I'm sure we've all had an online shopping mishap; it's practically a rite of passage for the internet age. For most people though, it's a piece of clothing that's outrageously large or a home-ware that's laughably small. Not for Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham, whose online shopping misadventure ended in his house full of live crickets.

Ingraham's family adopted a bearded dragon for Christmas this year. The lizard is named Holly, and her hobbies include eating, a lot! As well as eating vegetables and mealworms, Holly eats a lot of crickets. Which led Ingraham to make the decision to purchase crickets in bulk online, but, all did not go as planned.

Luckily for us, Ingraham decided to share the hilarity on his Twitter account

So, a shipment of crickets for the lizard arrived via FedEx today. It was my first time ordering bulk crickets off the internet, and I naively assumed that they would be in like, a bag or some other contraption to facilitate easy transfer to another container. They were not.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Considering we live in an age where even fruit can come wrapped in plastic, it is a fairy reasonable assumption that live crickets would be securely wrapped too!

"I cut open the tape and opened the cardboard flaps and was greeted by dozens of beady little cricket eyes staring eagerly up at me. I had a brief vision of the aliens-in-the-claw machine from “Toy Story” before the crickets started doing what they usually do when they are suddenly exposed to light — hopping all over the place. I quickly closed the flaps."

They were in a cardboard box. And I cut the tape and opened the box and SURPRISE! Crickets everywhere. It was the middle of the workday and I didn't have time to deal with cricket logistics, so I put the tape back on the box.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Seems like the best option to me!

And then I put the box in the upstairs bathroom, the only semi-contained place in the house where I knew the kids and the cats and the dogs wouldn't be able to get at the box and tear it open and unleash 250 hungry crickets into our warm, semi-humid environment.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Deny! Deny! Deny!

About 20 minutes later I'm back at work on my computer, and I hear my wife in the kitchen: "where are these goddamn crickets coming from." I freely admit I had not kept her fully up-to-date on my cricket purchasing plans.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Just keeping calm...

And at first I was like "okay, maybe one or two got out when I initially opened the box. No biggie." I kept working.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

You know what they say... hindsight is always 20/20!

With the benefit of hindsight, this was a mistake.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

"Eventually"

I'm trying to wrap up a story but I keep hearing cricket-related exclamations coming from the kitchen. Eventually I get up to investigate. I say, "So uh the crickets got here toda--"
"I REALIZE THAT," she says. "WHY ARE THEY ALL OVER THE KITCHEN"

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

An excellent question.

One I, myself, would be asking if in a similar situation.

I say "That's a good question. Let me check something." I walk over to the bathroom. I open the door. There are crickets. Everywhere.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Just move out, the house is theirs now.

Crickets on the floor. Crickets on the walls. Crickets in the sink. Crickets in the toilet.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

There isn't much a cheery attitude can't solve!

For some reason my first instinct is to flush the toilet, as if that will do anything to solve the problem of crickets in all the other places that were not the toilet. I shut the door. "Uh, don't come in here!" I try to sound cheerful.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

There is a lesson to be learnt here: always seal your cricket box securely.

Apparently I had not sealed the box shut as well as I should have. I ended up rushing out to the shed, in the 18" of snow and below zero temperatures, to pick up a spare aquarium we had. I spent about 45 minutes collecting crickets from the bathroom.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Any chance of getting a video of the cats helping out?

"Briana later told me that she first realized something was terribly wrong when one of the cats suddenly leaped on to a pumpkin pie that had been warming on the counter top. It was going after an unusually large cricket that was munching the filling."

Of course by this point many had migrated elsewhere. They were in the closet. In the shoes. Making their way downstairs to the playroom. The cats were having what I can only imagine was the greatest day of their lives.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Absolutely would NOT play this game of Pokemon.

I tried to collect all of them. It was like the world's shittiest game of Pokemon. But here we are, roughly 10 hours after the initial catastrophe, and stray crickets are still turning up in odd places.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

Reasonable

I make this information public because if I do not send any tweets tomorrow, it is because my wife murdered me after finding a cricket in our bed in the middle of the night.

And that's the news from Red Lake Falls.

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018

With the worst of the crisis over: Ingraham posted an update the next day!

You can read a full account of the cricket crisis here.

To all you monsters who demanded photos of the infestation: believe it or not, while a horde of crickets was marauding through my house I did not think to whip out my phone and start snapping pics

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018