[PCO Stories] You Gotta Be Kidding

The job of a pest management service technician is one that engrosses those outside the industry with its day-to-day dealings with cockroaches, rats and mice — dealings that those within the industry know as just another day on the job. Days that are so run-of-the-mill, they’re cliché. But then there are the other days, the days when the PCO runs into situations a bit less common. On those days, after hearing the story, even veteran technicians say, "That’ll freak ya out!"

"Cockroaches? Mice?" you laugh when your neighbor/mother/brother/friend squeamishly asks how you work with those nasty pests every day. "Those are nothing! Nothing! Let me tell you about nasty…"

And so you did. This article contains just a few of the stories you’ve told us or left on the PCT Online message board (www.pctonline.com/messageboard) about those days in the field that go well beyond the ordinary, days you came home or back to the office, simply shaking your head and saying to anyone who would listen, "You’re not gonna believe this one…"

The most common uncommon days seem to involve crawlspaces literally crawling with snakes, maggots and other "nasty" vermin. Have you heard the one about…

Orkin Technical Director Frank Meek has run into plenty of snakes throughout his years in the industry, but he’s also spent time with new technicians who are not quite as used to the slitherers, such as Allen, the "brand new kid right out of high school" whose greatest fear in life was finding a snake under a structure, Meek said. So…it’s the "kid’s" first day and he and Meek are shimmying through the crawlspace of a home, inspecting for termites. Meek stays in front, explaining the inspection and reassuring Allen every few feet, "Don’t ever be scared. There’s nothing to worry about…" This home, though, happened to have a second crawl space area, because a bedroom had been added on the side. As Meek opens the door and begins to crawl through to the second space, he immediately sights a 3½-foot timber rattler not 4 feet in front of him. "And it was mad!" Meek stops moving and tells Allen, "Stop right where you are and back out."

"What is it?" Allen asks.

"It doesn’t matter, just back out."

Nope, not good enough for the fresh-faced kid. He wants to know. So he crawls up onto Meek’s back and peers over top of him.

"The only thing I could hear after that," Meek says, "was OW! thunk; OW! thunk; OW! thunk," as Allen hit his head on every single floor joist rushing out of the space. "It scared the heck out of him. … He quit that very afternoon."

But even veterans can get scared silly by the unexpected appearance of snakes. Ask PCO Glenn Warren who had to "bust through" a section of a house that had never had an access opening, only to find the inside area crawling with snakes. "Scared me so bad I started moving out and broke my flashlight and couldn’t see a thing…I commenced getting out — bump, bump, bump — all the way to the access door…knots on head and skinned back."

But a thorough inspection of a crawlspace can often yield more than termites or snakes — and it’s not all bad. The PCT message board is filled with items found while crawling under homes and buildings, including money buried in a mason jar; tombstones under a church; more than one incident of "illicit green weeds" under a home; old, collectible soda bottles; a corked and lead-sealed bottle of rye whiskey; "dirty little secrets"; and even, in one case, two homeless people who’d been living in the crawlspace of a commercial building.

While PCOs do all they can to maintain a courteous respect for the dead, there are days when this can be exceedingly difficult.

Take, for example, the apartment building Mike Masterson, president of ISOTECH Pest Management, serviced, in which a particular apartment started having terrible fly and odor problems. "We’ve got to get into that apartment," he told the building manager, "There’s flies and maggots all around the door." But when they did get in, they found that a person had died in the room. "That’s the gross stuff we run across."

Then there were calls that Orkin was receiving on phorid flies in mausoleums. After taking a number of such calls, Meek decided he needed to get into the field and find out what was causing the problems. "In order to know how to control a pest, I need to know where they are breeding, what the construction is, and such," Meek says. So he flew to one of the sites where the problem existed. To get the information on the flies — also called, appropriately enough, coffin flies — Meek had to go down to where the flies were…on the bodies. So they opened up the crypt and he crawled down inside. "I was crawling through a crypt with dead bodies in various stages of rot," Meek describes, explaining that the coffins start breaking down, what’s left of the body decomposes, and embalming fluids come out of the body. "But, of course, you can’t apply pesticides to corpses." Instead, he needed to find where the flies were breeding, which he discovered to be in the drain lines, which had become clogged by the body fluids. Though certainly one of the less appealing days in Meek’s career, the vaulted journey did put the customer’s problem to rest.

