Pause

I have often remarked that I am first and foremost a problem-solver. If you have a problem, I’m ready to offer my thoughts and experience about what you might do to solve it. I’ve written before about this being problematic as the most well-intentioned solution can come out sounding like criticism. If that wasn’t bad enough, I also must make sure that my solution I’m so sure about is actually a good one.

And this brings me to the problem of chafer beetles. They seem to be attracted to a lip in my storm door, fall into it, can’t crawl or fly out, and then die. If there was a way to patent this as a dual-purpose storm door/natural bug trap, I would make thousands of dollars. I was getting tired of using a twig daily to flip the trapped beetles out of my storm door and then sweeping them off the porch, so I found a beetle trap that used a scented lure to encourage the beetles to check out a plastic bag and then trapped them in a similar fashion to my storm door by not permitting them to crawl or fly out. The good news was that within two days, I had no more beetles in my storm door. The bad news was that the plastic bag filled up so fast that I didn’t notice until it was almost overflowing with beetles. And according to the manufacturer’s instructions, the lure had to be reused on another plastic bag included in the kit. This meant that I had to unhook the bag from the tree, full of beetles almost to overflowing, detach the lure, and place the overflowing beetle bag inside another bag to put in the trash.

You can picture what was going to happen. While I was unhooking the bag, the beetles and other assorted bugs were flying around me, so there were a lot of screams on my end but none so loud as when I dropped the beetle bag and about 1/3 of the beetles poured out on the ground. Many were dead, but quite a few flew away, I presume, to my storm door.

I was reacting to the problem of the bag overflowing and trying to reuse the lure as the manufacturer intended. I didn’t pause to consider that I probably wouldn’t be able to unhook the lure with the bag that full, and I should have just pitched the whole thing. If I would have paused to think this through, I would have realized I needed to switch bags before it got so full by tying off the bag below the lure before attempting to unhook it.

I recently read that the word “pause” can be considered an acronym for “perhaps an unseen solution exists.” When there’s a problem, we may need to pause to think outside the box (or outside the manufacturer’s instructions) to come up with a better solution. Hopefully, it will be one that ends up with fewer beetles on the ground and a lot less screaming.