“Jake was great! Amazing service, incredibly responsive and awesome quality of work. We had a huge project and he approached it with positivity and creativity. I would truly recommend him to anyone. On top of that he had very fair pricing and was really flexible around our schedules. Can’t say enough great things about Storysold. Highly recommend!”
Produced for Yvonne E. of SE Portland
Service Story #83: Total Access in The Tabor Wilderness
As far as gutter line exclusions go, so far I haven’t seen this story’s equal. Yvonne called because she was hearing scratching in the ceiling of her kitchen. After a quick introduction, I popped into the attic space of the cozy little home sandwiched between 82nd and Mt. Tabor.
“Holy Moses! There’s fat gaps of light running all the way around her gutter line!” I thought as I crawled back to the addition over the kitchen. Along the way, I passed squirrel, bird, and roof rat droppings hidden under the new insulation.
It was The Same Old Story, new homeowner in home that had been sort of cleaned, reinsulated, and brushed up, but nobody (not the seller, not the real estate agent, not the home inspector, or the pest inspector) thought to mention anything about the entry holes beaconing all God’s creatures in the Mt. Tabor wilderness to come and play in Yvonne’s attic.
That’s not an exaggeration. Sometimes I wonder if The Industry has some kind of shady anti-exclusion deal with the home inspectors’ union. Then again, the previous exclusion attempt (cheap mosquito netting and foam) looked super old. My guess is, if there’s a conspiracy it runs deep. Dozens of folks: landlords, homeowners, neighbors, and homeowners must have noticed this gap over time (like decades) and nobody had done anything about it. Until now.
No joke. Day one, I made eye contact with the beast in the home it had made above Yvonne’s kitchen. We shared a special moment. It chattered at me. I banged the roof to match its obnoxious behavior. Two weeks later, I spent a day excluding the long gap around the roof with metal flashing. I kept an eye out for my buddy while I worked, but there was no sign of the squirrel anywhere. I even left the entry hole nearest its nest open, just in case.
The last thing I did that day was inspect the attic again. Still no sign of my buddy. So I decided to seal the last entry hole up and call it a day. There was no reason to “wait to make sure it was gone” and milk my customer. I could see the whole attic space, and squirrels aren’t exactly stealthily creatures.
Here’s the dialogue between Yvonne and I after the exclusion was done:
YVONNE: That looks great! Thank you. Just out of curiosity how does the attic get proper ventilation now. I know we have a vent up there but I just realized how much ventilation we must have removed with taking away the mesh. I’m not sure if that’s a common thing you run into or not.
STORYSOLD: Good morning Yvonne! Good question. I’ve never seen any home that planned to have one massive “soffit vent” running 3/4 the way around the edge of the roofline. It seemed to me that the mesh wasn’t planned. It was installed poorly in places where the original builders created a gap when they failed to connect the facing to the sheathing. That leads me to believe the mesh was meant to be exclusion. The back side of your home is a good example of that. No mesh was installed there, because the construction work is good. I imagine if ventilation was an issue, the original builder or some construction guy along the way would have installed soffit vents property…they would have built or installed a frame for the vent and they wouldn’t have used that mesh crap. It’s like door screen or something. Not something anyone would use for a soffit vent. All that said, it wouldn’t take too much to install a few more vents if a professional contractor agrees that the original builders failed to install a proper number of vents in your attic. All I did was put metal flashing where their should have been wood facing. The metal will breathe better than the wood would have if they built it like they did in back.
YVONNE: That’s great. I assumed that was case I just have never dealt with something like this so wanted to check! So the back and front both have wood and the sides just had the crappy mesh?
STORYSOLD: There’s wood all the way around. That’s what the gutters are attached to. The problem was, there was a gap between the wood that holds the gutters and the edge of the roof. In the back, the construction guys did a great job of making the wood flush with the roof. Not so much in the original construction. The mesh was a hack exclusion job…along with all the foam someone tried to use to exclude the massive gaps as well. Critters in attic was clearly an issue for whoever owned your home before you. Cheap landlord with a can of spray foam and a roll of screen door mesh is my guess…I feel like yesterday I corrected a decades old mistake that many many people saw and did not try to fix properly.
YVONNE: I would agree! Thanks for your awesome work
THE END
Service Story #84: Exclusion In Times of Virus
This service story was produced for Ron, a landlord with an old house in NE Portland. Outside of the giant mystery box of 80s porn I found in the attic space, this was a textbook squirrel venting and exclusion service.
Wilderness Corridor #1Wilderness Corridor #2
I used to be shocked when I found open entry holes like these. I was like, “How could we (as humans) continue to trap and kill raccoons and rats year after year, decade after decade, without sending the simplest of signals…” Now I know that I can knock on almost any home, in any neighborhood, and find at least one open entry hole.
I know it sounds crazy, but somedays I feel like I’m exploring something new called “exclusion.” These entry holes were found under the eves of the dormers. Classic spots.
The real story here was the poor family who lived in the rental. Not only did they encounter a creature eye-to-eye through the vent in the attic room, they had to deal with another known carrier of disease and pestilence: Jake.
I’ve always know I’ve been a vector for novel characters such as Wilderness Security Guide and Pest Predator, but now that our planet was facing a pandemic virus…I was a possible host for that creature too. And the family was as frightened of that invisible viral creature as they were the critter in their attic.
They decided the best plan was to leave (like for the whole day) while I performed my work scene. Honestly, I’ve never felt more like a pest in my life. The male figure in the house texted me the next day to ask if I’d taken my respirator off at any time during the service. It was an usual feeling that dredged up memories of being picked on at school. Yet, at the same time, it was refreshing. Humans need to be reminded that we can be pests too.
All in all, I was thankful I was able to limit my pestilence and nail the ending in 2 services.
Service Story #85: Why Not Birds Too?
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (reviewed on Thumbtack): “Jake was great to work with. He responded quickly to my request. He was able to do the job by being creative. He sent a follow up email to let me know when he would check back. His rate was very reasonable.” – Kelly A. of SW Portland
Yeah, we know. Humans are incurably hooked on the idea that “Good Guys kill Bad Guys.” It’s the environmental “disease” Guide calls Systemic Death Production Disorder. We also know, every so often, we find a glimmer of a cure in The Action.
Kelly was one of the coworkers and friends Brenden of The Garage Liberation Front sent my way. She had a problem with birds nesting in the eves/vent holes of a large add on bay window thing. Normally, during in a bird service, Guide can access the nest from inside, physically scoop the nest up, and then exclude the entry hole. She knows relocating a nest is often a death sentence for any baby birds, but she supposes it’s better than killing them outright. In any case, we didn’t have that option. The addition didn’t have any access to the attic, so Guide had to come up with a creative solution…
At first she wanted to mark the holes (stuff plastic bags in them) and then return to remark them if the birds pushed them out. She was about to do that, when she suddenly remembered that our truck was stocked with a variety of squirrel venting equipment. Ten or so minutes later, she’d cut one of my one way doors to size and fixed it to the entry hole.
While Guide was up there, she realized that many of the vent holes were compromised by birds. Someone had used the same darned cheap mosquito netting/mesh stuff that was featured in Yvonne’s Service Story #83. A few light pointy pecks of the bird’s beak, and the birds would be back in business…
[ Not actual vent (same model). I put the birdseed lure inside roof void to test for activity ]
Once Guide realized her vent would be pointless unless she, at least, marked the other holes, Guide eyed the storm clouds gathering above us like a salty old sailor–then she said, “I have some expanded aluminum mesh in my truck…If we want the vent to be effective…I really should exclude all these holes now.”
Kelly was all for that idea. After Guide installed her first new vent screen for an example, her husband said, “Oh wow, that looks great! That’s going to add value to our home for sure!”
The actual number is lost to us, but we’d say Guide excluded at least 16 entry holes in less than 2 hours…all before the rain hit. Major victory! It reminded Guide of her days of thru-hiking, hustling to make camp before the storm hit.
And our victory was a true team effort. If Kelly hadn’t been watching the birds and called us when she did, the cute baby birds may have died trapped and separated from their parents. Go team! Wilderness Security Guide can now add a bird-venting-and-exclusion service to her lineup of action!
THE NAMES OF THE HUMANS IN THIS SERVICE STORY HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT. ALL PHOTOS ARE DIGITALLY GENERATED TO REPRESENT WHAT THE ACTION WOULD LOOK LIKE IF YOU WERE THERE.
Before Portland was a glimmer in some long forgotten timber baron’s eye, gangs of bedbugs roamed the earth in search of human hosts. They were merciless. They infested the longhouses of the Native Americans. They infested the cabins of the pioneers. They didn’t care if their hosts had red, white, or blue bedsheets; all they wanted from their humans was their willingness to be calm, carry on, and feed them their blood.
The greatest of these mighty gangs was The Heroes of Slumberland. They were the best at what they did, and they prided themselves, like Marines, on being the front line…”First to fight!”…of their epic, endless battle to control the infestation known as “civilization.” Like many earth creatures, The Heroes claim their cause is not only right, but more right than any creature claiming to be “civilized.” They believe they’re right, because they believe our planet is suffering from the singular, uniform, monopolistic infestation known as The Suck. Their long name for it is The Suck of Civilization.
If you’ve ever said, “This sucks!” in reference to your human domestication, then you get The Suck. It’s not meant to be a complicated idea. The only complicated part of The Suck is trying to describe The Whole Monster without sounding like a raving lunatic. We all know the little parts that suck, but the big picture is always, forever illusive.
Good news is, we’re OK with not getting all our facts straight. To hell with “being right.” Life isn’t a test. We’re OK with injecting as much fiction into the truth as we feel The Suck needs to make a least a little sense to you humans. And that’s why you’re going to need to switch off your fact finding test-taking mode and simply accept this fact:
The American Dream isn’t the beacon of hope and hearth you think it is…
For starters, The American Dream was not invented by humans. Some hack named James Adams coined the phrase in 1931 in an effort to sell books and escape a life of labor. In his book The Epic of America, he defined The American Dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
Words are often an unhelpful way of understanding anything. The Action we know as The American Dream was developed by The Heroes of Slumberland 3.25 centuries before James Adams staked his claim to the ocean of live actions that preceded his moment of literary brilliance.
The action known as The American Dream was first performed by a bedbug named Juice. It happened when she realized that their wilderness infestations achieved more victories (lasted longer) if they piggybacked on the actions of another seemingly unrelated infestation. Humans have many nice politically correct euphemisms for that kind of infestation. If you were a human sitting at your favorite diner wearing a red broad brimmed hat drinking tea with your friends who also enjoyed wearing red hats, you might call this kind of infestation a “collection.” If you were a celebrity (or eccentric) living on a hill with your dogs, you might call it “stuff in garage,” or “stuff in attic,” or “old sports stuff.” If you were hard working, God-fearing man, you might call the same phenomena “prepping,” or more specifically “End Times preparations.” And if you were an old Arthurian king you might call it “treasure,” or “riches,” or maybe even “plunder.”
The not so nice term for that kind of infestation is “hoard,” which is the same term our friends the dwarves and dragons use. Hoard is the human slang slur for the same normal “collection” the Red Hat Ladies sit atop everyday. When the hoard is bad (and not a good hoard) humans often label the hoarding action as a “phycological disorder,” which is the modern equivalent hosting an evil spirit. Like a spirit, a disorder is something immaterial you humans can only understand (or comprehend) with the help of a professional hoarding technician.
In any case, there was a long time in human history where The Heroes of Slumberland didn’t run across a lot of hoards, or hoarders. So much so, one of the old nicknames for bedbugs was “crimson ramblers,” because they were known to feast on royal blood. It wasn’t until circa The Industrial Revolution, The Heroes began to encounter more human hoards more often. It was like when humans discovered bronze and suddenly it was The Bronze Age everywhere. Suddenly hoards and hoarders were everywhere.
Juice wasn’t a phycologist. She didn’t know why humans suddenly began to hoard more than they did centuries before. All she knew was…if she could infest a human territory packed wall to ceiling with a hoard, then the humans would have to nail endings to 2 infestations instead of 1.
No this isn’t a Disney story. Bedbugs are bugs. They aren’t smart like humans. It was just simple math. Two infestations are harder to hunt down and end than one. And three is harder than two.
Since her groundbreaking discovery, there’s been 223.5 Juices (Juice 154.5 was squashed by a quick handed insomniac seconds after he claimed the name). The protocol for claiming the name “Juice” was not like human protocols, which require never-ending levels and constant suppressive discipline to enforce, all the bug had to do was perform The Action, play the character, and be Juice. And they performed that action by targeting humans will hoards. Meaning, the fittest bedbugs (Heroes of Slumberland) were the ones who could find the one, or two hoarder in a dark crowded theater, or bus with non-plastic seats (like Greyhound), or hotel in a favorite tourist destination (like Disneyland), and ride home with them; instead of hitchhiking home with a Buddhist minimalist monk with no stuff to hole up in.
