Random Fail III: I Can't Come Up With A Title Right Now: Cantih Title Credit Edition

[Cantih]

Yeah, I'm reading up fast. Chemicals look unreliable, heat & steam seems to be the only way (it is difficult to evolve resistance to being cooked/set on fire).

I'm on the fence between a steam cleaner, or a heat bag. Because we have stuff (books) that can't be steamed, and I consider my bed a write off and gonna have it disposed of, I'll get a Coleman cot for the duration.
The couch too, we were meaning to get rid of it anyway and get my mom a recliner, we just hadn't done it yet because of reasons.

My mother's bed is, problematic. It can't be secured with leg traps, it seems likely that a mattress & box spring encasement would tear, and she can not live with a cot, it'd destroy her in a month. And getting a new frame is iffy. The one she has, my grandfather built it, it's 65 years old, she's had it for 35. A lot of reluctance to part with it. Just, dunno how this will go yet.

Also, we don't have a car, and can't afford one at the moment with the market as it is (especially before this was thrown at us), so even getting around to shop for things is non-trivial.

Story time below
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What happened was, I got up at six to go do groceries (a habit since the pandemic started), and while I was on the toilet looked down and saw one on my shirt. First time I'd ever seen one, so it took a moment, then my stomach dropped and went googling to confirm. Then I checked my bed. Had to go out immediate to do groceries because I had to catch the bus. But added bed bug spray to my list.

As for the severity. There's three spots in the apartment they could feed. The couch, my bed, and my moms bed. I found no sign on the couch (not that it's easy to tell there) or my mom's bed thankfully (not that that means anything).

So my bed, I have a twin bed, and for the past decade, every fitted top sheet I've gotten for a twin doesn't actually fit, it's oversized and baggy. So I use those tube clips with a cut on one side to secure it in place.
About 3 months ago, my fitted sheet ripped, and I went to BBB to get a new set. When I replaced it at that time, there was no sign of bugs. I would have noticed if there were any on the clips, and there was no staining on the fitted sheet.

Friday morning, there were 2-3 adult bugs at each clip. I get a trash bag, put some gloves on, put down paper towels at the clip sites, and get to work. Remove them, spray down the site for all the small ones, and the staining is extensive (about the size of my hand at each clip) enough that I just chuck everything into the trash bag. I spray down the mattress and box spring, finding 4 more adults on the bottom of the mattress. All told, probably about 2 dozen adults so far. Spray runs out, toss it & the gloves in, I tie off the bag, knotting the bag so as to seal the opening, and dumpster that shit.
Because of reasons, I regrettably and (also thankfully, we'll see later) didn't flip up the box spring or frame. (For the record, my frame is one of those low slatted style from Ikea that they don't make anymore, looks kinda like a nice clean rectangular shipping pallet)

Then I tell the manager at 10am when their official hours are up. Process in motion. I find 2 more stragglers, use TP to grab them, crush them, and bisect them (god to they stench when they die, at least it lets you know the job is done, no smell, you left them kicking), then flush the fuckers.

Saturday I get a call that the exterminator/inspector is coming in. He comes in, I take him to my stripped mattress, he glances around says it doesn't look like there are any. I point him at some clusters of black spots on the box spring and frame. "Could be anything" then he checks the carpet "Oh, see here, you have carpet beetles, not bedbugs, no problem, miss-identification common". (To be fair, it's a fucking meme on the bedbug subreddit)
At this point I'm panicking. so I flip the mattress and box spring up. he doesn't even seem to look at the bottom of the box spring, but on the frame I spot a small movement, pinhead sized nymph, point it out, he squashes and smears it with a nail, and between the volume of that for a tiny thing & some more black spotting on the frame, he's finally convinced enough.
(I'd go back later, and on the bottom of the box spring, I found 3 more adult bugs, he would have seen if he FUCKING LOOKED. THESE ones I double ziplocked, and showed the manager, also complained that whoever they have on tap may be unreliable.)

So now were on moratorium. Nothing durable leaves the apartment unless disposed of by their hauling/disposal people, at our cost.
Cost of chemical or heat treatment is on us, (I'm checking, and this https://debedbug.com/california-renter-bed-bug-rights/ says it shouldn't be the case, but I cannot find explicit law/regulation to back it up.)

We've got a bunch of other spending to do as a consequence. I've got to worry about doing laundry and taking out normal trash. We have to prep for treatment which we havn't received instructions for yet. But we've been in this unit for 20 years, we're established, we need to get rid of some stuff before we can even shift things around in order to make access for the treatment. Chicken & egg.

And while I grabbed some old sheets to put on my bed, I did another check around and found another adult (into the bag it goes), and checked the piping on the boxspring and found live nymphs. Lost nerve to sleep in the bed, went back to the couch.
But if I stay away from the bed for more than a few days, anything capable will go hunting and spreading. Which they might have already from the spraying I did on Friday, oops.

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Silver lining: I'm non-reactive/immune to bedbug bites, so won't notice them, so I got that going for me, which is nice. =\

[Elizara]

A suggestion; If you're in good with your landlord, go check Yelp and find a pest company with good reviews that does bed bugs and point the place out to your landlord. Now, I've never had to deal with bedbugs. I HAVE had to deal with roaches though, and those can be difficult to get rid of. My mom got our current bug man and we still have the same company on retainer, they're that good (they deal with rodents too, which is nice) I assume the same advice works with bedbugs; check for feedback, check their ratings, check with friends, find someone reliable.

