Paying Bills with Spider Drawings (Seven-Legged Spider)

Original & Known Variations of Seven Legged Spider

Overview

In general, Seven Legged Spider (a.k.a Paying Bills with Drawing of Spider) refers to the e-mail conversations that took place in October 2008 between David Thorne and Jane Gilles. More specifically, Seven Legged Spider is a comical drawing made by David, who offered his stick-figure artwork as a payment for his overdue utility bills. Needless to say, his drawing was rejected by Jane (the company’s representative), but the playful/cutesy e-mail exchange between them lived on to become internet famous.

Background

In October 2008, David Thorne received a payment notice via e-mail, stating that his utility bills were overdue by $233.95.

Unable to make the ends meet at the time, David responded to the payment request with a pathetic drawing of a seven-legged spider:

Humorous Exchange

Interestingly enough, this seemingly impossible exchange went on between David and Jane (company’s representative) for some time, during which his offer of payment with spider drawings was rejected by the representative not just once, but twice:

Shortly after their exchange, Thorne posted the original conversation on his website^[2], which was then picked up by Digg and subsequently disseminated throughout the web. People’s reactions after reading David’s e-mails were astonishing and the site’s server crashed after being hit by hundreds of thousands of people.

A self-proclaimed internet prankster, David has posted a series of other “internet jokes” on his website prior to the drawing of seven-legged spider.

eBay Auction of Seven-legged Spider

In November 2008, David took his joke to another level by auctioning off his drawing of the seven-legged spider. The classic eBay joke caught on quickly, after a user known as Patrick made the winning bid of US$ 10,000 for the drawing while others put up customized/accessorized versions of David’s spider, such as Santa’s hat and Buddhist’s robe.

Derivative Fanart

Artist Enkel Dika uploaded “Value of The Spider” to Flickr on December 17th, 2009. The image was one of many pop culture mashups by Dika featured in Buzzfeed thread “The Art of Enkel Dika”:

External References

^[1] 27bslash6.com – David Thorne’s Website

^[2] Flickr – Value of the Spider

^[3] BuzzFeed – The Art of Enkel Dika