The trick to becoming Juice was the super economic/unprofitable power of knowing instantly if a human was a hoarder, or not. Many speculative theories abound. No one (not even The Heroes themselves) agree on how this is done. It used to be easy. Back before The Hoarding Age, all a Hero had to do was catch a whiff of perfume. Only wealthy hoarders were able to afford such luxurious cures. Large disorganized purses full of stuff and bulging brief cases were also once a big tip off. Now days, many Heroes follow The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hoarders, which promotes the “hoarding center theory.” Very simply, it states that the fittest/most Darwinian way to hitchhike home with a hoarder is hanging out at hoarding centers.
For example, if you’re a “Low Brow Hero” you’d hang out at thrift stores. Economically challenged hoarders love Goodwills, Salvation Army stores, Deseret Industries, and old Portland favorites like The Red, White, and Blue. And if you’re a “Street Hero,” you’d hang out at apartment store dumpsters (in the cold and wet) waiting for the Trash Marauders to appear, like clockwork, with their bikes and wagons and carts full of random crap, each item peddled laboriously from street to street because each item in the hoard has a special place in their hearts. Every prop has a value, fills a need, and plays an irreplaceable part in the unfolding stories of their lives. If only for the classic reason, “I paid good money for it.” Once the payment/blood sacrifice has been made, it’s abhorrent for any hoarder to believe it had no meaning. Thus the collection continues to be collected, because the base action (the act of amassing stuff) has no meaning or part to play in the grand unfolding story. It’s pure infestation, but no professional hoarder will ever admit that. All the payments, sacrifices, and decisions they made in life have meaning, especially the old childhood train set.
Just because the prop is clearly an inactive part of the story that doesn’t mean it will never play a part in it again. All props have a place on the stage. Active or inactive, there’s a special place (a heavenly wormhole void of time and space) in the human mind where all the jangled pieces fit together. We call it the “magical mystery hoard hole.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hoarders “High Brow Hero” theories are simpler (less infested with words). High Brow Heroes are advised to hang out at Ikea, or target humans with strict, borderline OCD routines.
Hoarding is an extreme sport. Rich hoarders spread their hoards full of eccentric inactive props out in massive, precisely organized spaces that only become horrifying if they were able to be viewed in full; like, for example, if we could stage the hoard in the center of a football field and view it. Poor hoarders, on the other hand, are limited economically. They don’t have the resources to rent another storage locker, garage, or second house to spread their hoard out. Sometimes all they have is a shopping cart. That’s one of the most interesting things about what we’re going to call, Inactive Prop Collection Disorder. When humans view a shopping cart mismatched with random stuff in full, they’re horrified. “In what possible story would all that crap make sense?” they wonder to themselves. “Who needs 5 broken computers, 2 dolls, and a book on housewarming etiquette from the 50s?” How can all that stuff possibly hold value?
We, the live action characters of earth, love this visual human reaction. It betrays the deep, hardcore fact that good or bad stories (time itself) are the only sane way to measure value. And hoards, when seen in full, are instantly seen as undesirable stories cobbled together without any action to connect the mass of unused props.
Thus Juice becomes Juice when he, she, or they feed on a human hoarder who fits that definition. All the great serious literary authors of our modern civilization have long heralded the death of The American Dream, but we know better. What is The American Dream if not the massing of props for stories that never see the light of action? Even the humans who claim to have put The American Dream in action are still often great collectors of mismatched people, places, and things.
A bedbugs greatest fear is going home with a human who knows where all their props fit on the planetary stage, and they use them on a regular basis to support The Action of their story. A human like that is almost invincible to bedbug infestations. Or any infestation for that matter..be that internal infestations (like singular action addictions) or environmental ones like neglecting the needs of one’s home territory (ie. Entry Hole Disorder).
The Heroes of Slumberland love to boast. They will feast and drink the blood of humans, and then lounge around their jidey-holes boasting about how they were able to “trigger The American Dream” and sedate their human hosts enough to develop hoarding actions. But we know that’s all bullshit. Classic novelists, TV binge show writers, and video game developers are, by far, more skilled at triggering the hoarding action in humans than bedbugs. Figurehead characters such as those have perfected the art of anti-inspiration inspiration; the production and maintenance of what we call “The Fourth Wall,” or generic stories that sedate humans instead of inspiring them to control The Action of their lives.
At best, bedbugs are like most of us: great riders, breakers, and benders of infestations. Juice 223.5 likes to boast that she developed the infestations at The Humble Apartments in SE Portland, but we know that’s not true. She just got lucky (struck dragon’s gold) when she hitched a ride with one of its tenants many years ago.
And that’s where The Action of our service story begins. Our human receptionist at Storysold: Pest Control received a message on Thumbtack from the building’s landlord. He said 2 of his units might have bedbugs. He asked if we would inspect the units and give him a quote. We agreed, and triggered The Pest Predator for the job.
A few days later, we met the Humble Apartment’s live-in manager. After Predator did a quick inspection and found bedbugs in his tiny, one room unit, Manager filled us in. Or at least gave us a good beginning for our story. Apparently, the property management company’s first response when they heard the word “bedbug” was to inform the Manager that he was responsible for killing the bugs because he brought them in. The Manager was a savvy youth (and amazing cartoonist) who respectfully reported that, in Oregon, if more than one unit was infested with the same pest it’s the Landlord’s responsibility to provide their tenants with a healthy living environment. No battle ensued. The property managers and Landlord agreed to pay someone to kill the bugs. Manager also told us that we weren’t the first company in line. Another fairly well know local company had already inspected and given a quote.
“So why are we here?” we thought As One Flesh. “Why wasn’t the other company already killing bugs?”
Then we walked from Manager’s tiny unit, across the tiny hallway, and met his neighbor. Predator liked the guy almost immediately. Gruff, but warm and friendly. He reminded us of Bookmaker’s old character Bob/Gunny G, a classic tough guy xenophobic front shielding a heart of gold, willing to do anything to help a good cause.
As we let Bookmaker paddle on, getting to know the character we’re going to slander as “Hoarder #1,” Predator was taking stock of he human’s hoard.
“Juice!!’ Predator suddenly screamed a silent inner scream only the character kind can detect. “I know you’re here my old nemesis…reveal yourself to me!”
After a few more silent screams, Predator heard a mocking chuckle rise from the human’s closet that was packed, top to bottom, with treasures. “Yes, it is I…” Juice.224 finally replied. “You’re looking trimmer than last we met. Is Bookmaker on another Adventure in Sobriety?”
“Yeah,” Predator replied. “Beer’s hell on our human’s waistline.”
“You should be thankful you’re not being hosted by a bloated corporate human. There’s no end to the walls and waistlines of some corporate characters. Warehouses as far as the eye can see…all stocked with treasures.”
“You should know better than to buddy talk me, ‘Buddy.’ You know why I’m here.”
“Same old Predator,” Juice chuckled. “All action, no foreplay. 110% sociopathic human hater.”
“I’m not a sociopath. I like a few humans…here and there.”
“You can’t fool me. You’re like Bookmaker. You like trained humans like humans like trained dogs. And that’s not the same as liking wild humans. Not by a long shot.”
“What do you know about wild humans?” Predator laughed. “You’re a Hero of Slumberland. You prefer all your humans to make their actions nice and routine…domestic as pets.”
“Oh yeah?” Juice shot back, finally emerging from a crack in the wall. “At least all I do is suck their blood!”
Predator prompted his human to tear a strip of duct tape from the roll on his arm, reach up to the bedbug emerging from the crack, and pluck it from existence. “What’s worse than feeding on human blood?” Predator asked, knowing all too well what Juice would say. All live action characters (creatures of the character kind) know the ruling king currency of our planet isn’t gold, stuff, or blood. It’s The Action.
Another bug emerged from the crack and said, “All we do is suck their blood…you suck their hearts, minds, and souls.”
“Oh please!” Predator roared. “You know your infestation controls the actions of this poor human. The difference between us Juice, is our team doesn’t use The Fear to control Jake. He can kill us off anytime he wishes.”
“Well, our human kills us everyday…”
“Not the same,” Predator stated flatly. “You know your guy only kills your insect hosts everyday. He doesn’t have even the faintest control of The Slumberland Infestation you’ve developed to pacify him.”
Predator cued the duct-tape killing of three more bugs while Bookmaker continued to chat with Hoarder #1. Every time one of their host bugs died, we could hear Juice laughing like Lord Vader deep in the walls.
Predator paused their banter and took another look around the room. There was only one path through the tiny one room unit, and it appeared (based on the large piece of foam rolled next to the closet) that 2 human were living there. Bookmaker confirmed that fact. Hoarder #1 had a nephew who had been living there as well. Apparently, as the story goes, his nephew was the one responsible for the mountain of dirty and clean clothes piled in the kitchen.
“Nice work,” Predator said finally. “You found a good hoard to hide behind here, bug.”
“Oh we’re very happy here,” Juice laughed. “We’ve been here for more than 2 years…”
“2 years!!!” Predator almost choked on the words.
“To be fair to our human host…he really isn’t a classic hoarder. You’ll find that you won’t be able to trigger an emotion response from Our Guy when you separate him from a piece of his hoard. He’s more like a messy person living in a tiny apartment with his nephew, who he helps because he’s a Classic Tough Guy With a Heart of Gold. He’s not a true hoarder…the kind of guy who cries and throws a tantrum and wants to die when someone scratches his sports car, or a sudden drop in the price of of his stocks, or diverse, forces him to sell half his hoard.”
“Not a true hoarder huh…” Predator pondered thoughtfully. “Then why are you here?”
“Just you wait and see,” Juice laughed. “Just you wait and see!”
That night, we presented our acton plan to Landlord. Our pitch was simple. Bookmaker explained to Landlord that most companies who claim the ancient and honorific title of “bedbug destroyers,” aren’t capable of exterminating a dual hoard/bug infestation because they don’t actively hunt bedbugs. The Action usually flows something like this: a) company issues a long, jangled preparation list to the said Hoarder; b) said Hoarder doesn’t have a friend with a truck, or saving to hire a fake friend with a truck, or the physical ability to empty all their dressers, launder and bag all their clothes, put the bags in kitchen or bathroom, pull all their furniture a foot from the walls, and do The Hokey Hokey and turn themselves around; c) and then, when the inevitable happens and the said Hoarder fails to comply, they’re evicted on the grounds of health reasons. Usually the pitch swings the other way. The pest control company explains that “health concerns” can be a blessing, or an “eviction warp zone” (for you millennials), which frees the landlord from the usual long, drawn out process of riding themselves of a hoarder. We know this extremely lucrative storyline between landlords and pest control companies as The Eviction Business, and it’s usually pitched and sold with a lot of well worn one liners, quips, and odes to responsibility and tough love. The tenants who are usually targeted by the Tough Lovers of The Eviction Business aren’t always true Hoarders; like the characters who will bomb or burn a village down if you steal their gold, or harm their economy. Other characters include Single Parent, Low Income Working Parent, Disabled Non Worker, Elderly, and Messy Adult, all the humans hosted characters who, for a range of reasons, can’t keep their piles of clothes, toys, books, and stuff from piling into hoards.
We, on the other hand, pitched Landlord a fairly radical action plan. We told him that the only effective way to kill off Juice and the other Heroes of Slumberland who had piggly backed on a hoarding singularity to hide behind was to hunt and end both infestations at the same time. We called it a “harborage removal service” (like it was one of Guide’s environmental controls) even though it was, clearly, a Hoarder character control service. And we kept our prices low enough for both services to make it make sense. “After all,” Jake said on the phone. “Even if you evict them, you’ll still have to pay someone to haul all that junk away. And you know they’ll charge extra for hauling bedbug infested junk.”
The radical part of that plan we liked the most was the part where we, the pest control operator, amped up The Action of their services with real work. For too long, pest control operators have profited by playing The Authority Figure character, who tells tenants and homeowners what to do, but they won’t lift a finger (even for a price) to fix the rat holes, move the carpenter ant infested old wood, or help an overwhelmed tenant sort and throw away their bedbug infested stuff. Operators like to think of themselves like soldiers with spray guns who’s job it is pull the trigger and kill the Bad Guys. They prefer to leave the food growing, wall building, homemaking hard work to the poor townsfolk. Watch any action movie, it’s always the non-hero supporting cast types who build the walls and traps to prepare for the villains arrival while the Hero sits back and supervises the work, watching and waiting like a bedbug for the right time to “bite” the Bad Guys.
A week later, we were standing in the middle of The Hoard putting our action plan to work.
“What do you think?” Predator asked as he held up an old leather jacket to show Hoarder #1 the bugs crawling on it. “Should we try to save it, or toss it?”
Pausing, “chin to mouth,” Hoarder #1 said, “Hum…I don’t know…that’s a nice jacket.”
Over a hundred items later, each discernibly placed in either “the shit can” or a bag for laundry or storage, we finally cleared the epicenter of The Infestation:
Aside from removing enough harborage to spray the epicenter, the goal was also to install a new boxspring and mattress for my new friend Hoarder #1. It took some convincing, but Landlord had agreed to pay for it. “If we can remove his infested mattress and box spring,” Predator explained to Landlord on the phone. “You’ll be killing enough bedbugs in the removal process to save us at least one service.” Not only was the mattress and box spring infested inside and out, it was worn well beyond its expiration date. If it was a pair of old shoes, it would have had holes in it all its toes.
