Ants raiding laptop keep on buggin'.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

I opened my laptop computer at home recently and there it was: an ant wiggling up through the `W' and the `E' keys.

It scaled "D,' slalomed its way up and over "C" and, as I watched in amazement, paraded down the spacebar with all the arrogance of that Oregon State cheerleader flaunting the chancellor's basketball trophy before being tripped by ex-Duck Coach Dick Harter back in 1974.

Before I could smite it, the ant zipped into the crevice between "Enter" and "Home" - and was gone.

I'd just been taunted, I realized, by an actual computer bug. And yet, flipping up the keyboard on my Apple iBook, I was stunned to find he wasn't working alone.

Like Indiana Jones first seeing the Temple of Doom, I found myself staring at a mini colony of ants, scurrying around in the recesses of my laptop.

It's bad enough that Oregon's summerlike winter has me waking to day after day of pathetically blue skies. And has my lawn growing two months before an Oregon lawn should be allowed to grow. Now, the mild winter has turned our 67-year-old house into some sort of destination ant resort, and apparently raised an ant-sized marquee over the iBook Inn that says: "Kids stay free."

I do have company, I found.

"In the last week or two, I heard about a guy with an iBook who had ants, too," says Paul Thomas of Eugene-based Computer House Calls. "I've never seen ants in a computer. I've seen a dead mouse, though; he definitely got the worst of it. He was fried."

A quick search on the Web turned up photos of a hornet's nest inside a PC, another fried mouse and, yep, ants.

"Doesn't sound strange to me at all," says Jeremy Brown of Eugene-based Bye-Bye Pest, whose specialty is ants. "These are `sugar' ants - the proper name is 'odorous house ants' - and they are often attracted to electrical devices."

Michael Downing, service manager at the Eugene Mac Store, says it's probably the warmth of the computer that's drawing them into my iBook.

"I don't find that strange at all," he says. "But, then, I've seen an old iMac whose user smoked so much that the tar and nicotine inside the computer had shorted the logic board."

So who are these iBook ants and what do they want from me?

I'm not naive enough to believe they're just a bunch of six-legged insects who randomly chose my iBook's motherboard for warmth. Nor are these your typical picnic ants, trying to spoil something. They are not, in keyboard talk, simply trying to be a pain in the asterisk.

They want something involving me and my iBook. But what?

Attention? Perhaps. I've written about tarantulas, lazy cats and freeze-dried dogs, but never ants.

Money? I haven't figured my Internet worth lately, but it isn't enough for an ant to risk its two-month life for.

Revenge? Sure, I've squashed, squished, sprayed, flushed, wiped, burned and - when found basking on the plastic covering of my chicken fettuccine - zapped a few ants in my day. (They're amazingly resilient in microwaves.) But I did so only when I felt, like Jodie Foster in "Panic Room," our household was truly in danger.

All I know is these ants are smart. It didn't escape me that the colony's scout - or was he sent topside as "bait'? - exited my keyboard between "Enter" and "Home." Coincidence? Sure, and I suppose it's just a quirk of fate that my computer has been sluggish lately.

Are they trying to get into the Internet? Onto the Web? Or, worse, trying to get into that vast region of cranial nothingness - my head?

I couldn't wait for answers. I passed on my first instinct, which probably would have led to your reading a column about my microprocessor chip having been sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Suffice it to say I deleted the critters.

No time to celebrate, however. A little later I was typing away when an ant surfaced - was that a smirk on its face? - near, of course, the "Return" key.