SPIDER DAY: GOV'T EMPLOYEES GET OFF WORK

   In a predicament that would surely elicit sympathy from Little Miss Muffet, 50 federal government employees were frightened away from their Ottawa office building not once, but twice, after someone spotted a potentially dangerous spider.

Without waiting for the spider to be identified, which came later that same day, managers again decided to send employees home for two days while the building was fumigated and its ducts cleaned — this time costing taxpayers $18,000.
   Catherine Scott, an arachnologist and PhD student at the University of Toronto, said the evacuations were a massive overreaction.
   "This is totally absurd and a giant waste of money," she said. "Fumigating the office with chemicals is probably more dangerous to the people working in that office than a spider would have been, even if it had been a brown recluse spider."