Waiting for the Cavalry

Friday, two weeks after my discovery, I got word from my landlord that he had scheduled an inspection by our local Terminex outfit. For the following Tuesday.  Not soon enough for me, but it'd have to do.

Thanks to the Atarax by Saturday I was rested enough that my baseline anxiety level retreated from orange alert to something below yellow.  I still noticed myself reacting to feeling something brush against me, but that reaction had gone from "OhmygodwherearetheygetthemOFFMENOW!" to me glancing at the area, noting nothing and shrugging it off.

There wasn't much I could do before Tuesday to prepare other than unwrap the sofa and take the bedding off the bed.  There was no way I wanted the sofa unwrapped for 3 days and I needed to sleep in the bed so unmaking it wasn't a viable option.  Instead, I spent the weekend doing other things, normal weekend things. And vegging on some TV.

Shortly after my landlord told me the date and time of the inspection, I sent him an email asking what I would need to do to prepare, and followed that up a day or so later. I got no reply to either email. On Monday I called Terminex directly and asked them what I'd need to do.  The customer service woman didn't know, but gave me the cell phone number of my inspector.  I called and he told me to unwrap the couch, remove the bedding, and make sure there was access to baseboards all around the rooms where I'd seen bugs.

Tuesday rolled around and I took the day off again. I need to unwrap the sofa, vacuum up the DE, wash my bed clothes and the throws I'd placed on the sofa so I didn't have to sit on plastic, and generally straighten up the place. I didn't want the inspector, or more importantly my landlord, to have anything negative to say about my cleaning habits (which are good, don't get me wrong, but I was paranoid).

Once the sofa was unwrapped, I shook out all the DE onto the floor and started coming through for bug carcasses. I'm not going to lie, I started feeling a bit like an entomologist: on my hands and knees wearing a face mask and sifting through the dust with a pair of tweezers and a jar.  (See my warning about overuse of DE here.)  There were probably more amidst all that dust, but I only found 3 dead adults and a couple of dead nymphs.

It happened to be one of the hottest days of the year that day.  By 10 am, and hour after starting to work on the vacuuming project, I was dripping sweat. By noon, we were at 100°. At 1:30 pm, an hour and a half before my scheduled appointment, the Terminex guy calls to report that he will be unable to make it because the heat has caused his car to break down and wanted to know could we please re-schedule for tomorrow?

Heavy sigh.

I told him no, I couldn't take another day off work that week. We were 3 days away from our 30th Anniversary Gala at the office. A 650-person seated and plated dinner followed by a casino party that had room for up to 1,000 people.  Even taking one day off was a stretch. He told me he would make a couple of calls and see if he could get another Inspector.  10 minutes later he calls to tell me that another inspector will be coming a bit later, closer to 5:00.

Just before 3:00 my landlord showed up to wait. Terminex hadn't called to tell him they would be late. I'd assumed they would do so and hadn't called either.  I explained what they'd told me and he decided to go home, and asked me to call him when they got here (he lives close by).

At 7:00 pm I figured the guy wasn't coming.

Even heavier sigh.

My landlord and I agreed we wouldn't use Terminex and didn't re-schedule. Instead, I was able to convince him to use one of the two local bedbug inspection companies who use bed bug sniffing dogs to search. If there are bugs within a few feet of the dogs, they react. I'd wanted this service from the beginning but my my landlord wouldn't agree to it. He ultimately chose Pestec, because the don't just do the inspection, they also do the treatment.

Unfortunately, Pestec couldn't make it until 5 on Friday. I decided to try and live with the sofa unwrapped - it was too late at that point to re-wrap it and I didn't want to put in all that effort just to undo it again a couple of days later.  Instead, I took the DE and my paintbrush and drew a protective circle around the sofa and vowed not to sit on it until after the inspection. I felt a little like a witch drawing a protective circle to keep spirits away as I cast spells, but instead of trying to keep the spirits out, I was trying to keep the bugs in.