Pleh

Nope. Turns out that it took only two hours for the bugs to start munching on Lisa. She went to bed around 11PM and around 1AM, just before I headed up, she came marching down all pissed off, showing me the bites. She also found and squashed two of them. I went into the room and within five minutes or so, had caught four more live bugs. The fumigation didn’t work, so we’ve retreated back to the guest room again and will be talking with Protech again.

I have tried to be patient with them. Sure, they apparently made an identification mistake initially and thought our bat bugs were bed bugs. I hear that’s easy to do and they offered to re-fumigate again at no charge, so I’ll cut them some slack. Sure, it costs us around $250 in hotel and laundry charges (all of the laundry and curtains in our master bedroom and the other bedrooms needs to be washed) and that’s not including time any time they fumigate, but everyone make mistakes, even professionals. Where it starts moving from “human” to “incompetent” is now.

If they, ProTech — the exterminators — the bug killers — still can’t kill the bugs even after a second fumigation, then I’m starting to think they just can’t kill bugs. The ProTech people we’ve dealt with have been nice and friendly, but there comes a point where you have to call a spade a spade.

We signed a contract at the outset that covered the initial fumigation and three of four monthly reapplications. It cost around $1700 - $1800 bucks, but we wanted the bugs gone and we wanted them gone yesterday, so we sucked it up and paid. The problem with the contract, though, is that they state that we cannot use (or possibly even consult) any other pest control company without breaking the contract and losing the money we paid. The one exception is “gross negligence” and I’m sure it’d take some pretty bad failure (and possibly a visit to a lawyer) to see that they owe us our money back. The question is, at what point do we say that enough is enough and they’re grossly negligent?

Lis called them today and will be talking with them later about what they plan on doing. The last time, they convinced her that the bites were all in her head. That worked until she found a live one in the bathroom. This time, she’s got some notes and a bag of live bugs, so I hope they’ll be more responsive to fixing up their mistakes.