Watch This Canadian Meteorologist Freak Out Over A Spider

Canadian meteorologist Kristi Gordon was going about the business of presenting the weather earlier this week when a spider crawled onto the camera. Given how far the equipment was away, it wouldn’t have caused a problem for most, but since she’s a weather girl and she has to constantly look at the image of herself and the screen projected behind her for pointing purposes, she quickly noticed the creepy crawler. Even worse, because of magnification, the arachnid looked absolutely gigantic and like it was dangling just over her head. Not surprisingly, she freaked out.

Most people who are live on the air have an internal desire to immediately try to regain composure and press on, but Kristi was so blindsided by the spider’s appearance that she actually walked off stage for a minute, leading to some good-natured taunts and comments from the peanut gallery by her co-workers who asked if they should swoop in and read off the temperatures for her.

Gordon’s bosses over at Global BC Television haven’t said whether the event was an intentional prank or not, but considering all that’s happened before, I’m pretty sure it was. In fact, the powers that be at the station have freaked her out using menacing background pictures during her forecast before. Check out this montage of Kristi being thrown off her game…

The line between having the right amount of fun and being unprofessional is often very blurry. Some viewers like when there’s quite a bit of anchor banter and others even like when the broadcast goes south. A good percentage of viewers, however, prefer a nice, clean broadcast that reports the local news, the weather and the sports without any nonsense, and the more stuff like this happens, the more a channel can risk losing those viewers.

Regardless, everyone in this video seems to be enjoying their jobs, and since the ratings apparently haven’t been affected, I greatly look forward to the next video of poor Kristi trying to work and getting blindsided by some heinous sight in her peripheral vision. Here’s to hoping, whether the distraction is a manatee, a rhino or a centipede, her reaction proves to be just as over the top, viral and hilarious as the ones embedded in the video clips above.