[ Note the plastic along the wall in the background of that photo. That’s a clever DYI pest control device. The bugs get caught behind the plastic on their way to their host, where the host can kill them like soldiers on an open field with ease. ]
During the first hunt at The Humble Apartments, Predator removed an entire pickup full of infested stuff and harborage, including Hoarder #1’s mattress and boxspring and Manager’s homemade bed frame. Two weeks later, Predator packed our humans truck “Ranger Jane” full again. The service featured the removal of Hoarder #1’s infested entertainment center and dresser. Predator shared a moment with Manager when he asked if he’d help him move the massive dresser down to the truck. Most humans (very nearly 100%) would have freaked out at the thought of lifting and moving a dresser, facing live bedbugs inches from your face, but not Manager. He didn’t even flinch. When they were done, Predator wanted to share his warm feelings with Manger, so he gave Manager a “mind hug” shared between two consenting live acton characters. As Predator’s fond of saying, “Physical contact is overrated.” A good action is never wasted, in or out.
Long story short, in 3 killer bedbug hunts Predator was able to eradicate all of the bugs in Manager’s apartment and clear enough of The Hoard to do a proper chemical application: baseboards, under bed frame, inside epicenter closet, and even the baseboards behind the mountain of clothes, which had been sorted, (mostly) washed and dried, and relocated in a truck full of storage bins that Predator bought on sale at Freddy’s before The Virus hit. Turns out, that was a good thing to buy. A few months later, Farmer Emily discovered that bins had become a hot commodity, out of stock and pricy.
All the signs were looking good, until we got an email from Landlord. The word was out. The Humble Apartment had another “hoarder” and he had bedbugs too. Manger had already described this tenant, saying, “We have sort of a hands off policy here. You know, as long as the rent gets paid…” Through the meandering process of piecing a coherent and accurate story together, we learned that Hoarder #1 and Hoarder #2 were both in their late fifties/early sixties and they had both lived in The Humble for more than twenty years.
No doubt, this wasn’t their first rodeo. Before Predator knocked on Hoarder #2’s door to do his inspection, Bookmaker drew a horrifying mental picture to harass him. The picture showed a progression of all the characters who had played in the same scene, and knocked on the same door, prepared to do battle with the dreaded Hoarder. First was the parent who screamed “clean up your room!” followed by the teacher who scolded “organize your desk!” followed by the supervisor who calmly (through gritted teeth) asked “please clean your work van.” Next in line was the social worker armed with star chart trackers, legal drugs, and The Latest Theory who was determined to return the hoarding infestation to the routine rules and orders of civilization. Clearly all of them had failed, and Predator was just the newest sucker to saunter to the mouth of the cave and raise his shiny sword to face The Hoard.
Predator’s response was classic Predator. “Fuck all that,” he shot back. “I’m only here to hunt the bugs.”
“Hello?” Hoarder #2 answered the door like a question.
After a few minutes of introduction and routine questions about the bugs, we finally opened the door enough to see The Hoard in full. The small 3×3 space where the door swung open was the only space not filled floor to ceiling with stuff. No walkway to the back room. No space to access the kitchen. No living room to sit, kick off the shoes, and relax after a long day of work with a beer and bad TV.
“I have to ask…” Predator asked. “Where do you sleep?”
Hoarder #2 pointed to the foam pad teetering at the top of his most immediate pile. Predator knelt down and took a closer look at the sleeping area just inside the door. He saw the diatomaceous earth and the spotting/bedbug droppings on the newspaper bags all around. “Nightmare scenario” didn’t begin to describe it.
Like cowards, we fled from that scene as quickly as we could…offering safety advice about the health hazards of inhaling bug killing dust as the the door closed, once again, on The Hoard.
At first we rejected the job, sighting the fact that (even if we wanted to do it) we couldn’t move The Hoard with only one human host employed on our payroll. Wilderness Guide, Bookmaker, and our receptionist Jake all remembered our recent misadventures with our human’s late, great, hoarding uncle “Just Jim,” which had been digested throughly in our first live action novel, The Rise and Fall of The Novel Corporation. It was Predator who stood alone.
“I started to hunt this infestation,” Predator cried aloud like a Viking in town square. “And I will not back down!”
It was more than Predator’s need to win victories than dragged us into the cave with him. We knew our teammate like we knew ourselves, and we knew he needed, more than any of us, to finish what he started. He needed to hunt like our human needed chips, pizza, and beer. It was Guide who threw her live action vote first.
“I can use a break from breathing insulation in crawlspaces,” Guide replied. “Let’s do this.”
We all turned our attention to Bookmaker. He was already on the couch eating pizza and watching his favorite action simulation on The Fourth Wall. It was the part of The Wall called Vikings on Hulu. At the end of 3 action packed episodes, he turned to our team. “You know,” he began rhetorically as usual. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to send a big ‘fuck you’ to those industry assholes in The Eviction Business by showing them a better way to hunt Juice?”
“Yes,” Guide smiled. “That would be awesome.”
The next day, we pitched Landlord an insanely low price to hopefully keep his interest through the whole ordeal. A few days later, we were once again standing at the mouth of The Hoard. We carried no tanks full of pesticide, or fancy dust, or some stupid bug killing program designed in The Industry’s Bug Lab. All we had was a big roll of plastic bags and Ranger Jane (our human’s beat up old truck) ready for action on the street outside. Our first goal was to get Hoarder #2 off the ground, away from the front door (where the infestation could…and did…spread easily to his neighbors), and sleeping in a bed. That way Juice and all the other Heroes of Slumberland would have to climb the bed to reach their host. As it stood, Juice could hide anywhere, in anything, within a few feet of their host’s sleeping area on the floor. In warfare, general’s refer to this classic strategy as “picking the terrain.” Predator wanted Juice to follow their host to the edges of a mattress, where he could find them and pluck them off, one by one (if needed), easy as shooting deer in an open meadow.
Each for our own reasons, Storysold: Pest Control liked Hoarder #2. He was a hardworking career temp worker who didn’t have a set schedule, a freedom most employees take for granted. He waited for The Call from his agency everyday. When it came in, he took the bus to work, worked his shift, and returned to wait again. He had a radio, but no TV. He clearly didn’t drink to excess or do drugs. He was interested in nutrition, eating right, and remembered fondly his younger days when he once biked from Seattle to Portland in some kind of event. He had the usual loner habit of monologuing, which didn’t bother any of us except Bookmaker who is, of course, also an epic monologuer. But Bookmaker let that one roll off him, because he was genuinely in awe of Hoarder #2’s storytelling powers.
“What about this?” we’d say, holding an item up from The Hoard. “Can this go?”
Every item we held up was a precious part of his creation. The kitchen was buried, but the pot we held up was the perfect pot to cook his favorite dish when he got more organized. And so on.
Predator identified it immediately. It was The American Dream in action. The Hoard was built on an interconnected web of “some day” dreams. Some day you’ll use those skis again. Some day you’ll need that box full of lawn games when you invite your friends over for a backyard barbecue. Some day you’ll use that tool in your garage to build a shed to store all your tools in the backyard. Some day The End days will come and you’ll need a AR-15 with a sniper scope. No doubt, this was Juice’s doing. When the Heroes of Slumberland weren’t busy sucking human blood, they were building Slumberland (aka The Fourth Wall) and stocking it full of action less dreams that have less than zero chance of becoming true.
After two full truck loads to the Metro Transfer Station (and a last pre-quarantine lunch at Subway), we were really beginning to enjoy the rhythm of sorting through The Hoard, discovering little pockets of bugs, sealing them in bags, and then making our runs to the dump. We talked a lot about our childhoods, our human’s old Marine character, and sharing the best of our work stories. Hoarder #2 had some good ones. Like the time his boss from the Oregonian tossed 50 gallons of a flammable printing substance away and ended up setting the dump on fire.
As we sorted and inspected, I discovered that The Hoard had a few familiar American dream themes: 1) bike gear 2) travel magazines 3) cooking 4) flashlights, 2) shopping bags (reusable and paper), 3) daily newspapers, 4) Terry cloth towels, and 5) porn. Lots and lots of good old fashioned porn.
“At least it’s not another Precious Moments collection,” Bookmaker laughed.
Wilderness Guide took her usual position on The High Ground. “No crimes are ever committed by characters who objectify happy childhood memories.”
“Oh contraire!” Bookmaker laughed again. “Why do you think Shrinks are so obsessed with unlocking the childhood memories of their patients? At least, in most case, porn leads to some sort of pleasurable action.”
“And I suppose objectifying Precious Moments makes our hosts miserable?”
“Are you kidding?” Bookmaker rolled with laughter. “The Fourth Wall is like 65.3% built with nostalgia for youthful days of Drive Ins, Milkshakes, and Sweetheart Kisses on the Cheek. At least they try to censure sex fiction.”
Then suddenly, out of the blue, Predator turned to his team and said, “Ok, I need to say something to the team…”
“Well then, say it!” Bookmaker mocked.
“In private,” Predator said, as he prompted our human to drop his bag of hoard and walk away. A moment later, on the sidewalk outside The Humble Apartments, Predator let us have it. “We’re not here to play psychotherapist…and try to figure out The Hoard like it was a got-damed math equation!” he shouted like a drill instructor. “Standing apart, figuring out stupid nonsense isn’t going to help us end this infestation!”
We had no reply for that. Predator was right. In The End, The Action is all that matters. So we stopped trying to figure out The Hoard (and its collective core of porn) and put our better characteristics to work.
1,250 pounds of hoard later, Juice’s human host was off the floor sleeping in a bed we made for him. The window shown in the photo below was literally the light at the end of the tunnel we burrowed through The Hoard with a lot of hard work, iron wills, and a lot of patience and humor >
And yes, you can use glue boards to catch bedbugs…
At the infestation’s peak, we were active hunting bugs in 4 occupied units, 2 vacant units, 2 shared bathrooms, 2 storage rooms, and the laundry area. There is so much more to this story; like the part where we waited months waiting for the last of Juice’s hoard-hiders to emerge from the cracks and wall voids and shopping bags; or the part where small pockets of bugs popped up in Hoarder #1’s storage (from the clothes bags of Clothes Mountain he didn’t wash) and migrated to the shared bathrooms; or the part where Hoarder #2 failed to use his new bed and propped it up to make more space; or the adventure we took with Hoarder #1 to his friend’s apartment in a low income high rise in Hollywood to make sure The Infestation wasn’t going to reignite there, and then hitchhike back to his home. Or the part where, no matter what we did, there is still a 75.3% chance that Juice will find their way back to The Humble Apartments. There is so much more to this story, but thanks to our new friends Hoarder #1 and #2, Manger, Landlord, Property Manager, and Hoarder #2’s Neighbor we’re feeling more sensitive than ever to the hoarding of our American Dream.
Today is our second day off in a month, and Storysold: Pest Control would rather not waste any more time recollecting and objectifying the actions of this service story. It’s time to get our human off his ass (go running, or do the dishes, or make dinner for Farmer Emily) do something, anything, before we become a part of our little hoard of literary gold.
And while we’re away, engaged in The Action, we suggest strongly that you imagine this story exactly as we wrote it. Memorize and learn it “by heart” it like all the collections of Precious Moments the teachers teach. Don’t you dare edit it (even by accident), or digest our treasured words in a messy way.
Because there will be a test, and if you fail we will send Predator to shit can your precious hoard too.
Wouldn’t it suck to have to start over from The Beginning? All that hard work and sacrifice lost?
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that’s just the point of reaching…
PRODUCED FOR ANNA AT HAGRID’S CABIN, AN AIRBNB THAT WE’VE SERVED SINCE AUGUST 21, 2019.
“High on Larch Mt., overlooking The Columbia River that once brought the first invasive humans to Oregon, there stood a cabin so wild and beautiful it broke reality, beyond The Fourth Wall, to that magical place where Lamorians run through the trees looking for gold, wizards battle dragons with sticks, and Rubeus Hagrid the Gentle Gamekeeping Giant sometimes struggles to keep his mouse friends out of his beard…”
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the environmental control operator in charge of rodent services for Storysold: Pest Control. I feel like I should make some kind of apology or disclaimer for the service story you’re about to read, but I’m not. Instead I’m going to be a good teammate and say nice things about this story. I authorized Bookmaker Jake to ghost write it for me, and I hope you enjoy it!
For a few years the lovable star of the Harry Potter series, Rubeus Hagrid, was able to balance his wizardly duties and do his job as gamekeeper too.
He tried to run missions for Abus Dumbledore, help Harry and his friends when he got in trouble, and still have time to make his nightly rounds in the forest managing the populations of hippogriffs and flobberworms.
He tried, but his fellow wizards were needy. Villain after villain rose from the pages of their lives like roaches in a Vegas diner, and they all depended on their old buddy Hagrid to stand and fight The Good Fight with them.
Then one day it happened. The stress of his daily heroism found a name…
He returned to one of his favorite cabins overlooking The Columbia River Gorge after a long day of wizarding, plopped down in his cozy chair, and fell asleep. When he woke he rubbed his eyes and looked down, into his beard, for the first time in months. He couldn’t believe it. There was a small family of mice nesting right under his nose!
“What the..!?” Hagrid exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Nesting,” they replied in unison.