Gene Fowler, a regular contributor to the message board and owner of Fowler’s Pest Control in Tampa, Fla., said he has encountered much "that would be gross and unusual to the layman," but little that PCOs have not seen themselves. However, he adds almost as an afterthought, "There is one that comes to mind…"

Fowler used to service a funeral home at which the mortician thought it funny to have Fowler enter the embalming room while he had "open work" on the table. Fowler repeatedly asked him to cover his work before he went in, but the mortician seemed to enjoy trying to "gross me out," he said. One day Fowler arrived for service and asked the mortician if he had anything working in the embalming room; the mortician answered, "No, I don’t have anybody in there right now."

"Upon entry I found that, not only had he lied," Fowler said, "but there was a body that was being wrap embalmed, because the body was badly decomposed. I went back upstairs and began to read him the riot act when the owner of the funeral home chain came out of an office to ask why I was so angry."

When Fowler told the owner of his numerous requests that bodies in the embalming room be covered for his service, then explained what he had encountered, the owner turned and, without hesitation, fired the mortician. The owner then explained that unless a person was wearing protective clothing and a surgical mask, it was against Delaware state law to be exposed to an unprepared body. While the event was determinedly unpleasant, Fowler’s real anger was at being lied to.

Tom Jarzynka, technical and training director for Massey Services PrevenTech, Orlando, Fla., was working alone one night in a restaurant on the banks of the Mississippi River. The building was an old converted ice house that was said to be haunted. "So being alone doing service at 3:00 in the morning was just a little unnerving," Jarzynka says.

He is working in the kitchen — lying on the floor directing a fogger into a large void space under an elevated floor when he hears a strange noise coming from inside the dark void. "Yeah, it’s dark. I’m alone. The building is haunted, and noises are coming from places there shouldn’t be noises," he says. "I was just a little bit concerned."

Suddenly, Jarzynka feels something on his shoulder moving rapidly down his back, thigh and calf. He wiggles and thrashes about to pull away from the void; he drops his fogger without a thought and rolls as far from the opening as quickly as he can… when he sees a large Norway rat running across the kitchen floor toward a hole in another wall.

So it wasn’t a ghost, Jarzynka says, but "I certainly felt a cold chill as the rat passed over my body, and I’m sure at least one — or both — of us emitted a high-pitched scream."

Only in this industry would a rat running across your body be of less concern than a ghost.

In Florida, much of the service — and many of the stories — revolve around termite inspection and service (although the PCT message board indicates a fair number of encounters with bears as well!). In the Midwest you’re more likely to hear accounts of grain weevils and fumigation. But in California, it’s the Hollywood encounters that make some of the most entertaining stories.

Located in Los Angeles, where streets are regularly closed off for filming, Masterson readily can entertain an audience with stories of life among the stars, and how pest management service has led, more than once, to being a part of the scene.

Take one: Paramount Pictures, Star Trek, final season. It was a closed set, with the entire cast and crew sworn to secrecy. No one knew exactly how the season would end and Paramount wanted to keep it that way, allowing only the most essential people on the set. But the definition of essential expanded a bit when a flea problem got so bad that the stars of the show walked off the set, Masterson says. His crew was called in to take care of the problem — after signing non-disclosures, that is. "We had to swear we wouldn’t tell anyone," Masterson says. Once there, his crew was then to stay and watch the entire filming — just in case any problems arose. Not exactly one of the tougher days in pest control!

Then there was the day that Masterson actually got an acting part on the Golden Girls television show because he was there. He was walking around with his contact, inspecting the studio area, when he saw they were filming the show. "I was going to try to get into acting, but realized I’m not really cut out for that," Masterson says he told his contact. "Next thing I know I was in a police outfit!" Masterson ended up playing a bailiff on the show, getting a full two minutes of airtime — including actual lines. Dick Van Dyke was also a guest on the show, and the episode is still aired…and Masterson’s 15 minutes of fame continue to live on.

The author is a frequent contributor to PCT magazine. She can be reached at llupo@giemedia.com.