When to Overreact

Sometimes people just have totally inappropriate reactions to things that happen to them. Mostly you read about excessive acts of revenge or overreactions. Like killing someone over Facebook comments. That’s an overreaction. So is dealing with a bad breakup by driving a car through your ex’s house. We’re all entitled to emotional reactions but murder and enough car and property damage to put two insurance companies out of business are at the very least out of proportion with the events that triggered them. As well as being really illegal. Sometimes you just can’t help it and you get a bit emotionally charged and not entirely rational. The day you’re late for work because you had to peel two miles of frozen wet wads of toilet paper off of your car and the tree next to it is the day you start believing in capital punishment.

Less commonly, you hear about people who have the most surprisingly relaxed reactions to things for which it would kind of be totally understandable to retaliate by shooting someone. Sometimes you can explain it by the relief being greater than the annoyance and frustration. Other times an underreaction is just as unbelievable as an overreaction.

For example, waking up to find your dog barking like crazy because there’s a crocodile in the house. Any reaction you decide to have to this would be completely appropriate. In a situation like that there is no overreaction. But you can still have a totally inappropriate one, as was the case in Darwin, Australia when one couple woke in the middle of the night to find a five and a half foot salt-water crocodile in the middle of their living room. And it was pissed off.

I understand getting bugs in the house. Small rodents. The occasional bird. If you’re unlucky enough you might have a squirrel or raccoon problem. Those things get into houses all the time because they’re nimble and sneaky or at least fast enough to get inside when you go to let the cat in.

Crocodiles are not something you really think of in this capacity. They can’t open doors or climb through windows and they’re not small enough to fit through holes in the insulation or dog-doors, so finding one in the house isn’t something you can really prepare yourself for. Not that this really matters when you come downstairs and there’s a fucking crocodile under the coffee table and it’s hissing mad at you.

Whatever you do in response to this situation would be acceptable.

For some reason, this Australian couple decided the best reaction would be for the husband to fend it off by hitting it with his guitar while the woman called the crocodile removal people.

First of all, the urgency of the situation allows you to turn whatever is handy into a weapon. I just don’t think a guitar is the best choice and it might be a good idea to spend a few seconds looking for something else. If for no other reason than because getting close enough to hit a crocodile with a guitar would also put you close enough to find yourself on the business end of a very nasty bite.

Secondly, apparently finding crocodiles in places they have no business being is a common enough occurrence in Darwin that they have a specific group dedicated to dealing with it. She didn’t call animal control. She didn’t call the ‘unwanted and inconvenient intrusion of wildlife’ people. Not even ‘dangerous animal incursion’ people. She called the Crocodile Removal Unit whose job it is to remove crocodiles. Such an organization would probably not exist were it not for some level of necessity. Who knows, maybe a crocodile infestation is the Australian equivalent of an ant infestation or something.

So right away we have the unexpected presence of a crocodile in the house, the inappropriate choice of defense weapon, and the mindfuck inherent in there needing to be crocodile disposal people in Darwin. Already we’re dealing with a Salvador Dali level of the surreal. And then you have this lovely quotation from the news interview with the woman in question, which is the only opinion there seems to be of the whole business:

“It is pretty full-on.”

You would be justified wanting to flee the country if this happened to you. Maybe seeking a less reptile-intensive environment, like Siberia. Instead it’s described as ‘full-on’ and nothing more. In American it’s the same as saying it was ‘a little much’. I don’t know anyone who could keep that calm about an unwanted moth in the house. A power outage is ‘a bit full-on’. A major appliance breakdown is ‘a bit full-on’. The presence of a large deadly reptile in a bad mood is a problem.

And yet no one involved seems to be at all concerned about this. That it attracted enough attention to be newsworthy means it’s at least a little unusual, but doesn’t appear to be attracting any more attention than local news would pay to a shoplifter.

If there’s ever a situation that causes Australians to panic, I suspect the rest of the world will be totally fucked.