“Not on my watch you’re not!” he thundered as he rose, shaking the mice from his beard. The family all jumped and ran, scattering in all directions.
As gamekeeper, it was his job to keep the populations of wild creatures in the forest from becoming a mysterious force few Muggles know anything about. The word Hagrid and his friends use to describe That Thing Creatures Become When They’re Not in Control of Themselves cannot be translated into Muggle, but the closest inaccurate English word is the word “infestation.” The Infestation is that unseen thing a herd, flock, band, pack, tribe, gaggle, or family can become when their population becomes too large to manage, or control, without outside help. The most obvious sign of The Infestation is a lack of conflict (and wildness) within the population, which inspires healthy doses of diversity and balance. Predator free shelter, abundant food, and the creation of a singular population control center, all are signs of the phenomena Hagrid and his wizard friends nicknamed, The Suck.
Hagrid understood the dangers of keeping dangerous pets more than anyone. It got him in trouble more than once. (Remember the dragon egg!) He was very aware that any creature caught in “an infestation spell” loses all control of themselves. Like a bad house cat (or a growing baby dragon), the infestation spell makes its host feel free, almost immortal, like they will never have to worry about food, shelter, or death ever again. They surrender their wildness, responsibility, and control of their actions to the singular, centralized control center of The Infestation. Once they do, they fall into The Suck like a zombie. They live to feed (and feed to live) like a pet, because The Suck has reduced the diverse range of actions the wild creatures were once capable of producing to One Scripted Routine. “More” is the only action The Suck knows, and all it’s energy is hyper-focused on making big, even bigger.
Deep down, Hagrid loved wild creatures: dragons, spiders, and monster dogs, so he didn’t try to trap the mice at first. He tried to cast protection spells on his cabin with his umbrella wand, but it didn’t work. As soon as he cast his first spell, Voldemort countered his spell by opening hidden portals in the walls, under the siding, under the doors, and underground for the mice to enter the cabin.
To make matters worse, when Hagrid wasn’t in his cabin on Larch Mt., he allowed a few of his favorite Muggle friends to rest and relax there. Few Muggles know this, but he was the first to coin the term “Airbnb.” Hagrid could have asked for their help fighting The Infestation, but he knew Dumbledore would frown on the idea of teaching Muggles the gamekeepers’ magic.
Luckily, a half-wizard friend of his Anna heard about Hagrid’s troubles on Larch Mt. and flew in her magic van to help. The first thing she did was wait for Hagrid and his friends to leave, and then she had a heart-to-heart with the mice.
“You’re under Voldemort’s infestation spell,” she spoke in Mouseese.
“Say what?” the mice laughed.
“No seriously,” Anna explained. “You need to leave the cabin before you become so well fed and unafraid of predators you lose your wildness forever.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” the mice laughed louder. “Silly Muggle! We are mice! It’s scientifically impossible for wild mice to lose the wildness of our characters. Any real wizard knows that!”
Anna tried to warn the mice away from The Infestation a few more times, but her word spells had no lasting effect on them. She wasn’t a wild creature, but she was a half wizard…and she knew that most earth creatures are more likely to understand, respect, and respond to action spells.
So she dug deep and began to cast action spells…
She didn’t know the gamekeepers’ magic, but she knew the Muggle version of gamekeepers’ magic. Humans call the people do who that sort of Muggle magic “pest control operators,” and Anna decided to hire a new nearby company to trap the mice in the cabin and send a clearer message of action she hoped they would understand.
Roughly, translated into mousese, the message Anna wanted to send was “Stay out!”
The new company was calling itself “Storysold: Pest Control.” It was owned and operated by a human named Jake. Unlike other companies, Storysold: Pest Control wasn’t a normal business entity. It didn’t have its own immaterial governing body and or corporate character that hosts the actions of many humans. Storysold: Pest Control is a human: one organic, hand-shakable, flawed and fleshy governing body named Jake who hosts many live action, customer service characters. Hosting many characters helps him stay balanced, in control, wild, and free from the troubles caused by the self infesting, addictive, responsibility sucking super characters that rule most companies. Storysold was founded on the simple fact that a pest control company has to first be able to control itself before it can control anything else.
Day one on the job, Jake brought his whole team of “stage magic” customer service characters along to help Hagrid and Anna battle Voldemont’s infestation spell: Wilderness Security Guide, The Pest Predator, and Bookmaker Jake, but Jake chose Wilderness Security Guide to play the main character for our production of Hagrid’s Cabin. She usually leads all our rodent services with her sharp-eye for tracking The Action, but Predator sometimes takes the lead when she needs the help.
Guide cleared and reset the first company’s old traps, and then he added twice as many in places where he suspected Voldemort had cast his hidden entry portals. Guide doesn’t use anti-coagulant bait poisons like most rodent control operators, because she’s very aware that everything, including poisoned mice, will one day end up on her plate. Besides, it takes skill to use traps. And Guide the one of the best in the business of trapping creatures caught in The Infestation.
On our second service to Hagrid’s cabin, Guide cleared seven mice from her traps. Her end game wasn’t to kill mice. She didn’t didn’t see her role as a wild, live action human character to be the primary predator of mice. Like a good, all-American tycoon, she believe in delegation. She considered mice hunting (and digesting) the work of lesser predators like owls, weasels, fox, and hawks. Guide was hunting The Infestation—The Suck itself–and every tripped trap gave her more information about the size, strength, and movement of the unseen, immaterial, super villain she was tracking in The Action of the cabin like a Ghostbuster tracking an unwanted phantasm.
The second customer service character on Jake’s pest control team was The Pest Predator. Predator was much too alien to be a human character. He embraced his weaknesses–traits the humans called Attention Deficit Disorder, Autism, and Bi-Polar Disorder–and transformed them into strengths. Like Guide, he specialized in the finding of entry holes and infestation portals and shutting them down, but unlike his teammate, Predator was gifted with The 2nd Person Perspective, a fierce love/hate relationship with The Action that’s needed for tracking and hunting the mircoworld of insects. While Predator belly crawled every accessible inch of the cabin tracking the microworld for signs of The Dark Lord’s entry portals, Wilderness Guide flew high above The Action and cobbled a working description of The Infestation from her Bird’s Eye Perspective.
One of Guide’s first discoveries was a mouse-sized gap under the door leading up from the basement, which she believed accounted for the activity Hagrid’s guests reported in the kitchen and other places in the cabin. She also found a few large holes that looked like burrows leading from the outside down under the foundation. On her second service she filled them with gravel. On the
Predator and Guide have a lot of themes in common, but the one that polarizes them is the use of chemicals, poisons, and pesticides. Pest Predator is our chemical control operator. He believes in the targeted use of chemicals to control bugs and rodents, but Guide does not. She hates using blood thinning anti-coagulant poisons on her mice friends for two reasons: 1) slowly bleeding to death inside over the span of 24 to 48 hours is a cruel way to kill any earth creature, and 2) introducing poison baits to The Food Chain is bad. At best it spoils her owl friends’ meals; at worse it can kill them.
Normally, pest control companies put bait poisons in stations outside homes and businesses to thin rodent populations. It’s by far the most common method of rodent control. Clearly our team needed some way of thinning the rodent population outside Hagrid’s cabin, but how to do that, in the best of all possible ways, was far clear. That’s when, I (Bookmaker Jake) was asked to host an official team meeting for the purpose of writing a new service storyline. My teammates will deny this at every turn, but I’m the real leader here. I’m gifted with The First Person Perspective.
After a long jangled meeting, we finally agreed to put action to the storyline we called, The Volehalla Rodent System. It was already in existence. We used for “open field trapping” at Farmer Emily’s Full Cellar Farm, but our “shelter bait” rodent boxes had yet to be tested for use around home fronts and other human territories. Here’s a brief description of that storyline:
THE VOLEHALLA RODENT SYSTEM: All the voles, field mice, and rats living on your farm or garden know is, “game on.” Food is everywhere, and their natural predators are eating Science Diet for their urinary track infections. The Master Switch flips and their population explodes. Now, instead of facing predators, they begin to police themselves and form rank structures and hierarchies. No wild creature enjoys being policed by their own (it’s humiliating), so the brave ones—the missionaries, soldiers, and astronauts—explore in hope of a better world. “Oh utopia! Oh heaven! Oh shelter! Oh Portland!” The ratonauts see that dark, unexplored hole in our shelter-bait rodent box and snap! Their ancestors welcome them through the gates of Volehalla.
It was the first time since Jake began to host Storysold: Pest Control that all three of his customer service characters worked As One Flesh on a single storyline: Predator picked likely rodent runways, Guide trained her owl-like eyes on the foundation searching for portals, Jake followed their advice and installed the Volehalla boxes around the cabin, and I (Bookmaker Jake) inspired the team by stealing glances at the cabin’s beautiful view of The Columbia River Gorge.
The Volehalla Rodent System was an immediate success. The numbers of mice we caught inside dropped as the numbers caught outside increased. In some cases, one box would catch as many as four mice in the five traps set in a row between the holes. We had no way to measure its success against a classic poison bait station system, because the bait stations have no way of tracking how many mice, rats, or small squirrels it kills. Only how much poison has been consumed from the station by some earth creature, which often included ants and slugs.
Based on the advise of Hagrid’s friendly neighbor, we set a few for rats around an unused shed. We only had 4 traps set, and the boxes caught 2 rats in a month.
It was that service, when we cleared the 2nd rat from our trap, the smell of death triggered the presence of a familiar character: Voldemort!
“Looks like you’re really winning Guide!” Voldemort laughed. “No doubt, Anna and Hagrid will be proud of the work your little band of rebel characters are doing here.”
“Band of rebels?” Guide laughed back. “We’re not rebelling against anything. We’re the new norm in pest control, so you better get used to it.”
The Dark Lord flew a few feet higher than Guide’s bird’s eye perch, robbing her of her usual perspective high ground. “Oh sorry about that crack about rebels,” he snickered. “I’ve never read any of The Harry Potter books, so I have to imagine what this Voldemort guy sounds like to you humans. Darth Vader is always a favorite. In my humble opinion, he’s the classic figurehead for the classic human infestation called ’empire.’ Oh how I love to hear those empires grow and go pop!”
“Yeah sure,” Guide said as she panned her perspective out, a few feet further than The Infested Head, like a cat struggling with its human to stay atop its pride. “Whatever you say, wacko.”
“Yes,” he snickered again. “I have to say I love watching you try to battle my infestation with you’re primitive control techniques. You’re no match for the power of my magic.”
“What magic?” Guide replied. “I can track any action on earth, even magic ones.”
“This has been so much fun!” he roared with laughter. “I hate to ruin it by telling you the truth.”
Guide eyed her prey as he once again took The High Ground from her.
“Ok you win. Tell me the truth about what?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” The Dark Lord said, tapping his fingertips together. “If you acknowledge the fact that most heroes are repressives who struggle to share their feelings and emotions with others, and generally fear any real relationship that forces them to break out of their righteous, little, indivisible Truth Castles, I will do my villain thing and share my diabolical plan with you…”
Guide took a quick survey of her teammates. Predator was busy tracking a nearby ant trail, obviously unimpressed by Guide’s banter with The Dark Lord. Bookmaker, on the other hand, was loving every moment of it. He was grinning big like a proud parent, giving Guide two thumbs up.
“Sharing is what grown adults do,” was all Bookmaker had to say on the subject.
“Yeah,” Guide sighed. “I see your point. Villains can be better at communicating than heroes.”
“Not good enough,” he beamed infectiously. “I want you to admit that villains, as a whole, are a lot better at sharing their feelings than heroes. That’s why they always lose. Heroes take the sharing as a sign of weakness, and use it against them. Happens in every Hollywood action movie featuring Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Mel Gibson, and The Rock.”
“Leave The Rock out of this!” Guide shot back, suddenly very angry. “I love The Rock.”
Voldemort was cool as a cucumber. “Whatever you say Hero.”
Guide took a long, deep breath and said, “You’re right. Villains as a whole are a lot better at sharing their feelings than heroes.”
When Voldemort heard that he cupped his hands to his mouth and announced, “Did you hear that one Hagrid? How about you Anna? You hired a real villain sympathizer here…next thing you know she’ll be filling your fridge with free-range chicken eggs and organic vegetables!”
“Good one…” Guide said unenthusiastically. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself…I just wanted to show you how I could spin the drama and use your sharing of feelings against you…you know if I wanted to do so.”
“Get on with it! We have a bedbug hunt in an hour!”
“Ok, ok, keep your feathers on,” he smiled. “I hate to ruin my diabolical plan by sharing it with you, but that’s what we villains do. We self-destruct. Like an infestation that runs out of control.”
“You’re still stalling…” Guide said as she folded her arms and flew higher than before.
“I call my plan, Systemic Death Production Disorder,” Voldemort said, settling into his perspective a few feet below Guide. “I have you all so EXCITED about sending all your wilderness creature friends to Volehalla, you’ve forgotten all about ending my infestation.
Guide was speechless. Truth hurt.
“Keep this up,” The Dark Lord continued, “you’ll be no better than my immortal generic character The Orkin Man. You’ll get rich, one reoccurring monthly service at a time. Embrace it. It’ll be easy. And besides, why would you ever want to end your service to such a beautiful story?”
He had us there. Hagrid’s cabin was a beautiful place to work, but we’d made Hagrid and Anna a promise to hunt and end The Infestation.
Guide sat at the edge of our van, looking glumly into The Wilderness with the smell of the dead rat sill in her nose. She didn’t know what to do. She’d poured gravel in all the holes around the foundation she could find, installed a fancy foam door sweep on the basement door, and excluded all the entry holes she could find around the exterior. Even Predator agreed they’d run out of ideas.
While all this drama was happening outside, Anna and Hagrid were hanging out inside quietly watching The Action. Until now, neither of them had used any magic to help the Muggle owned pest control company they hired to battle The Infestation.
“Do you suppose we should help her?” Hagrid asked as he picked through his beard, looking for signs of mice that were no longer there.
“We should,” she smiled, “but it feels so nice to relax…you know…let the Muggles figure it out for themselves. Like big kids.”
“I hear that!” Hagrid chuckled joyfully. “It has been nice to relax…and stop rushing off to fix every crisis that Harry and his friends get themselves into…”
The two wizards didn’t talk for a nice long while. They shared a few homemade newt head cookies dunked in purple dragon’s milk, and pretended to be like humans and watch a TV show.
“I’m going to do it,” Hagrid said out of The Blue.
“I already did,” Anna grinned and dunked another newt head cookie in her dragon’s milk.
Hagrid looked around, trying to spot Anna’s sly act of magic. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he looked over at his old friend and asked, “I give up. What did you do?”
“I cast a winter spell,” Anna chuckled. “Guide should discover it anytime now.”
“A winter spell!” Hagrid boomed with joy. “Brilliant!”
Right on cue, when Guide was done falling into The Suck of defeat, she and Predator took another lap around the foundation and saw it. It was a clear rodent tunnel along the edge of the foundation they’d missed the month before, because of a bush had blocked their view.
Anna’s Winter Spell had made all the leaves wither and fall, reveling an entry tunnel leading directly under the foundation!
“Ha!” Guide cried aloud when we found it. “Take that Voldemort!”
The Dark Lord watched at a distance as our team dug out the tunnel, plugged the entry point with foam, and covered the trail with gravel. The portal that had fed The Infestation for so long was now officially CLOSED.
“Drat!” Voldemort cried, feigning defeat. “I should have never shared my diabolical plan with you characters! Alack, alack! Now I shall never win!”
While Predator and Guide worked, basking in the glow of their victory, Bookmaker Jake wondered how a villain could lose with so much flare and intention and still be The Villain. There has to be something we’re missing here, Bookmaker thought to himself. I think that Asshole’s letting us win…but I don’t know why. Is he somehow still winning…and quietly robbing us of our victory?
I can’t be sure. Maybe I imagined it. But I thought I saw The Infestation flicker, fade, and suck back into the immaterial form of Voldemort. Ones and zeroes, The Suck had simply changed vectors. The mice were now no longer the agents of infestation, The Dark Lord had taken the all power of The Infestation into himself like a dragon sucking in oxygen for another fireball.
We felt that The End was near, but we still hadn’t had a service were no mice were caught inside. For a true victory, we needed to clear Hagrid’s beard for good…
Two months later, we were checking the Volehalla boxes behind the shed. It must have just happened. The snake, a beautiful fat red racer, was writhing with its head caught in a rat trap.
Bookmaker was convinced it was Voldemort in the flesh. “Kill it!” he cried in fear.
As usual, I didn’t listen to my teammate. But I too had become convinced that we needed to kill the snake. Not for fear, but for mercy. I was sure the snake wouldn’t survive…
Shovel in hand, I was about to do The Right Thing and “put it out of its misery” when I felt the weight of a familiar giant’s hand rest on our head. Hagrid didn’t say anything. He simply laughed like he was watching a child trying to tie their own shoes for the first time.
I put down the shovel, opened the box, and lifted the bar from the snake’s neck. Then I went about my business.
When we returned at The End of our service, the snake was nowhere to be seen.
It had vanished back into The Wilderness to live another day.
THE FOLLOWING SERVICE STORY WAS ONE OF OUR FIRST EPIC EXCLUSIONS THAT KICKED THE OLD INDUSTRY SCRPT.
Produced for Summer L. in Portland, OR
When I met Summer that day, I didn’t tell her the truth.
Not too unlike an employee working for a company, I didn’t disclose my true identity. I am only the human host of Storysold: Pest Control. The business is run by my customer service characters: The Pest Predator, Bookmaker, and one of my oldest characters, Wilderness Security Guide.
I’m not planning to introduce my characters until our Grand Opening, but Guide took a special interest in Summer’s service story.
You see, Guide knows Summer lives in prime rodent hunting territory, and she never misses an opportunity to feed her wild creature friends. Like I tried to explain during the service, we could set poison around Summer’s home and do our best to kill off every rat and mouse in the neighborhood, or we could do like the wild creatures do…and mark our territory in such a way that rats understand what happens when they cross The Line.
An owl has to make a living too! And Wilderness Guide was determined to help Summer push the rats and mice out of her home and force them back into the urban wilderness predators.
To that end, I suited up, inspected Summer’s home, and I found:
The vent along the back patio had a gap in front, but that wasn’t the entry point. Not really. It had a monster gap between the patio and the ground that offered the mice (and other creatures) easy access to the unfinished basement/crawl/wild home space. The only thing blocking their entry was a puzzle of non-load bearing, loosely stacked concrete blocks, which were held in place by a piece of wood wedged against the top sill.
Here’s the front view with the marker I stuff in it >
The most obvious Tom-and-Jerry hole (low hanging fruit) was in the front yard vent. “It’s too easy,” was Guide’s reply when we found it. I agreed, it’s an entry point, but I’m not convinced it’s the one. That’s why I set a half a dozen traps between it and Summer’s kitchen, where the activity is.
Note the beautiful shot of your flower. I’m like a photographer! Someday Guide will be in the business of supplying mason bee homes.
On the other side of that tiny crawl space in front of your home is another gap and possible entrypoint, which I marked >
That I will need to be repaired from inside and out. It’s kind of a medley of parts that don’t quite fit together.
Next up is the two vents to the left of the door. They’re not active, but the dry rot has almost completely destroyed their frames.
“Something must be done about these vents!” cried Guide aloud when she saw the gaps leading from the driveway.
Next, I found a possible runway in the unfinished basement/lair. That one runs to the bathroom.
Also there’s a clear rodent runway (which I didn’t photo) leading from the corner next to the back patio vent into the secret/mystery kitchen crawl that also borders this strange monolith >
And least I forget the two rodent holes in the kitchen (under cabinet and the side of stove), all of which I plan to exclude with foam, wood, metal, or a mouse hunting robot that shoots lasers from its eyes.
Guide ended our first service with the ritual setting of “fishing traps” to determine the level and direction of activity. Guide never feels good about killing her wilderness creature friends, but she’s knows every creature that crawls, walks, and slithers on earth kills to eat, kills to make clothes and shelter, and kills to protect their home.
As always, Guide is clear about which side of The Magic Line (between wilderness and civilization) she stands on. She had no qualms about killing the mice in Summer’s home who’d surrendered their wild for an easy roof over their heads, kitchen scraps, and late night dog food snacks.
“The wilderness is vanishing before our eyes,” she said to her human Jake as he belly crawled through the dirt setting traps. “Humans and their pets can’t be blamed for their domestication. They’re dumbed down and tamed since birth, but I cannot abide traitors. The freeborn wild mice of Southeast Portland have a choice! They know what it means to be wild.”
Chapter 2: Trapping vs. Exclusion
It was a few weeks before Guide returned to The Owl Project. She had me schedule a full four hours to do some exclusion work, believing that would be enough time to get the job done.
The Second Service started smoothly enough. Guide read her traps and discovered that she was right. The two entrypoints in front and along the driveway weren’t active. All five (or so) of her kills were in the traps she set in front of The Monster Gap below the back patio. Her theory was, the would be civilized mice—traitors!—were running from that opening right around the corner into what she was calling the “mystery crawlspace.”
The work fixing the four vents didn’t take too long, but fixing The Monster Gap was more challenging than Guide had imagined.
“Argh!” I groaned as he twisted his body into place to face the jumble of concrete blocks. “This is going to be a good one.”
After I played with the blocks for a while like a kid with Legos, a plan began to form in my mind.
“Yeah, I know…” Guide replied after she heard my plan.
“What do you mean, you know?” I shouted silently at my teammate as the sweat dripped around the sides of my respirator. “It’s my plan!”
“Yeah, I know…I gave it to you,” she smiled. “Subliminally.”
“That’s what I hate about working with characters,” I whined like I always whine when I’m tired. “You’re always trying to take credit for all the good stuff I do, when really it’s all me…me, me, me.”
“Wrong,” Guide replied coolly. “We, the employed characters of Storysold: Pest Control are the work engines of your brain…your company. You just think it’s your plan because you can’t engage The Action that finally hits you like a boardroom presentation after all its work is done.”
“Whatever you say Guide,” I huffed as I began to put the plan into action. “I don’t have time for this. We have to be in another crawlspace in a hour.”
“You know there’s no law that says trapping and exclusion have to be done separately,” Guide offered slyly. “If you don’t finish today…and you saved some for next time…wouldn’t that mean more time, in general, to really get a good read on the trapping situation here?”
I tried to process that thought as I tried to free my twisted body enough to bend a large piece of hardware cloth in position. “I like that,” I said when I finally caught up. “Checking traps isn’t much of a service anyway, and I bet in time we could get really good at closing off entrypoints one by one, and creating runways that make our traps more effective…”
“You’re welcome,” Guide beamed proudly.
“For what?!”
“Giving you another idea.”
With that, I called it a day and climbed from the darkness.
As Summer and I talked about Guide’s new action plan to trap and exclude in the same service, I remembered the last text she sent me. Summer said she discovered a new hole in the corner of her kitchen. It was then that I saw it: droppings in corner next to dog door, droppings around the corner from dog door, and the answer to the mysterious crawl space. The mice weren’t coming up, through the pipes like usual…
“Oh my god!” I cried aloud. “It was the dog door all along!”
“Yeah,” Guide said coolly. “I knew that all along…”
Then Summer weighed in. “Oh, and I was wondering if they could also be coming in, up through this vent?”
Then she took a wood panel off the step into her kitchen and we saw the end of the same vent we’d already been trapping below.
“How did you miss this?” I shouted silently at Guide. “I thought you were supposed to have the supereconomic power of the bird’s eye third person perspective?”
While I was busy talking to myself, Summer added, “Oh, and my sister also noticed a lot of burrows along the walkway…”
“Shit sticks!” I cried again—immediately realizing that was likely the spot where the mice were tunneling to The Monster Gap.
I had a sudden urge to do the classic pest control guy thing and lie, saying something like, “Yea ma’am, we saw that. We’re leaving that runway open to make our trapping more effective.”
Lie wrapped in truth. Trapping is more effective if it’s left open, but we did not see the holes. We’d been so hyper focused on the broken vent screens and The Monster Gap we’d completely missed The Big Picture.
Chapter 3: The Action
Humiliated and humbled, my third service was all action. I planned out the new frame and screen combination for The MonsterGap, drank a lot of coffee, and fashioned it into being. I was surprised how well it went together.
I only used one small piece of concrete block!
I don’t have a before photo of the Monster Gap, but try to imagine 2 concrete blocks holding up a 2×4 and a highway of entry holes running from the gap under the back patio into Summer’s home.
Next I foamed the gaps around the kitchen vent from the crawlspace, a fewfeet from The Monster Gap. I also foamed the strange monolith (not shown here) around the corner.
Then I added store bought screens to the two vents along the driveway to reinforce the work I’d already done in crawl space.
By that time, Summer was gone. She had a meeting, so she told me to lock up before I left. I remember talking to her. I was in The Action zone, and it felt like everything I said to her was jangled and awkward. Sometimes it’s hard for me—and the rest of my team—to make what I call The Leap, or The Leap of Leaps. Basically, The Leap is that transition we humans make all the time from introspection/focus/deep thought or action to relating in real time with other characters on The World Stage. It’s like staring at a movie screen for hours, then trying to speak intelligently to your friends.
The work in the kitchen went smoothly. I don’t like using foam, so I used metal and hardware cloth to exclude most of the inside entry points:
And how could I forget the dog door!
“Feel the cold steel of exclusion rodents!”
Chapter 4: Ranger Jane to The Rescue
I imagine there’s a scene that played in a parallel dimension where a cop pulled me over in our farm truck, Ranger Jane, and asked, “So what’s all this…gravel for?”
And I answer, “Pest control.”
“Yeah sure, bub,” He’d laugh. “Tell me another one!”
“No really,” I’d plead. “I’m going to drop this on a bunch of burrows.”
Then he’d laugh again, wave me on, and call all his buddies that night and tell them the story of the idiot pest control operator who hauled a truck full of gravel to his customer’s home for “pest control.”
“All you have to do is kill them,” he’d laugh. “Drop a five dollar pack of bait in their burrows and they’ll be dead by dawn!”
That’s when my New Other Self in another parallel dimension other than the first parallel dimension I introduced would ask the cop, “Wouldn’t it be ‘smarter’ to just kill criminals? Bullets are cheap and prisons are a multi-million dollar industry. Why don’t you do that?”
Meanwhile, back in reality, Guide and I cleared the weeds and built a wall to keep the gravel in, and then hung the CLOSED FOR TUNNELLING sign along her walkway.
Before our team left that day, we foamed the entry point at the bottom of Summer’s stairs, reset the traps in the basement crawl, set a few “fishing trap” outside near hot tub, and promised our patron to return to make sure all the would-be civilized house mice died a merciful death under the yoke of our traps and exclusion.
Chapter 5 (or so): That’s a Wrap
Our service story here ended many months later. I returned to patch an entry hole in my Monster Gap exclusion work, clear 3 dead rats from the outside Volehalla boxes I set, and confirm that a new uprising of activity in the upstairs room was the result of leaving the doggie door open at night.
I like to think that the owls of the neighborhood would now be a little fatter, but that might be one of those classic over-the-top romanticism of nature we Oregon born granola crunchers are known for. I do know, however, it’s not a romanticism to say I’m going to miss my chats with Summer.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ SERVICE STORY (Reviewed on Home Advisor)
“Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!”
Produced for Jamie C. and her team at Sunnyside Methodist Church in SE Portland
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the Environmental Control Operator in charge of rodent services for Storysold: Pest Control. The story you’re about to read was written by my teammate Bookmaker Jake. He’s a sociopathic liar with god-like delusions of world domination, but he did OK tracking The Action at the heart of this service story. He called it, Church Mice –
Guide stepped from our little Ford Transit cargo van, hit the ground on a familiar street in the heart of SE Portland, and looked up.
Normally, it’s dangerous to look up in the middle of the street. But it’s not as dangerous when you’re receiving a vision from heaven.
No joke, Guide stopped cold in the middle of the road when she realized that the iconic old church was our destination. None of us knew why she stopped so suddenly, but we knew our teammate well enough to know she was instantly hooked: hyper focused, feet frozen waiting for her to make a direction from ten, no memory of the past or present, only two hawk-like eyes on the church and The Action that was about to unfold there. After Guide broke her heavenly stare (and crossed the street), she asked our host to use his camera/phone to document The Beginning >
None of us sawThe Grailhovering over the field of service that day, or anything so clandestine. But, each for our own oddball reasons, our whole team joined Guide on The Hook. Even the Pest Predator looked up—and saw his character producing a hit service in the old stone church. It might just have been our human’s childhood training, but the feeling—that strong sudden urge to be a part of whatever story was about to unfold there—was undeniable. The hardest part of pitching our services to the youthful Church Director, Jamie, was not looking in her eyes and saying, “Forget the money, we’ll do it for free!”
That’s about as good as it gets for “visions from heaven” these days.
The church folks set a sign along the sidewalk. It read, “IN WITH THE NEW, OUT WITH THE OLD, ONE IS SILVER, THE OTHER IS GOLD.” We felt it summed up The Action there pretty well. The first congregation had formed in 1890 at a shoe factory, and then spent the next 21 years building the beautiful stone structure that many locals know, most famously, for their dedication to feeding the city’s poor. The last “silver metal” congregation died an immaterial, other-than-physical (but not spiritual) death in the early 2000s. Not sure why. People just stopped going to church.
Since then, the church has managed to keep its commercial kitchen open to feed the poor/people experiencing homelessness. It also hosts a variety of groups, teams, and neighborhood gatherings like Alcoholics Anonymous and the preschool who is run by an instantly likable human named Joey who has made the magic happen there, with or without proper funding, for more than a decade.
Now a new organization was emerging—stirring the old spiritual stew (heavy on the method and light on the holy rolling theatrics)—with new youthful leaders like Jamie and co-stars like Josh the new maintenance guy.
The plan for a new beginning—aka The Youthful Revival–was thus:
1) Address the neighborhood’s concerns concerning the mass of humans experiencing homelessness around the church.
2) Restore the safety of the neighborhood by shutting down the soup kitchen, cut off the services to the “good and bad” homeless persons, and exclude them from camping on the sidewalks.
3) Shut down the soup kitchen, cut off the food supply to the church’s rodent population, and exclude them from their cozy, predator-free nesting sites in wall voids, behind cabinets, and cupboards.
“Oh wow,” I said when I understood The Youthful Revival. “Are the mice acting as a foil for the homeless persons, or are the homeless persons acting as a foil for the mouse population here?”
“Who cares about all that literary crap?” Guide replied. “What we have here is an opportunity to flex my environmental control techniques on a hundred year old, mouse infested church!”
“This would be an honorable challenge for sure,” Pest Predator chimed in. “If we get the green light, can I join you?”
“For sure,” Guide smiled. “I’d be happy to theme up with you on this one Predator. I’m going to need your eye for spiders, ants, and other bugs to find all the entry holes.”
“Good,” Predator replied without expression. “Count me in.”
Once our team realized what Jamie was asking us to do, it became even more difficult to hold back, bite the tongue, and keep from leaping (hands in the sky) exclaiming, “Holy Moses! what more can we ask from a good service story? Name your price! We’ll start now!”
After Jamie gave us the grand tour, we communed with her in the dusty, eerily unused sanctuary. “I’m sort of new at this pricing thing,” our human host said. “What’s your budget?”
Then she told us. And Jake accepted it. All smiles. Clearly he should never be permitted to play poker.
Our first service scene was awesome. It couldn’t have looked any less like the pest control service our human performed for his 4 former employers if we tried. Instead of jumping right into the heroic acts of setting traps and poisoning God’s tiny creatures, we cranked up the tunes and clean the kitchen.
Not many humans have read our official company novel (mission statement) The Living City, but those poor souls who have read it would recognize a guest appearance by our much-loved “live action” character, Dishmaster Jones. It felt good to dust his character off and put him to work, scrubbing and cleaning. Dishmaster cleaned for almost three hours before he said anything. Then he smiled (with a tear in his eye) as he said, “Oh wow, for a while there I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear the hum of a Hobart again.” Don’t worry if you don’t get it. He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.
When I began, the mice were even shitting in the cleaning supplies. I cleaned behind this cabinet for the first time in (decades?). It reminded me of a 24hour Denny’s.
I had been mentally prepared to do the cleaning scene like a sanitary ninja; but stoic, righteous, loner, isolationist asshole hero types are not always a good fit for church work, especially when The Hero’s Journey is cleaning the microscopic devils from the dark corners of a kitchen. Church, as we knew it, thrived on group projects. And Jamie seemed to agree. She rallied a group of volunteers to clean and ready the basement for their reclamation.
Not too unlike our service story in NE with Farmer Rachel, Master Freddy, and Evanshoe—The Adventures of Ratty Claus—cleaning the old church was a true voyage of discovery. Nothing there was ubiquitous. Everything we saw, felt, and touched was alive with its own untold story. We’d become so used to generic cityscapes—strip malls, chain food joints, familiar retail stores, Beaverton (etc.)—our cleaning scene felt like we were rip roaring through an unseen wormhole at the center of the old church, emerging newborn on The Other Side with every newly discovered story.
At Storysold, usually “old” is just code for “rich with stories.” Ancient bedbug chemicals from when the church was a shelter. It’s a repellant like all of the cheap chemicals you can buy over-the-counter. Using repellants on a bedbug infestations only fans the flames. I found an old letter full of poetry stashed behind this brick. Someone put there like a time capsule for The Future. I passed it along to one of the staff members, and then I used the stash hole to trap mice. Only got 5 or so there.
God’s not big on comedy. Church Goers aren’t normally allowed wicked senses of humor, but rat catchers are known for theirs. Most of the good rat catchers get it. We’re civilization’s foil: the bumbling John Goodman Bugs Be Gone comedic sidekick character in Arachnophobia who tries and inevitably fails to control The Action of nature. With that said, I loved that Jamie called her windowless, concrete dry storage room, “The Murder Room.” When I asked her why it was called, The Murder Room, she said, “You know. It’s that room in movies where the murders happen.”
Made sense to me. I killed 5 mice in the entryway of The Murder Room after setting a few “fishing traps” in my first scene. As my righteous, gun-loving uncle likes to point out, “[group killing] war isn’t murder.” Only individuals killing individuals is murder in The Eyes of God. And no one would ever call killing mice murder. Somewhere along the way, we’ve labeled them, forever, as vectors. Rodents will always bear The Mark of Cain (marked for eradication like malaria transmitting mosquitos and meat infesting horn flies) and that means we, the pest heroes, will never have to worry about the home’s environmental backstory. It’s “see a rat, kill a rat” all day, every day. Instant diagnosis. Unlike real doctors, we pest professionals get to skip The Story, bypass The Action completely, and go straight to the part where we apply our generic treatments. “Disease” and “rat” are synonyms. Killing a mouse, rat, or vole is the same as treating a disease, because the presence of rodents in your home, or church, is always bad like the Dark Lord Satan.
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” It was the first thing God printed, page one. Must have been important.
Can you imagine a future world where doctors and pest professionals alike enjoy the ease of instant, or nearly instant, diagnosis? You would wait in a long line (like a grocery store) to present yourself before your doctor’s customer service counter. Next you would strip and put on a ritual gown of some kind, then wait some more while the doctor scanned your body for symptoms (using a Star Trek style Google body reader) a few short minutes before they labeled you with an instant diagnosis that came complete with its Google treatment, a pill, therapy, surgery, or a combination of pills, therapy, and surgery.
Thankfully, our doctors haven’t found a way to reduce our everyday, live action stories to generic symptoms and instant diagnosis. They still bang our knees, tell us to open our mouth and say “aw,” and make kind but firm inquisitions about our drinking, drug, or sexual habits. They still have to, at least, make some show of learning our backstories before they slap us with their diagnosis and treat us, instantly on sight, like rats.
In our story, however, the consequence of not dominioning the church mice seemed clear. After a few hours of running my Ghostbuster’s-style backpack vacuum around the walls, I had a canister full of proof. If the presence of live mice in didn’t equal “bad” or “disease,” their droppings certainly did. And that was enough of a backstory for me.
When the initial cleaning scene had come to an adequate ending, I sat in the basement and performed the classic prebattle scene. You know, the scene where the Ewoks set their rolling log traps, Wylie Coyote set his new ACME roadrunner trap, or that annoying Home Alone kid set his deadfall paint cans and flame thrower traps to foil any bad guys who dared cross The Line and invade his territory.
I quickly became bored applying peanut butter on traps. Desperate for any distraction, I asked Guide to give us a call to arms speech to hearten our entry into the coming battle scene. I asked her nicely, but I also told her I didn’t want just any call to arms speech. I told her I wanted one at least as good as the one Bill Pullman used to rouse the blood and bile in his fellow earthlings before they battled their infestation of space aliens.
“We will not go quietly into the night,” the Supreme President of Earth (Bill Pullman) said, standing on his fighter jet with a bullhorn in hand. “We will not vanish without a fight. We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”
Guide agreed to indulge me, but her speech did not, or would ever, meet the emotional needs of men charging into battle. If she delivered that speech, let’s say, a few moments before the trench officers of WW1 blew their whistles to “Charge!”, not one unsuspecting youth would cross heartily over The Line. They would all stand there—feeling unfilled—ready to die at the hands of their officers rather than charge bravely into battle. Guide’s “call to arms speech” was more like a calm, how-to lecture (or cooking show demonstration) on the best ways to kill the church mice.
“Just remember team,” Guide said as we shit-canned the empty jar of peanut butter and reached for a tube of green, scientifically engineered mouse attracting goo. “The mice are already hooked on free food: kitchen scraps, garage, kiddy crumbs. They’ve been living large in fancy ‘burrows’ under kitchen cabinetry without any predators around to keep their bodies fit and their minds sharp. All we have to do is ride nature’s wave and spur The Action onward to its inevitable climax. Free food is always a trap, and abundant free food is always a recipe for infestation/The Suck of tragedy, crisis, and environmental disaster. History is ripe with examples. Smart creatures, both wild and domesticate, work a little harder to find the undiscovered niche markets the predators have yet to stake out.”
Should have made this a video. Our guy is still live, swimming in circles.
I listened to her usual lines on the subject of freedom vs. security/wild vs. domestication, but, as usual, I didn’t agree with her. Guide likes to paint my character as the Asshole of our team, but she does that because she’s jealous. I’m better at seeing The Big Picture than she is…and she knows it. I mean, really, she was missing the obvious fact that we were slathering free food on traps in a soup kitchen. Doesn’t The Church sort of run on the idea of feeding and finding civilization—the Dry, Centrally Heated Body of Christ—for all the poor, homeless, wild creatures of earth?
What would The Church be without its church mice?
As we set over 250 snap traps under stoves, below cabinets, along walls, on pipes, behind boilers, in storage rooms, and other dark corners where the furry evils dwell, I pondered that question. I’m as much a rat catcher as Guide is, and any rat catcher worth their salt will tell you (likely after a few beers and a few tears) that deep down, they’re sort of rooting for the wild creatures. Real rat catchers don’t really want the mice to stand in line at our traps, eat the free food, and spill their sacred wine. Real rat catchers are half wild creatures themselves, who cross The Magic Line because they want to feed their prey to The Wilderness like an ancient offerings to the gods. For real rat catchers, killing in the name of their customers is just part of the job. No true hero ever delights in the slaying of an honorable foe. Monsters like Orkin Man, Rentokiller, and Terminixor will never understand that. That’s what makes them monsters.
