Spend any time in the pest control industry and your bound to run into people who have their imaginations get the best of them about insects. This ranges quite a bit and since I’m not a psychologists I’m not really qualified to tell you if the person who sees two earwigs on the kitchen floor & thinks they’re being over run is nuts or that the guy who has about 1000 german roaches perusing his counter tops each night and say’s “they aren’t that bad” is ready for a sit down with Dr Phil either. No, I won’t venture to what I think of a persons psyche and I’ll tell you why.
While I literally HATE the old adage “The customer is always right” I can’t fight the truth in the words. That doesn’t mean they are correct all the time, it is more of a statement of their position of power in the service / customer relationship. Start arguing with a client and let them know in no uncertain terms just how wrong they are and see how long your ‘said’ relationship lasts– Thus the truth in the words. Of course good customer relations is finding ways to express yourself and get what you need and keeping the customers ego in mind as well.
But what can you do with the truly irrational? The ones so far up the spectrum that no amount of help you give is ever enough. I’ve run into many cases like this over the years and I can’t tell you how many wasted hours I’ve spent on the phone, at the home inspecting or time looking for answers that even if I did find them I knew would do no good.
Here’s a link to a story where a woman is convinced she had ‘Black flies’ eating her flesh and with just this short read you can see just how many top level people she got involved in her case. I can tell you that she must have been one ‘squeaky wheel’ cause she got a lot of grease and the people she was able to wrangle up aren’t known to get involved in a whole lot of situations like this.
Al Hoffers Termite, Lawn & Pest control was the company called out to get rid of this dreaded pest and free the woman from her flesh eating woes. I don’t know Al personally but I do read his blog and it’s easy to see he knows a thing or two about this industry. If you’d like to see exactly what Al did which is so important in a case like this click the link and see the very short story. It even has a video and you get to see the woman in question. Although it doesn’t mention very much of what the pest control operator did for her there is something KEY that he did not do and it is from a pro like this we should all take a lesson. I’d love to hear what you think of Al’s decision and if it was the best one to make or if you think he should have gone another route. Let us know what you’d do or have done in situations like this, just comment below. I’ll update this article soon with my thoughts and hopefully we’ll all learn a little something about Delusional parasitosis and the best way to handle it. Believe it or not, there are cases lurking around us all the time and it’s best to know ahead of time how to handle it correctly.
