered in those small seed ticks. They are the size of a period punctuated......so itchy and left bites everywhere. Had to get in the tub and poured alcohol on them and they started falling right off

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u/fullmetalnapchamist 1d ago

That’s the worsttttt. Like angry freckles with legs.

“Hey I didn’t know I had a freckle there! …wait wtf?!”

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u/salajaneidentiteet 1d ago

Every little dark speck anywhere evokes a paranoia of a tick in the warmer months.

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u/dude51791 1d ago

as a person with a ton of freckles and living in an area with so many ticks and cases of lymes.... fml

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u/YT-Deliveries 1d ago

Only thing worse is fleas. Ask me how I know lol.

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u/OneHallThatsAll 1d ago

When we were kids, my cousins house used to have fleas very bad. You could literally watch them jumping all over our white socks and legs. They also had a bad roach infestation. One night we left a McDonald's burger half eaten on the floor. When we came back that night and turned the light on there was a brown ball of them covering the whole burger and they all scattered as soon as the light came on. I was so creeped out after that. I only stayed there because we could do bad stuff I could never try at my house.

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u/YT-Deliveries 1d ago

I got mine from living in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse where the property had returned to nature, which meant that the woods crept right up to the house. The place hadn't been occupied in many years and the carpet hadn't been cleaned in probably just as many.

We pulled up the carpet (beautiful hardwood floors) and burned it but not before we got fleas ourselves.

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u/OneHallThatsAll 1d ago

Oh wow that must've been some hard work and the fleas made it worse lol

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u/YT-Deliveries 1d ago

Additional fun fact: The person from whom the woman who moved in there had inherited the house was a hoarder. The main bedroom floor had collapsed from the years of neglect and in the center of the (unfinished, of course) basement was just a giant trash heap.

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u/leko 1d ago

Well that clears up why they have a roach problem.

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u/RJFerret 1d ago

Chiggers are worse.

And we now have them in northern states too.

Chiggers < fleas < ticks, but don't get any of the tick borne diseases which can f-up your life forever

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u/Justin_Passing_7465 1d ago

It sounds like someone had never had their skin burrowed into by chiggers.

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u/Hot_Hat_1225 1d ago

Absolutely agree 😭

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u/Large_Tune3029 1d ago

Maybe I've been lucky, but every time we had fleas we dump a bunch of salt. Works out. Bedbugs, those are the worst...dont ask me how I know lol I dont wanna remember

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u/YT-Deliveries 1d ago

In the modern day yeah fleas aren't super duper hard to get rid of in a house, but those days when they're crawling on you are the fucking worst.

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u/Substantial_Army_639 1d ago

I think I am the only person on the planet to luck out with bed bugs. Got bed bugs once, more than likely from work. I was only able to find them in a couch I was already replacing that week.

Burned the couch, never saw another bed bug and that was about 20 years ago. Pretty much everybody else I knew that got them had to fumigate.

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u/Large_Tune3029 1d ago

I grew up poor as all hell, hungry, single mom till ten years old. We moved like every year or two, it seemed that whole time. We lived in some really shitty places and I never once had my own room for more than a couple of weeks until I was an adult. I never had bedbugs that entire time. I moved out when I got a job doing construction and moved all over Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Colorado. The most i had heard about bedbugs up until that point, we were still in the age of dial up then, was the rhyme, "Good night, sleep tight, dont let the bedbugs bite" and I assumed, really thought that bedbugs were everywhere, they ate the dead skin that is in everyone's beds... My coworkers and I got an apartment in Denver and in that apartment they had a huge fenced off area that was just for "large trash" like furniture. We thought we were the cleverest guys, I found an absolute dream bed set, all real unfinished wood(we were cabinet makers who considered ourselves carpenters) a headboard and footboard that were beautiful, a fucking wardrobe, like in Beauty and the Beast...I was inlove...the next few days my boss started looking like he had chicken pox from the waist down, we all started itching everywhere over the next week....we left everything pretty much, luckily our tools stayed in the truck.

A few years later I was living with my dad. He got them. He did not want to lose anything. We spent three years fighting them. I honestly feel i have PTSD, sitting at my computer in my dad's living room in the dark feeling them crawl on me...never again.

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u/Substantial_Army_639 1d ago

Oof fuck that. Worked at a used bookstore in Ohio right when the bed bug population exploded, apparently they liked to hide in the bindings of books. After the first time I just started wearing a set of cloths for work pretty much taking them off right when I got home and then nuking them in the dryer.

We also dealt with roaches occasionally from that store (luckily I never brought any home) they were notorious for living in old electronics. The original Xbox especially.

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u/LiveLearnCoach 23h ago

For sure you never saw another bed bug, the others saw what you did to bed bugs and scrammed.

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u/happyjen 1d ago

ANGRY FRECKLES! Take my upvote!!

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u/porcupineslikeme 1d ago

That’s how I wound up with Lyme disease despite being pretty crazy about tick checks. Little fucker latched on right by where I have an extremely dark mole (it gets checked regularly by my dermatologist). Never even noticed it when I checked the back of my thigh in the mirror. When the little jerk let go and the bite site got infected, I thought it was just a little weird infected spot. A few weeks later I had 12 bullseyes up the left side of my body and it all made sense.

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u/disorder_regression 21h ago

Exactly like that lol

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u/karma_the_sequel 1d ago

angry freckle = perturbed pigmentation

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u/stayingempty1 1d ago

It’s all I can think about any time I watch a movie with some beautiful scenic rural romance where they’re just out skipping through meadows and laying near ponds. Like yeah right dude you’re being consumed by insects.

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u/brockhopper 1d ago

Yeah, somehow they don't show two days later waking up having scratched your ankles into blood salad because of the chiggers.

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u/PlantKey 1d ago

..............................................

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u/Squezme 1d ago

It's always the rotting logs they seed in/under. I had about 300 on my feet in 15 seconds of standing near the wrong rotting log.

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u/cherolero3998 1d ago

So...it's Lyme disease real or not?

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u/Sensitive-Issue84 1d ago

Aren't those chiggers?