I know my next line might sound confusing, contradictory, or like “circular logic,” but the wild humans among you will get it immediately: “No one on our team wants the mice to spill their sacred wine, but we’re proud as hell of catching the ones that do.” Our first real trap check service at the old church revealed 23 kills. And we shared that body count with everyone we met that day. “Including the 8 we caught in our fishing traps without really trying…we’re up to 31 already,” we reported to Jamie.
That was just 31 mice. Jamie had also put us in charge of clearing the rodents from a neighboring house. It had been vacant for some time, and its backyard had often been used for an unofficial homeless camp. In its cold, empty, dimly lit basement we found an entry hole (around a heating vent) leading to and from the house’s inaccessible front porch. It proved to be the perfect rat catching honey hole. I was able to trap and kill two healthy adults right off the bat.
We were so proud of our body count, we even told the homeless folks who wandered into the basement (right on cue) nearly every time we propped the door open. The first few poked their heads in politely hat-in-hand looking for “services.” Upon investigation, I discovered that “services” was code for free food in the soup kitchen–not the nourishing Word of God. In any case, whatever their deal was, I informed them, matching their politeness almost competitively, that I was just a humble rat catcher/small grain of sand (with 32 confirmed kills). Each time, I asked the service seeker if they wanted to help me clean mouse turds. When they said no, I excluded them from the church by shutting the door that had been opened to them. My favorite service seeker was a friendly guy I met the last time I opened the door, a few minutes before I became fully convinced the service seekers would always be there knocking and waiting for the door to be open to them. He asked me about the art classes. I told him I wasn’t staff—just a humble (but highly skilled) rat catcher. The whole time we were talking he not so slyly slipped pens, paper, and other art supplies from a nearby table into his satchel. I laughed while I watched his show, enjoying the finer arty points of the interaction immensely, before I dusted off my old social worker character and asked him to leave non-verbally (herding him to the door with my actions) all the while apologizing for something in a calm, even, non-threatening tone.
A month into our service story, Guide turned to us and said something weird. “I can see them now,” she said as we cleared another 5 mice from our traps in the kitchen.
Pest Predator took off his respirator and replied, “Funny, I don’t smell anything unusual.”
I looked at my teammates like a sports bro standing in line at a comic book convention. “Say again?” I said, making my best Trump face/you’re-the-idiot (not me) look.
“The mice,” Guide replied without making eye contact. “I can see where they’re running now.”
“You see the mice!” I laughed. “Are you adding X-ray vision to your list of supereconomic powers?”
Guide turned to Predator and said, “The traps have spoken.”
Predator nodded his understanding, leaving me to wonder if I was the “I” in our team who’d been left out of The Loop like a bad boss. After much debate and discussion over a 6 pack of Cascade Ice (because we were, as a team, still officially on another 10 month Adventure in Sobriety), I was able to piece The Action together. Here’s what Guide “saw” in our traps:
In the dark void, a few inches behind the Tom-and-Jerry hole in back of the Hobart, a few survivors of our trapping efforts (which was now well over 55 dead mice and 3 dead rats!) huddled in mass like shell-shocked refugees of a highflying bombing campaign.
“I can see him now,” a long lean mouse said to the fat footed one beside her.
“Say again?” the Fat Footed One replied with a cold, black-eyed stare.
“I can see the human,” Long Mouse said again. “I know what the rat catcher is going to do next.”
The other mice nodded agreeably at Long Mouse’s hopeful statement.
“Why do you always have to be so weird,” Fat Foot laughed. “We should be happy he hasn’t used any bait poisons yet. You know how impossible it is to train our corruptible youths to say no to drugs!”
“In small doses,” Long Mouse shot back, “anti-coagulants can be used medicinally, or to induce spiritual awakenings…”
“Is that what happened to you?” Fat Foot scoffed. “Did you ingest too much bait, and now you think you’re At One with The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky? Snap out of it. We need to do what we’ve always done: keep quiet, stay in the walls, freeze in place (stand and make The Blank Face Look) when our human masters speak their sacred words, and wait for the offerings of food to fall from Volehalla. Only then will we be loved as Holy Pets, with real parts to play, in this church’s great congregational drama.”
Suddenly, three mice emerged from the wings of the dark wall void. They all look satisfied, fat and happy with the glow of a good meal.
“I have received a vision,” Long Mouse replied unaware of the new mice in their midst. “We’re all prey of The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky…who loves us…and wants us to prosper, thrive, and live wild, free, and keep our bodies fit and strong for our parts in The Great Game.”
When Fat Foot hear that, he roared with laughter. “The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky loves us?! Oh wow, now I know you’ve ingested bait!”
The three new mice laughed too. The most satisfied of the three, a mouse known as Light Claw, spoke up and said, “We just saw the rat catcher. He is obviously some hack the humans in our congregation hired on Home Advisor to test us. Everyone knows Home Advisor is total bullshit!”
The second new mouse snickered along with the group and added, “Yeah and we passed our newest test. Our humans placed peanut butter in little cups surrounded by a big flat alter. The answer is, as long as we nibble humbly at The Butter of Life without touching the alter, our humans will continue to offer us their blessings of food and fellowship.”
“Yes Mouse is right!” Light Claw thundered victoriously. “I got the idea from watching Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom with the security guards last night. All we have to do to continue receiving our blessings of food from Volehalla is nibble the peanut butter from the cups without touching the Alter of Unbridled Greed. You see, it’s a metaphor. Our human masters are trying to teach us to live a righteous life…as long as we’re not greedy and take what they give to us…we will continue our journey to become their Holy Pets.”
“Yes!” Yes Mouse cheered. “It’ll be rad! We’ll spend eternity eating The Butter of Life with our human masters in Volehalla!”
Long Mouse rubbed fur with all the mice in the void, before she flattened her body to the floor, and said, “I don’t know if Volehalla is real, or not; but I do know that human out there isn’t trying to teach us any lessons. Life is not a test. It’s a game, and The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky didn’t send their predator to be our gentle guiding, comfort human.”
“Predator! You mean that guy out there?” Fat Foot laughed. “That idiot couldn’t catch a rat if it jumped in his lap.”
“Yeah…and we all know mice are a lot harder to catch than dirty old, nasty street rats…he couldn’t catch us if we jumped in his lap!”
Light Claw peaked out of their Tom-and-Jerry hole. “Look everyone!” he laughed with delight. “There he is now!”
“To the choppa!” Fat Foot laughed.
“What’s he doing?” Long Mouse asked.
“Not sure,” Light Claw replied. “It looks like he’s fixing something to the bottom of our pantry door.”
“What an idiot!” Yes Mouse roared. “He’s trying to evict us from our sacred pantry. No way our masters approved that one. As long as church mice have lived in these walls…not one of our human masters have tried to block off our entry holes. Besides, we can get in the back way!”
“Not any more,” Light Claw reported from the light. “He found the hole behind the fridge. He’s filling it with some kind of gun.”
The mice suddenly grew silent. While their new reality sank in, Fat Foot spoke up. “He can’t block all our holes…there’s too many…”
Long Mouse flicked her tail and said, “I don’t think this is another one of your stupid tests. That fucker’s trying to kill us.”
“You mean the humans hired him to punish us…”
“No,” Long Mouse answered boldly. “I mean that guy’s a rat catcher…our natural predator…who won’t stop until we’re all dead.”
“Heretic! We’ve interpreted the sacred words of our masters…God put mice on the earth to bring comfort to our human masters…”
“Our humans wouldn’t kill their Holy Pets! Not without reason!”
“That would be murder!”
In that moment, Long Mouse realized her words were meaningless without action. She rubbed fur with her old friends for the last time, and then she ran from the void, through the Tom-and-Jerry hole, into the light of the kitchen like the Dark Lord Satan was nipping at her heels.
“Hey you, Rat Catcher!” she squeaked at the human standing like a giant above her, holding a foam gun. “Catch me if you can!”
“Oh my, what a bold creature you are!” Guide said when she saw Long Mouse bolt from the hole. Instead of giving chase, Guide watched her wild creature friend run across the open kitchen, through the kitchen door, to an entry hole on the side of an outer door leading to freedom.
“Sorry friend,” Guide said with a chuckle. “I already got that one.”
Then Guide opened the door for her wilderness creature friend. Shocked and surprise, still running with all her might, Long Mouse saw the trees, clouds, and sunshine on the other side of the door. She didn’t wait around to discern the Rat Catcher’s actions. She knew it wasn’t some kind of twisted loyalty test. Long Mouse ran for the open door without another thought, running from her former cozy, predator free home—out into a world she’d never known. The Wildernesswas old as the sun, sky, and grass, but to Long Mouse…it was a brand new, wild frontier fraught with danger, hidden treasure, and adventure.
“Anybody else?” Guide called into the dark hole.
Nobody moved. They all stood perfectly still—like they’d done a thousand times before—with their heads bowed (attentive as movie goers) ready for their human masters to drop their daily bread.
Guide didn’t speak. She didn’t say things—speak in the foreign tongue of The Sacred Word—that inspired the mice to stay quiet and attentive in their roles as Holy Pets behind the walls. Guide didn’t eat food and drop any daily bread to reward them for their roles in the church’s congregation that lived, like an audience, in sacrificial service to the directors (the priests, politicians, and storytellers) who rule The Fourth Wall.
She aimed her foam gun in the hole and squeezed the trigger. The black mass of chemical goop erupted in the void like Vesuvius, trapping the mice like a landslide of hot mud, embalming their bodies forever in foam. Guide had finally answered their prayers, pushed The Conflict to its natural climax, and opened the gates of Volehalla to them. They were now forever what they had always become each and every day they spent in sacrificial service to their masters. They were now true Church Mice, ever-lasting parts of The Dry, Centrally Heated Body of Christ.
In 2 short months, our team at Storysold: Pest Control caught 95 mice, 4 rats, and excluded over 62 entry holes: foaming wall voids, patching the foundation with concrete, installing door sweeps, covering open windows with plywood, and patching the bigger holes with metal and mesh.
In the midst of The Action on one of our 2 epic exclusion days, we met one of the oldest members of the congregation. He was the church’s former unofficial facilities manager. His name was Tim and he had a grandfather who was also a member of the congregation. I talked with Tim while Guide and Predator exercised their environmental control skills installing a tight fitting door sweep to keep the mice out of the pantry. It takes a lot to make me really listen to any human, but Tim had amazing stories to share, so it wasn’t an effort. Not in the least. He talked about the old church’s Golden Age like the time they built a basketball court on the third floor for the neighborhood youth, only to discover they built the ceiling too low. He smiled when he shared the part where the congregation literally raised the roof to make the court work.
In The End of any service story, it could be said that most humans work for money. Work is rarely a reward. Work is a “four letter word.” That’s humans. We, the live action characters of earth have no need for pressed and dyed fibers.
[ Never heard of live action characters? In brief, we’re earth’s smallest creatures—the unseen engines of life—who feed on The Action. For more on that check out Guide’s website: www.thewildguidingnews.com ]
All that’s to say, it was Tim, Joey, and Jamie who deposited these lines of literary gold in “our storybank accounts,” which is how you’d say it if good lines, scenes, stories were real currency like it is in The Living City:
DEPOSIT #1 – Jamie gave us the heartfelt review we display with pride at the beginning of this service story.
DEPOSIT #2 – Somewhere in our conversation, Tim said, “We’ve had mice in the church off and on over the years…but you’re the first person that I remember who has tried to seal up all the holes.”
DEPOSIT #3 – “I’ve had mice running across my desk for years,” Joey said to us in passing one day after our traps had gone silent. “When I first heard they hired someone to exterminate the mice, I didn’t expect them to actually go away. But they’re gone. I can’t believe it.”
It felt good to bank that literary gold from the humans, but the legacy we left in the dark, dim lit basement of the vacant house felt even better. The shiniest of the treasure we earned in this story was the newly formed actions we found on the wild side of the door we built from scraps:
The keys were found in the wilds under the porch. Super old.
The new door still led to our rat catching honey hole under the inaccessible front porch (and we were still catching rats there after our traps inside had all gone silent), but there was now another scene in production on the other side of that door. Two feet from the edge of the porch at the edge of our honey hole, a congregation of a different sort was growing at the base of a beautiful old oak tree.
You would never know they were there unless you read this story. They made a point never to gather in mass, or make The Blank Face Look on the audience side of a wall void for their human masters. They dug their own burrows. They gathered their own seeds. They faced their predators at night—always wary of the dangers of silence—and they rubbed fur with their loved ones whenever they could…content with the small wild pleasures The Action had to offer them.
[ Not actual tree ]
In time, Long Mouse was the only mouse under the tree that remembered Volehalla. She did not gather the youth to her side to spend their precious harvest time reviving the cautionary tales of Church Mice. She didn’t feel any need to lecture them on the dangers of free food or the madness and infestation that follow the actions of Holy Pets.
