Furniture that bites

If you want to avoid infesting your living space, then never accept used furniture or office equipment. Because those things often come with pests. 

For instance, did you know that furniture can get fleas, just like pets?

I didn’t, until a hippie neighbor shooed a family of cats off her couch and pushed it into my apartment as she was packing to leave for San Francisco.

 

At first I thought, “Score!” But then I kept getting bit when I sat in it, like the couch had some ghost who pinched me every few seconds. The possibility that there could be blood-suckers in the fabric didn’t cross my mind at first.

 

But as I scratched away at the bites on my legs while watching the hippie’s cats outside, scratching themselves egregiously too, it was then that I realized I was infested.

That’s right — I finally figured out that I had fleas. Luckily they’re relatively easy to get rid of. I threw out the couch and got lots of flea powder to spread liberally around my apartment.

My boyfriend at the time didn’t fare as well as I, as he had a habit of sitting on furniture naked. I think he learned a valuable lesson, too.

Also, never take office chairs from a downtown basement. I tried rescuing a nice, benign-looking upholstered little number once. 

Although it was a little rickety, and the seat was a little speckled in filth, I just covered the chair with a large piece of fabric once I got it home, and everything seemed okay. 

Then a week or so later, I began to notice the red welts on my arms and legs.

 

They itched. I knew it wasn’t from fleas, though. My husband was all, “Maybe you’re allergic to the internet!” But then he started getting welts on his skin when he sat in it, too.

 

And after about the fourth time I jumped off of it, yelling and clawing at myself, we dumped that chair outside where nobody could rescue it ever again, and then we did some online research.

 

We found out we had scabies. Yup, these are better than fleas, because they’re microscopic… and they live and breed in your body, right under your skin! Which is pretty bad-ass of scabies, except they’re not as cute as fleas, when you look at both up close.

 

It took a lot of vinegar soaks to stop our skin from crawling after that. So there you have it. Never accept used furniture and then you will probably live a life free of fleas and scabies. 

That way, the only bloodsucker left in your apartment building that you’ll probably want to avoid will be your landlord.