Office Bugs

We’ve got about fifteen thousand of these little bugs marching around our office.

This picture was almost impossible to capture. The exterminator needed a photo to reference before they could come out and evaluate the problem. Our new office camera is more high-tech than any other I’ve ever used, and I spent a good ten minutes taking blurry images and letting out exasperated sighs before a coworker stepped in. Two phone calls to his wife later, and here you go. A picture of the bug. Definitely some sort of beetle. Kind of cute, but I took to murdering them when someone started the rumor that they bite. Plus, they were getting underneath my reports and as I added more paper to each stack, they’d get crushed. Beetle blood all over my work. Does anyone else think it’s weird that beetles have red blood? Anyway, a real problem. So I called the exterminator and they asked me to email the photo we’d taken. But the lady’s inbox was down, so after two failed attempts she had me fax the picture. Faxing photos typically doesn’t work, so I made the lightest copy I could, drew in the red markings, and sent it along. Try convincing these people that this isn’t a roach. Seriously, try. No matter how many times I told the lady it’s just a little beetle (no more than a quarter-inch long) she wouldn’t believe me. When the guy showed up today to check things out, the first words out of his mouth were “I’ve hear you guys have a roach problem!”. Holy crap, people, they’re just beetles. I picked a dead one off the floor for him to examine. The verdict: Apparently they’re called cinch beetles and they tend to invade buildings during the monsoon season. I learned a lot more about them than I ever cared to, to tell you the truth. The life cycle, explained over and over for ten minutes. I seriously almost fell asleep. People think I care more than I do. All I want is the bugs to be gone - I don’t care how you do it or how long they’re in the pupal stage of development. Then he moves on to talk about crickets and earwigs and other pests that we sometimes see. They live in the walls from the time the building is constructed, feeding on fecal matter over and over. Exterminator Buddy thinks it’s absolutely AMAZING how recyclable fecal matter is. Oh my. After the overall examination and a few more lectures, he gave me a quote and was on his way. And PS- As it turns out, cinch beetles don’t bite.

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A side note, but along the same lines – I took this picture the other day of a praying mantis that was perched on the outside wall of our office.

Are those dark spots his eyeballs? Is that a stupid question?