“Death from above"

Well I must say, it has been quite a while since I have written a blog. I have been getting a lot of messages lately asking me “When is the next blog coming out?!” Ok well, a lot of messages coming from my one and only super fan who remains anonymous..(I don’t blame them). Congratulations…it is your lucky day! Before I tell my profound and illegible tale, I must tell you a little bit about my background. Before I began my wildlife control business, I was employed at another large wildlife control company (which shall remain nameless). I spent many years as a technician before being promoted to a manager. I have to say that being promoted can sometimes feel like a demotion. I was given a new “experimental” position called a “Field manager”. A normal management position was called a district manager and the responsibilities included managing technicians in my district, making sure they had all the supplies they needed, making sure the technicians were following all policies and making sales quotas as well as managing customer service issues. Payroll was a district managers’ responsibility as well. There is a ton more but I don’t feel like thinking of everything because it’s painful for me and this wine has made me lazy. Now, back to the “Field manager” promotion. A field manager was a great way for the company to keep a technician and manager in the same area without sacrificing one for the other. Also, they would pay me based on sales like a technician but I was still responsible for being a manager. It was not a promotion but a death sentence for my success in that company. I simply could not make my sales goals and be a manager at the same time. It was ugly for 10 months until they dissolved my managers’ position and I became a technician again. At first, I was relieved but then began to realize that my career in that company was short lived. I simply could not move up again from where I had gone. I decided that I wanted to start my own business and be independent. Now, I told you all of that boring nonsense because the story I will tell you, took place while I worked as a field manager for that other company. Get your booze, coffee, narcotics and doobies or whatever you do to relax and I will tell you a story of necrosis, death and vile filth with a touch of plausible deniability.

As a manager, one must routinely make tough decisions. One of the toughest decisions I have ever made in my life was to terminate someone, no..not like Arnold Shwarzennegar (though the thought crossed my mind several times). Firing someone was difficult for me because I can find good qualities in a lot of people despite the bad ones on the outside. Maybe empathy is the correct term. I was tasked with letting someone go and in doing that, I had to make sure all of the customers that the employee had where taken care of. This person had over 20 jobs left open (unfinished) and there was no paperwork for me to go off of. I basically had to wait until an angry customer called and asked for the manager before I could help. Another bad thing was that this employee collected all of the money upfront. These jobs were paid in full but not finished. Some of them where not even started!

Early one morning I received a call from a very angry hotel manager who told me the employee has not been back in over a month to check his pigeon traps on the roof (This customer had hundreds of pigeons roosting and pooping all over the place). I instantly face palmed myself because I was not even aware of this job. I told the manager that I would come out right away and inspect. Half way to the job site, the weather turned bad and it started to rain heavily.

I arrived at the location and could see that the hotel had three separate 3 story buildings. They were connected by a breezeway with a thick clear plexiglass roof. It had just rained and water was dripping through the cracks in this roof. The staircase leading up to the third floor was under the biggest crack in this plexiglass roof so everything underneath was very wet. I observed several families walk down the stairs as well as a few people dressed in military uniform. It was a rainy day and I thought nothing of it. People didn’t seem to mind that they were getting soaked while walking under this big crack in the roof. I walked up the steps from the first to the second and then to the third floor. When I reached the 3rd floor I noticed a hatch door directly above me with a metal ladder that reached the roof. I noticed a musty smell but didn’t think a lot about it. Just then a family of four walked up the steps behind me. I was in their way as they stood still under the leaky roof. I said “Oh, Im sorry” and I moved aside. As they walked by me I thought, “Damn those little kids stink...” I didn’t think about it but a few seconds and then I decided to get on the roof and find the pigeon traps. I climbed the ladder to the roof hatch. The handles were unusually greasy feeling slippery and smelled worse and worse the closer I got. I grabbed the hatch handle and turned it, the door sprung open and I climbed to the last step. I stuck my head above the hatch and a horrific scene began to unfold. The hatch door had a 6 inch tall metal rim around it so that water wouldn’t come through when it rained. The entire plexiglass roof had formed a 6 inch deep trough where rain water collected. The pigeon traps were in the middle of this body of water. Hundreds of dead maggot filled pigeons were inside the traps. The rain water dispersed the maggots to form nothing short of a maggot lake on top of the roof. It all started to make sense…the funny smelling kids, the leaking roof..the multiple families getting rained down on by maggoty filth water…the slimy handles on the ladder.. Oh no.. this was what you would call a FUBAR situation. What was I supposed to do?.... I thought for a second and decided that the first thing I should do is removed the traps and dead bodies. I grabbed the traps..there were five traps roughly 5 feet long and 3 feet wide. All full of bloated rotting bodies. I did what any other sensible person would do. I tossed them off the roof directly into the hotel dumpster..what? Don’t judge me.. Anyways, once the bodies were gone, I summed the god of water to see if he could get rid of the lake on the roof. I didn’t get an answer so I did what I thought was a good idea at the time.. I found a place that was not directly over the staircase and made a hole of my own with my foot to drain the maggot water. I think I may have acted a little pre-maturely, as the water fell like niagra, 3 stories down on to the cement where the vending machines were. I know what you are thinking and I don’t care. I was desperate. Maggots were covering the entire ground floor. I was fortunate that the ground floor had metal drainage screens on the ground to drain any rain water that might blow in sideways….wrong again! Actually, I wasn’t lucky because some ding dong plumbed the floor drains to exit on the walkway leading to the parking lot. The maggot lake drained into the vending area and the parking lot all at once! At least it wasn’t dripping on people as they walked under it anymore. Instead now they would just track it in to their vehicles and hotel rooms on their shoes..I recall seeing a lady pinch her nose as she walked through the vending area..the sound of plump maggot bodies popping under her shoes..I just played dumb and didn’t make eye contact with her. After it was all said and done, I made my way to the managers’ office and told him we caught a couple hundred pigeons and that I had disposed of them. He seemed happy at first and then the lady who I saw pinching her nose earlier walked into the office. She was an assistant manager (face palm moment). She said,” something really smells bad by the vending area”. I decided it was a good time to interject and say, “Oh yeah, I smelled that too, I think the dumpster is full”. The manager said, “We just had that emptied. They came yesterday. I’ll call them back”. Let’s be honest here, nothing I said was a lie.. I shook his hand and walked to my truck. I walked past the vending area to get to my truck and noticed that the gap I had made in the plexiglass roof was now being used by maggots as an escape chute to where they were just dropping out on the ground 3 stories down. Literally, as I sat in my truck and turned the key, my manager called me and asked how everything went. I told him my story and the first thing he asked was,”Did you clean it up?” My response was, “More or less”. He then asked slowly, “Did you get the traps?” I said, ”They didn’t make it”. There was an awkward pause where neither of us said anything. He said, “Ok then, thanks for going there…” The incident was never spoke of again..