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The Case of the Clueless Client
By Jesse Nugent | July 10, 2008
Table of contents for The Pest Detective
- The Case of the Leaking Termites
- FATAL ATTRACTION
- The Case Of Flying Royalty
- The Case of the Invincible Ant
- The Case of the Clueless Client
It was one of those mornings when everything seems right in the world. The sun was shining, the birds were singing and my stack of messages from the evening before was small. However, bad things can come in small packages too. The first message had the word URGENT! Across the top and the phone number for Mrs. Carlyle. She had been a fairly regular customer for the previous two years but suddenly had stopped using us. Oh Well-these things happen, I thought as I dialed her number.
The phone clicked to let me know she had picked up and as I started my standard,”This is Hunter Pest Control and I’m Jesse Nugent-Pest Detective” she cut me off with a pitiful cry.”Bugs are eating our new house! You have to come right away.” I realized the caller I.D. had alerted her that it was me calling and she was already at DefCon 3 on the scale of homeowner panic. She started an almost incoherent ramble about the new house and paying over a million dollars and everything was fine on all her inspections. She reminded me of the Summer showers we get almost every afternoon somewhere around town-pops up-dumps an inch of rain and then is gone , totally depleted. Well it took her about five minutes to “rain out” all her frustration and anxiety. I had seen this before, many times, so I just sat back and waited for her rant to subside.
Her story was one that was all too common in the real estate market of Houston. They bought a “new to them” house for over a million dollars. Because they were spending so much money on the house they tried to save money on everything else, including the inspections. I began to ask her a series of leading questions, designed to enlighten her as to her situation. I already knew all the answers.
How long was the termite inspector there? Oh, maybe 15 or 20 minutes. This is an 8,000 square foot house with an attached 4 car garage with maids quarters!
Did the inspection report recommend any treatment or correction of conducive conditions?
I don’t know. I wasn’t there but my agent said everything was fine.
Did you read the report?
No Why should I?
How much did the inspection company charge?
I was $35.00. No wait $37.50 with tax.
You spent $37.50 on a 1.2 million dollar investment?
Hmmmmmm!
What makes you think you have “Bugs eating your house?”
Well, we started to paint the Master Bathroom and the sheet rock has all these little holes and tunnels and it’s full of these little white bugs. Outside we were starting to paint and the wood just crumbled and there are millions of these little black pellets falling out. Is that bad? Can you come out today and spray them? Is it still $75.00 for a treatment like you used to charge every quarter on our old house? I then realized she was totally clueless as to her predicament. I slowly and gently informed her she most likely had an infestation of Subterranean Termites as well as Drywood Termites and no a $75.00 dollar quarterly spray would not solve the problem. The treatment for both would probably be in the $8,000 to $10,000 range. I did not tell her that if she hadn’t cheaped out on the inspection that all the treatments as well as the cost of repairing the damage would have been paid for by the seller.
I could sense the panic in her voice start to build like those summer storms. What should I do? We can’t afford that kind of expense.
Call your real estate agent and the Termite inspector, maybe they can help you.
I knew as I was saying the words that she would get nowhere with either. Her day was going a lot worse after our conversation but it was just another case for “Jesse Nugent-Pest Detective.
Topics: Pest Control, Real Estate Finance |
July 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am
How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth……
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to “man’s footprint”. But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to “keep up”! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.
We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe “knowledge drought” - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the “right way”. The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.
National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D’Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States - No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help “stem the tide”, I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com .
This new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.
Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest.