Friday, August 15, 2008

Still Buzzing

I took the day off of work today, postponing my PTO break even date, so that I could be here when they removed the bees. I'm pretty excited about the whole process, and I wanted to be here for the show.


It was apparently a bad day for me to be away from the office... turns out the Exchange Server decided to take the day off too, so I was getting calls at 8am. You would be amazed at the panic that ensues when people cannot send or receive emails. It wasn't anything I could fix anyway, so I directed them to the guys that set up the server for us, but that didn't stop a few of them from calling me repeatedly to see if I was sure there wasn't anything I could walk them through over the phone. Right, because you want me to experiment with the server using a proxy that doesn't even know what a page break is. Um... NO!


The bee guys arrived shortly after 9am, but they didn't seem to be prepared. I had to show them where we think the bees are, (though we already showed the estimator), and after looking around for a bit, the mentioned that they were going to do the removal from the roof. Mom was quite adamant that was not going to happen.

We have a crazy roof. Almost magical even. Aside from the hallway where the air conditioner ducting is, the whole house has vaulted ceilings, and the tounge-in-groove 2x6 spruce that you see is the actual roof. With the roofing material right on the spruce, the house's insulation was terrible, making the house a sauna in the summertime. So when my parents were doing all the work on the house a few years ago, they had a new roofing material put on. It's like 3 layers of insulating material, then the shingles. (The downside is that it actually blocks cell signals - we can't make calls on our cell phones inside our house - this is actually the single most frustrating thing about our house.)

This crazy roof was quite expensive, and my mom is very protective of it - she was not about to let them go in through the roof. The technician said that if they go in through the roof, they can do the live removal, if they go in through the inside, they would have to exterminate the bees first.

This is not what the estimator told me. He had said that they could do the live removal, and patch the drywall and repaint. To me, this indicated that they would be going in from inside the house.

So we started asking more questions. Bobby asked what they move the hive in. "Well, normally they give us a box for the hive, but we don't have one today." We also noticed that they didn't have any drywall tools, or roof tools, or anything that might be necessary for cleaning up afterwords. The tech then admited that he'd never done a live removal indoors before - only from the roof.

This is not what we signed up for. The technician and mom both called the office to clarify what we wanted to have done. Eventually, the appointment was rescheduled for a week from tomorrow. Until then, we still have bees!

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