Picture Diary Of A Pest Control Rip Off

If you want to make me mad it’s really not that hard but you have to be pretty patient. The list of things you can try is pretty long but generally just being an ignoramus when common sense is right there in your reach and I’ll be getting mad sooner or later. But if you’d like to make me FURIOUS, that’s a bit easier. In fact, just do one of three things and I start turning green, frothing at the mouth and, well, you get the picture.

Now I won’t tell you the first two things, (gotta keep you on your toes ya know lol) but I will clue you in on #3. Very simply, if you take advantage of a senior citizen just to sell a pest control job, my blood pressure starts going up. If that’s not enough, you mis-identify (on purpose) a pest that preys on their fears and then thats when steam starts coming out of my ears. Then, if you want my eyes to pop out of my head, well,…… read on

Recently one of MY customers was sold a bill of goods by an unscrupulous sales weasel/tech. He was there checking their termite

bait system when he started in heavy on trying to get the pest control contract as well. Now my client, doesn’t see real well, is a bit confused and definitely easily led. But she is a sweetheart of a lady and if I wanted her termite work I could have had it 100 times over. In fact she’s the one that brings it up more times than not but she always smiles and says “That makes sense”, when I explain I couldn’t trust someone else’s work and she’d have to have a whole new treatment from me. “Gotta save my pennies on my fixed income” she then says. It’s almost like a script every two months and until now that’s as close to crossing paths that the two services have gotten. So when we called to schedule her pest control recently and we found a very upset and confused woman who was suddenly staunchly canceling her service. We knew something was up.

Now cancellations are a fact of life but I knew something wasn’t right so a few days later I stopped by just to see what happened. Let me tell you, canceled service was NOT the words I would use for what happened. As she relayed the story to me I traced over every step of what the man saw and then went outside to see where the guy treated.(he didn’t have to treat inside

because his exterior barrier was far better than any companies in town.) Not only was the “pest representative” sloppy in his ID, (or was he?) he was even more of a PIG when it came to his “treatment.” So along with my venting, I took a few pictures for all to see and if this wasn’t such a litigious world- I’d love to post the pic of his truck which was just down the street, at another victims house.

She told me he said there were so many ants in the yard that he just knew it had to be bad inside too so he had to check. She pointed to the pantry where he said the ants were worst but all I found were a few flour beetles. Then she happily showed me his fancy brochure and iron clad contract that listed ants as the target pest. The contract totaled over $400.00. $95.00 of

which was the initial. She was very upset & I spent over an hour with her going through the pantry looking for boxes infested with beetles, (which if he was honest-he should’ve done) she felt so foolish for signing the contract and even worse when she realized she didn’t have any ants to begin with.

Truthfully, this kind of thing happens from time to time and sometimes, it’s just business & I get beat. This time however, it was obvious the guy was preying on an elderly woman and he even went so far as to say many unflattering things about my company not the least of which was that my inside treatments were old fashioned and unsafe. I guess from the pictures one might say the same about his & be thankful he never did come inside. In the end, I dialed the number of the offending company and cancelled

the ladies service because she was to embarrassed and frightened. I told them what I saw & I wasn’t happy with the way they treated her-I never told them who I was & they never asked… it’s a good thing too, because I was just starting to get angry.