When the youth asked her what lived under the porch, Long Mouse simply smiled and said, “Why don’t you ask The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky? Some say he’s still baiting his traps with free food there…”
And the youth would laugh because they were all old enough to know that The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky—the hawks, the owls, and ferial cats—all the predators of SE Portland circled, stocked, studied, and hunted the wild markets where Long Mouse and her loved ones gathered their seeds. That was just a routine, daily part of The Great Game. The predators worked hard to stay one step ahead of their prey—and they ran, like Long Mouse had ran, with a love of The Actionin their hearts.
Stories can become pretty infested with bullshit without it. Speaking of which, isn’t it time for us to schedule another service? We have to check our traps.
Story Sold Pest Control is rated 5 out of 5.0 stars based on 83 review(s).
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- Jake is great! He was referred to me by a friend and he was thorough, very knowledgeable and put my mind at ease! Thanks for all the help!
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- I contacted Storysold Pest control for mice/rat problems for a rental property. I was very impressed with their website about the process they use to keep out rodents not just catching them and calling it good. They are very professional, explained the process in detail and showed up on time for our appointment. It’s been a week or so since he came out and my tenant hasn’t heard or seen any mice/rats. Jake, the owner is passionate about helping people and very knowledgeable in all aspects of pest control! Don’t waste your time on any other company call him first. Teri C
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- Keith B
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- Abby and Dave
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- Paige and Kris
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- Kammie James
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- Ed Robertson
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We had a great experience and highly recommend Jake. He is responsive, effective and thoughtful.
- Eddie B
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Jake at Storysold Pest Control is knowledgeable and professional. He is quick to respond and reasonably priced. I find him to be trustworthy and ethical, he does not sell unnecessary services and he works with customers that are willing to do some of the work themselves as well as with customers who just want the whole service done without being involved themselves. While other companies told me I needed to replace all my insulation and do massive crawl space renovations, he offered several affordable options. With his help we no longer have a mouse problem and it was done at a fraction of what other companies quoted us. I appreciate his flexibility and fun, friendly personality. If I ever have another pest control issue, he will be my first call.
- Darian C.
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- Joyce R
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Jake has been helping me trap rodents at my farm with his Volehalla rodent boxes. He's friendly, knowledgeable, and effective: we've trapped a lot of rodents!
- Emily C
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Jake was fantastic! Fast response. Reliable and honest. Great rates. Hope not to have any more rodent problems, but if I do I will be calling Jake again. I would recommend him to anybody that needs help with Pest Control.
- Janet D.
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Truly, I can t say enough about this team! They are so professional, trustworthy, and for the very first time in a long time I feel that they aren t here for 1/2 hour only to run off to the next job site! Jake (I believe the owner) told me that their company prefers to have 2 home visits per day over 10!!! I can t say enough them!!!!
- Lori T.
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Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!
- Jamie C
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Mouse in the house!!!! I texted Sunday morning after having chased a mouse through the house Saturday all day and Sunday at 3am... they came out to the house by 12:30 that Sunday. Jake got in the crawl space and checked the outside of the house for entry points. While there was no evidence of a major problem, I opt ed for the full attack. He came in with an Arsenal of traps that he placed in the kitchen and crawl space. He didn t hard sell and his prices were very affordable! He was also very honest with potential outcomes which I appreciate. He literally just left and I haven t heard any traps go off but just based on his customer service, I would totes recommend him! He s coming back in a week to check traps. I ve read some horror stories about other companies but I feel very confident that I m working with an upstanding professional. And he s dog friendly!
- Taaj A.
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Great company.
- Ed S
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A pro. Showed on time. Knew what to do
- Mike B.
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Jake of StorySold is proficient, affordable, and punctual. He took his time with carefully evaluating my problem, fixed my issue, and did extras like helping me fix my mattress which he treated for bed bugs. Can't recommend him enough and will use him and his company in the future. Got two other quotes which were much higher each quoting at least $1,000 without a guarantee.
- James J.
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Jake is prompt, skilled, authentic and friendly! I couldn't be happier. I'm so glad that I talked to all three bidders before choosing. Even before he got here, I knew he was the best choice!
- Linda B.
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Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.
- Shelly A.
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Very good
- Larry A
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Jake actually arrived early. He did a good job of removing a large hornet's nest of very aggressive hornets. He will definitely be our first choice on any future pest removal we might need.
- Barbara B.
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Jake went above and beyond of what was asked of him! Will not use anyone else!
- Ted M
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Jake was extremely respectful and responsive. Came promptly and did a thorough inspection. He gave us options and his honest opinion about what we needed to do. He was very helpful in solving the problem simply and cost effectively! Will definitely call again.
- Michelle C.
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Came to our home right away and set live traps in our chimneys and made screens for the tops. Returned the next day to find a squirrel in one of the traps. We were very pleased with our results and appreciated the great customer service
- Kathleen
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Friendly, fast and efficient. Very pleased with the service Jake provided
- Joli P.
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Refreshing to work with Jake. He is collaborative and communicative. Great improvement since his visit.
- Seth W
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He's friendly, professional, punctual & extremely affordable. Would hire again & recommend to my friends.
- Max K
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- We’ve struggled with mice in our home for years. Stoysold came out in February of 2020, found the access spots, blocked them, and we haven’t had a single mouse inside in over a year. I highly recommend their service. KH in Sandy, OR
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- Jake was professional, friendly, educational on the process. I would recommend his services to anyone needing a exterminator for insects or rodents.
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- Boann
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- We are so happy with the work Storysold did to fortify our house against unwelcome creatures! They were courteous, efficient, and communicative throughout the process.
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- Jake took care of our unwanted guest (roof rat!) and identified and took care of entry points to prevent future problems. We have been paying for a pest control service for years that we are going to be able to cancel thanks to Jake’s work. He’s very professional and responsive and we highly recommend him! – Mary
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- Dustin
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- Dani Rathke
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- Thorough, effective and reliable. I’ve used other exterminator services that seem more concerned with signing you up for annual contracts than actually solving the rodent issue. This company is the opposite. They care the most about solving the problem, billing customers comes second. I’d highly recommend.
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- Paul
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- Kristy L
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- Darlene Warren
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- Erika Glancy
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Jake has been helping me trap rodents at my farm with his Volehalla rodent boxes. He's friendly, knowledgeable, and effective: we've trapped a lot of rodents!
- Emily C.
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Truly, I can t say enough about this team! They are so professional, trustworthy, and for the very first time in a long time I feel that they aren t here for 1/2 hour only to run off to the next job site! Jake (I believe the owner) told me that their company prefers to have 2 home visits per day over 10!!! I can t say enough them!!!!
- Lori T.
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Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.
- Shelly A.
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Jake actually arrived early. He did a good job of removing a large hornet's nest of very aggressive hornets. He will definitely be our first choice on any future pest removal we might need.
- Barbara B.
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Jake went above and beyond of what was asked of him! Will not use anyone else!
- Ted M.
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Jake was extremely respectful and responsive. Came promptly and did a thorough inspection. He gave us options and his honest opinion about what we needed to do. He was very helpful in solving the problem simply and cost effectively! Will definitely call again.
- Michelle C.
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Friendly, fast and efficient. Very pleased with the service Jake provided
- Joli P.
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He's friendly, professional, punctual & extremely affordable. Would hire again & recommend to my friends.
- Max K.
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Jake at Storysold Pest Control is knowledgeable and professional. He is quick to respond and reasonably priced. I find him to be trustworthy and ethical, he does not sell unnecessary services and he works with customers that are willing to do some of the work themselves as well as with customers who just want the whole service done without being involved themselves. While other companies told me I needed to replace all my insulation and do massive crawl space renovations, he offered several affordable options. With his help we no longer have a mouse problem and it was done at a fraction of what other companies quoted us. I appreciate his flexibility and fun, friendly personality. If I ever have another pest control issue, he will be my first call.
- Darian C.
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Went above and beyond my expectations! Would recommend to anyone, knowledgeable and experienced. Thanks again!!
- Jaimie D.
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Jake will give you friendly, personalized, and timely service, and you get the story of the service at the end!
- Emily C.
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Very honest, friendly and informative. Excellent work.
- Terry B.
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Refreshing to work with Jake. He is collaborative and communicative. Great improvement since his visit.
- Seth W
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- Zack C.
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We had a great experience and highly recommend Jake. He is responsive, effective and thoughtful.
- Eddie B.
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Very honest, identified the problem in a remote corner of the property, operated quickly, provided photos of the work done and is coming back to verify the problem has been solved.
- Matteo V.
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Jake was fantastic! Fast response. Reliable and honest. Great rates. Hope not to have any more rodent problems, but if I do I will be calling Jake again. I would recommend him to anybody that needs help with Pest Control.
- Janet D.
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- Taney R.
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Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!
- Jamie C.
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Came out next day and took care of our wasp nest! Easy to schedule and very responsive. Thank you!
- Jacoba G.
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Mouse in the house!!!! I texted Sunday morning after having chased a mouse through the house Saturday all day and Sunday at 3am... they came out to the house by 12:30 that Sunday. Jake got in the crawl space and checked the outside of the house for entry points. While there was no evidence of a major problem, I opt ed for the full attack. He came in with an Arsenal of traps that he placed in the kitchen and crawl space. He didn t hard sell and his prices were very affordable! He was also very honest with potential outcomes which I appreciate. He literally just left and I haven t heard any traps go off but just based on his customer service, I would totes recommend him! He s coming back in a week to check traps. I ve read some horror stories about other companies but I feel very confident that I m working with an upstanding professional. And he s dog friendly!
- Taaj A.
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Jake was straight forward and was happy to answer all questions. Thank you!
- April B.
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A pro. Showed on time. Knew what to do
- Mike B.
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Did an amazing job fixing some visitors to my crawl space. Sanitized, cleaned, and locked down from future uninvited guests!
- Stephen I.
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Jake of StorySold is proficient, affordable, and punctual. He took his time with carefully evaluating my problem, fixed my issue, and did extras like helping me fix my mattress which he treated for bed bugs. Can't recommend him enough and will use him and his company in the future. Got two other quotes which were much higher each quoting at least $1,000 without a guarantee.
- James J.
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He arrived on time, knew precisely what to do to resolve my problem and completed the job.
- Jeff J.
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Jake is prompt, skilled, authentic and friendly! I couldn't be happier. I'm so glad that I talked to all three bidders before choosing. Even before he got here, I knew he was the best choice!
- Linda B.
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Amazing! Jake is amazing! He came out because I had a squirrel in my attic. He has a vent he can put in so they can get out but not back in! Theres no trauma to the animal by trapping it and you will save yourself hearing it scream and cry in a trap! He walked around my entire house and attic looking for all entry points. He is very knowledgable and kind and looking to help you exist w wildlife w the option of not euthanizing. Years of experience. I was so pleased q his company I would highly highly recommend him for any of your critter/pest? needs! Thank you Jake!
- Susan K.
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- Loa H.
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We knew we had several openings to our crawl space where rodents were coming in. To come out and give us a quote, Jake was flexible with making an appointment at our convenience. He is personable and professional. We accepted his quote on the spot and he did the work at that time. He was thorough and gave us an excellent report with pictures after he was done. I highly recommend him and will use him again should the need arise.
- Larry a.
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- Paige L.
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Jake was a huge help with our recent rodent adventure. He was a great communicator and his work and knowledge were superb. He was thorough with his assessment of our property and honest with his recommendations. There was no attempt to unnecessarily sell us on any packages, in fact Jake gave us resources to get our situation under control and to maintain that going forward. Will absolutely be calling Jake in the future if the situation arises.
- Graham H.
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Great service and very affordable pricing.
- Humberto Z.
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- Deanna M.
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- Michelle H.
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Jake was very quick, informative. He not only took care of the rodent, but spent time helping to prevent it happening again.
- Em W.
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Excellent job! Jake was wonderful to work with.
- Kathy M.
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Jake went above and beyond. I had tiny ants in my cupboards and on my kitchen floor. He went outside the property and went underneath my condo. Not only did he take care of the ants but took care of a small rodent issue. Charged me exactly what he quoted me. All the extra work he did I thought for sure it would cost more but he stuck to his quote and was very polite, kind and quick.
- Brenda H.
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Jake was great to work with. He responded quickly to my request. He was able to do the job by being creative. He sent a follow up email to let me know when he would check back. His rate was very reasonable.
- Kelly A.
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Jake is really a 10/10 person and it shows in his work. Thankfully we did not have an infestation but his thoroughness, promptness, and overall attitude towards his profession was something that stuck out to me. I will be recommending him to everyone for pest control. I know who I'm calling when I need one!
- Samantha A.
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Amazing! Jake is amazing! He came out because I had a squirrel in my attic. He has a vent he can put in so they can get out but not back in! Theres no trauma to the animal by trapping it and you will save yourself hearing it scream and cry in a trap! He walked around my entire house and attic looking for all entry points. He is very knowledgable and kind and looking to help you exist w wildlife w the option of not euthanizing. Years of experience. I was so pleased q his company I would highly highly recommend him for any of your critter/pest? needs! Thank you Jake!
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