James's Weblog

I thought I was out of stupid Sony stories, but my former coworker Kevin was surprised that I hadn’t mentioned anything about the spiders.

What Japanese company wouldn’t have a special and conveniently accessible smoking area? The Sony building in San José has a fairly large atrium for such a purpose, complete with benches, trees, hedges, and a weird modern art sculpture. It also was infested with grasshoppers.

For some reason, birds within the atrium were rather rare. Maybe they didn’t want to be boxed in; maybe they were afraid of the humans who were constantly loitering around there; maybe they just didn’t want to get lung cancer. For whatever reason, birds ignored this plentiful food source, and the grasshoppers thrived.

The atrium also had a population of garden spiders. (A western spotted orb weaver, I think.) They were fairly large (not including their legs, they were about the size of a quarter), and they constructed gorgeous and expansive webs.

Every summer, these spiders emerged, fully mature, seemingly from nowhere. Every day of every summer, I tried to capture grasshoppers to place into the spiders’ webs.

Feeding the spiders was one of the few things that made my days at Sony enjoyable. Every fall I was sad when the spiders disappeared.

I guess I’m a sadist.