My younger brother, Wilson-Owen, has been talking nonstop about getting a job with a pest control company. This ambition seemed to come totally out of the blue; I reckon he must have been reading more than the recommended quota of William Burroughs or something. Anyway, he’s been doing mounds of research on the subject of extermination. He’s constantly steering our conversations towards various local case studies he claims to have read about.
Just this morning, he regaled me with a corker about a guy over in Gippsland who ignored the termite infestation in his house for so long that the ceiling collapsed on him, after which he proceeded to attempt to extract the offending insects by hand. Sounds a bit far fetched to me – don’t they have treatments for termites near Dandenong?
Wilson-Owen has quite a few tall-sounding tales like this. He reckons there was a woman in the north who failed to notice the wasp nest outside her bedroom window until she got stung up the nose in the middle of the night. That one is almost definitely not true, little bro, but I’ll give you points for imagination.
Then there’s the one about the couple who had such a bad problem with ants coming out of their walls that they collected some spiders and released them into the affected area, to little effect, before calling for pro pest control. This one’s kinda reminiscent of the proverbial old lady who swallowed the fly and so on.
I’m subtracting a point there for lack of originality, Wilson-Owen. I think he should just go and get the qualification already, and find out if this field of work is actually for him. Anyone know of a pest control company in Frankston that’d be up for taking on a little nutcase who’s fresh out of high school and filled with a disconcerting amount of enthusiasm?