My day starts at 6:45 AM, which is earlier than most people expect for a pest control technician. The reason: commercial accounts. Restaurants, food trucks, and catering facilities want service done before their kitchen staff arrives, and that window closes fast. My first stop today is a restaurant in South Austin — a quarterly maintenance account. I park, pull my inspection kit, and start at the back — dumpster enclosure, grease trap area, delivery dock — working my way in. I’m looking for signs of activity (droppings, gnaw marks, shed skins), checking my bait station logs, and talking to the kitchen manager about anything unusual they’ve noticed since my last visit. I spend 45 minutes, update my digital service report on the tablet, and I’m back in the truck by 8:15.
My second call is a rodent exclusion follow-up in Cedar Park. I sealed about a dozen entry points on this house three weeks ago and set traps in the attic. Today I’m checking the traps, looking for any signs of new activity, and doing a quick scan of the exterior to see if anything has shifted or if I missed a spot. I find a trap with a catch — Norway rat, large adult — and I find one seal point where the copper mesh has been pushed at slightly. Nothing got through, but something tried. I reinforce it, reset the traps, document everything with photos, and spend about ten minutes walking the homeowner through what I found and what it means. This is the part of the job that people don’t see: the explanation. A good technician doesn’t just do the work; they make sure you understand what’s happening in your own home.
The afternoon is a bed bug consultation — not a treatment, just an inspection and a conversation. The family has found what they think might be bed bugs in a spare bedroom, but they’re not sure. This is common, and it matters a lot to get the ID right before committing to a heat treatment. I do a full inspection of the mattress, box spring, bed frame, adjacent furniture, and baseboards with a flashlight and a probe. In this case, it’s not bed bugs — it’s bat bugs, which look nearly identical but indicate a different problem: bats roosting somewhere in the structure. I explain the difference, walk them through the wildlife removal process that needs to happen first, and connect them with our team. The look on their faces when I tell them it’s not bed bugs is one of my favorite parts of the job.
I wrap up with paperwork, supply restocking, and a call from dispatch about an emergency that came in at 4 PM — a wasp nest inside a wall on a north Austin property. I pick up the right equipment from the truck, head over, confirm it’s a yellow jacket colony in a wall void by the sound and the entry point activity, drill a small treatment hole, inject residual dust, and seal it up. The whole job takes forty minutes. The homeowner, who’s been listening to buzzing in the wall for two weeks and wasn’t sure what to do, seems genuinely relieved. That’s the other part of the job people don’t talk about: a lot of what we do is remove something that’s been causing someone anxiety. That part never gets old.