I defeat the fly

It was Friday evening, I was alone in the office, and my mind was already slipping into weekend mode... but there was one thing I needed to do before leaving work: I had to kill a fucking fly. This was a big, fat bluebottle fly—a type I don't often see in Seoul. The flies I normally see here remind me of "picnic flies" I see back home: tiny and quick, but not very tough. This fly, though, was loud, bulky, and disconcertingly fast. It buzzed in through my office's open door, then it wouldn't leave despite the door's still being wide open.

I have a bottle of Windex that I keep for mosquitoes. With the Korean F-Killer brand of bug spray having dropped its strong formula in favor of a much weaker, much less effective formula years back, I switched to Windex because the ammonia packs a punch and drops mosquitoes instantly—if you score a direct hit. I was pretty sure that Windex would work on flies, even the tough ones. It was time to close the office door and begin the hunt.

Mosquitoes are a lot easier to target with a spray than flies are, and this fly was energetic, spending at least 95% of its time in the air and landing only for a second or two. It also flew erratically, and though I tried following it with my eyes, the fly always managed to dodge suddenly and leave my line of sight, obliging me to reacquire it via sound. Spray in hand, I first adopted the strategy of Don't shoot until you have a target. This proved not to be a winning plan, though, so I got the idea of standing in the middle of the room (our corner room is pretty small) and spraying around myself in a circle, creating a toroidal nimbus of death.

That second approach was more effective. Because the fly was so erratic, it inevitably flew through part of the Windex cloud before the cloud had a chance to sink to the floor: I was using the fly's own speed and flight pattern against it. Many winged insects, when they fly through an aerosolized cloud, will inevitably land and buzz their wings as a way to shake the liquid droplets off themselves. If the liquid is Windex, then there's a good chance that the spray will begin to work its evil magic on the insect, making the bug all the slower. Sure enough, that's what happened in my case: as I listened for the fly, I began to hear pauses in the buzzing, indicating that the fly was landing and trying to perform a wing-shake even as it was being slowly poisoned by the ammonia.

I sprayed a couple more circle-clouds of Windex around myself (the office was smelling pretty strongly of Windex at this point), and the fly began flying more slowly, making it easier to track. I switched attack modes then, following the fly around the office and blasting it whenever I had proper target acquisition. By this point, I knew I'd already won; it was just a matter of finishing the fly off. The insect jiggered and went out of sight for a second, but I heard it: it had landed in a familiar place—one of my pans, which I store in a corner of my work station (I occasionally cook my own lunch in the office). I looked into the pan, and there the fly was, looking a bit dazed and trying to shake the Windex off its sodden wings. With no mercy at all, I pointed my spray at the fly and blasted it four times, forcing it to walk around inside a pool of Windex. 

And that was pretty much it. The fly was as good as dead, and even though it was still moving around feebly, I tugged out a Kleenex from my desk and grabbed the fly with it, being sure to crush the insect with my fingertips. I used the clean parts of the Kleenex to wipe the Windex out of the pan, then I balled up the tissue and threw it and the fly into the garbage. Job done.

Because that fly had been so big, so fast, and so obnoxiously loud, this felt like a moral victory, and it's yet another reason I could never be a Buddhist.