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.

My Landlord Pussyfoots around, Part II

The day after my sofa defeat, I spent hours more re-treating the sofa with DE and re-wrapping the frame in plastic. At this point, I was starting to feel pretty demoralized. My landlord was taking his sweet time getting an inspector in to check the rest of the building. I emailed him again asking if there was any word on when there might be an inspection, and his response avoided the issue and went on and on about my upstairs neighbor's baby and them not wanting any chemicals used to treat an infestation.

I had been CC'd on my landlord's original email he sent to the other tenants in the building, but they didn't seem to be hitting "reply all" as far as I could see, as I never saw any response.  In the first email he'd been nondescript, simply asking about "bugs" generally and considering the treatment maintenance pest control. In my reply to his email about the upstairs neighbors' sensibilities, I asked if had told the other tenants specifically that they were looking for bed bugs, explaining that unless you are allergic to the bites and/or see the bugs, you aren't just going to notice them hanging around like you would ants, spiders or gnats.

His reply was a little baffling.  "Are you suggesting to shut down the entire building?"

Um.

Huh?

I replied, no, I just think they should know specifically what they should be looking for. About an hour later, I was CC'd on another email in which he specified bed bugs, without passing along any of the information about how to look for them. I was worried that maybe one of the other units in the building was a major vector of infestation, and it started to drive me crazy that it was taking so long for my landlord to get an inspector in to discern the extent of the problem.

When I returned to work the next day, I felt it was time to let the rest of my co-workers know what was going on. I'd been reluctant at first because of the stigma associated with bugs. I didn't want anything to think I was dirty and didn't want to freak anyone out about the possibility that I'd transported them into the office.  Rather than making an announcement at staff meeting that morning, I decided to go through and individually speak with each of my colleagues who weren't already in the know. Rather than be horrified at my uncleanliness, they were all incredibly sympathetic. Some even developed the empathetic itch - as I explained, in addition to my own unconscious scratching, I noticed theirs.

The following day marked 12 days since the discovery and a week since I had notified my landlord. Concerned at his lack of action, I posted a question on a legal advice forum asking how long was reasonable for him to wait to act. Because it was an unmoderated forum, I got snarky replies, unhelpful replies, downright mean replies, and one or two that confirmed what I suspected: he should have already had an inspector. But because it was an unmoderated forum I had no way to verify the integrity of the responders. I suddenly remembered a former co-worker from my last job, who volunteered at San Francisco's tenants rights union.  I explained what was going on and asked about my landlord's rights and responsibilities as well as my own, and how long was reasonable to wait for my landlord to act.

My former co-worker wasn't able to help, but her husband still works at the SF tenants' union. She passed my email along to him and said he would reply in the next couple of days. It only took him a day to respond. Luckily, he has specifically handled bed bug cases and had quite a lot of information to give me.

He said generally, a landlord should be given 30 days to respond to a repair request, unless the problem was an emergency or something considered to make the unit uninhabitable. In that case, the response should be within 48 hours. Since I was having allergic reactions to the bites, missing work to deal with the problem and become sleep deprived, I was told this would be considered an uninhabitable condition. I could contract the pest control service myself and then deduct the cost from my rent. I would also likely be entitled to a rent reduction of 25-50% from the time I notified my landlord to the time the treatment began. And the most important piece of information: whether or not I brought the bed bugs in through some chance encounter, in a multi-unit rental it is the landlord's responsibility to pay for extermination.

I emailed my landlord again asking about when there would be an inspection: he still didn't have an answer, and started talking about some company in Georgia from whom he could buy a home treatment kit and do the work himself, much to my chagrin. I knew how many hours it had taken me to deal with my sofa, the living room in general, and the bed. Acting alone, I was pretty sure my landlord wouldn't have the ability to effectively treat 4 units.

I had a little mini melt-down, at which point a co-worker told me about some drug her doctor had prescribed her when she had an allergic reaction.  The brand name was AtaraxAtarax.  An hour or so later, they informed me the prescriptions had been called in.

That night, for the first in almost a fortnight, I slept deep and hard, and woke up not exactly fully rested, but much more rested than I had felt in days. The funny thing about being rested enough? Your stress level goes down almost instantly.  Feeling less anxious, I decided to try again to appeal to my landlord's sense (or lack) of urgency.