Insect Assassins:
If it crawls, flies or scurries, Thaddeus Mazuchowski has probably slayed it.
Mazuchowski, an exterminator for the past 25 years, and the seven other employees of NeverNest Extermination (3644 W. Diversey Ave, 773-772-9172) have gotten up close and personal with rats on the Blue Line, cockroaches in drug houses and mosquito infestations in housing projects - and they keep coming back for more.
It's not a job; it's an adventure", Mazuchowski says during a rousing game of What's That Smell? - one of the trickiest and most common questions exterminators must answer for clients. For the next half hour, crew member Brian Schelberger will root through a tall dark attic crawl space in a client's Hinsdalehome, searching for the source of a foul stench that will turn out to be the rotting corpses of a squirrel family. After bagging the cadavers and patching the hole the critters gnawed to get in the house, Mazuchowski and Schelberger call this an easy day at the office. They've seen much worse.
"Probably the worst thing I've ever seen is a dead person," recounts Schelberger. "We were doing maintenance on a building and the neighbors kept smelling something strange. They thought it was a cat or something, but when they opened the door to let us in the unit, the body was just there. It had happened in his sleep and no one knew he had died."
Aside from the corpses, NeverNest workers have also encountered bat colonies, skunk holes, raccoon hideaways, rats as big as small cats and roach infestations so bad they could barely see the floor, The animals and the waste they create, Mazuchowski says are expected. It's the human filth that gets to him.
"I went into a building once in a drug-infested area and there was a woman with 15 kids," Mazuchowski explains. "It was the worst thing I've ever seen. There was human feces on the floor."
The fact that his job is barely palatable to clients is precisely what makes him and several others in the extermination business feel satisfied at the end of an extra creepy-crawly day.
"My customers know that this is not something that they're going to deal with, and they respect the heck out of me for doing it," Mazuchowski explains. "One time I went to a job and I saw a woman standing in a laundry basket in the middle of the room because there was a mouse in the apartment. She had a phobia, and I had to go in and talk her out of her fear. Her husband tipped me $50 for it. Apparently she was ready to move in with her mother. I've saved a lot of marriages."
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