I also use erm, "sheet suspenders" (which is another name for clips like your tube clips) since I SWEAR, every sheet I've gotten won't stay on so I clip them on. Don't know where Dad got'em, don't care, they work.

[Mayareira]

Yeah, professional help from a reputable pest control company also solved my problem quite swiftly back then.

[Melena]

Doing laundry, tossed my laundry in the dryer, come back 48 minutes later, everything still cold and wet. Toss it in another dryer, process a refund for the first load with PayRange. Come back another 48 minutes later and that dryer is also dead. So that's 3 of the four at the complex.

I'm now sitting at the laundromat down the street from us

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[Ksandra]

My hubby would own like every electronic ever if he could. Asked about getting something in particular lately and I said, “No,” because I figured that would actually make a good bday gift for him (his bday is in September).




Now I can’t remember what it was he was asking about. RIP


Hopefully he asks again before then. XD

[arus2001]

Livejournal venty time.

Been telling my folks for years now that we've had power surges progressively moving throughout the house. It took our air conditioner as one of the earlier victims, one of my PC monitors, a couple computers in one room (one that could've been a fire if I didn't catch the smell early enough), likely a couple TV components, fried a vacuum and rug scrubber, and has frequently put our oven into a softlock state I have to reset the breaker on to get the buttons to respond. More commonly, I'll get speaker pops on my PC when light switches in other parts of the house are flicked, or more egregiously, when the paper shredder is run. The main issue is they just consistently do not give a shit, but when something inevitably does break/blow up, it's my fault.

Last night, my old man is in the shower, and we get another one. This time it takes out the outlets in the bathroom and all the light fixtures. It's like 1am and he's in total darkness while I'm a couple rooms over. Being the insufferable handicapped jackass he is, this immediately explodes into a "my problem" where instead of calmly asking for help, I'm being berated for not having the problem fixed before even knowing there was a problem because the door was closed. This gets my mom involved, who naturally takes his side, and they start babbling about some kind of "test switch" on the breaker that I have no idea what they're talking about, not could any of them explain, despite being the person frequently resetting things in the basement with the earlier mentioned oven locks and such. Let's also ignore the fact their hoarder asses have so much garbage in front of the breaker box that I'm practically laying on my stomach just to barely reach the fuses with my fingertips to toggle. Nonetheless, I go to the basement and the fuse is fine. I toggle it anyway, no change. A couple other outside lights apparently on the line also still work, though we seemingly blew a bulb on a garage light that's maybe on for an hour or two a year at most.

Anyway, this still hasn't fixed the problem, so my brain's shifting to diagnostic mode. Are the lights the sort that don't work if any one in the chain is bad? Swap those around, but apparently not. Grab a night light from the other room and plug it into the outlets to confirm the section is dead. Old man's still sitting in the shower cursing up a storm, of course. I'm out of ideas at this point, and I'm definitely not an electrician. Fast forward to now, and they're acting like nothing happened despite me knowing the moment it's dark again, they'll be bitching when they have no lights in there. Part of me is hoping that this line is the cause of all the other problems in the house and the failure is the eventual culmination of that, but I worry they're just going to half-ass the fix and we'll be right back where we started soon. The darker concern is that this is just the beginning and we're going to have something worse the more they sit on it. In terms of the wiring's age, this part of the house is at least 40 years old. The other sections are definitely older, but couldn't say how much. So, just increasingly concerned it's "their time" without knowing the quality of the wiring he used when building this extension since he's very much a cheapskate. The horror of them thinking I could do all the fixes (both feeding through walls and moving all the mess instead of throwing it away) instead of hiring someone is also not lost to me.

Just blargh. -.-

[Byrthnoth]

I've read enough of these to know that what you are describing is the prologue to a story that ends with "and then my house burned down."

You should probably get an electrician.

[arus2001]

I 100% agree. More fighting tonight resumed about it, in large part because we couldn't find a tool to test the current in our clusterfuck of a basement. Think I got my mom coming around to the idea of hiring someone, but the old man is going to remain a stubborn idiot.

[Koyangi]

Getting that wiring looked at and replaced is of the utmost importance. You gotta find a way to convince him how important this is (to get an electrician in).

[Salodin]

I 100% agree. More fighting tonight resumed about it, in large part because we couldn't find a tool to test the current in our clusterfuck of a basement. Think I got my mom coming around to the idea of hiring someone, but the old man is going to remain a stubborn idiot.

Sounds like a problem with old people being stubborn and cheap. Good luck and I hope it's resolved before a more dangerous symptom happens.

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[Melena]

Don't even have to be old to be cheap. I told my brother I wanted to hire someone to handle the leaves and he flipped his shit about more "expenses" because our Step Mother refused to spend her own money out of her own pocket to maintain the mortgage and utilities of our fathers house and instead put it in forbearance and his dumb ass didn't save any money from the life insurance policy.

[Odesseiron]

This is 100% not a jab at any of you, so please don't feel that way. Sometimes I think my stepfather can be quite annoying. Then I come to this thread and I'm like... "Oh"... When seeing some of these things posted.

[arus2001]

Dealing with my family's irrationality is a common problem. Like a while back with our air conditioner issue, they kept getting mad at me I couldn't fix it by just toggling the breaker and making sure some pipes outside were clear. Turned out the unit was on recall because of fractures on internals due to materials used. Like, how the fuck was I supposed to both know and fix that.

Meanwhile, found the power outage extended to our garage when I went to pull the car out earlier this evening. Old man says they're one the same line, but it still doesn't make sense to me that the outside lights still work if they're also on the same line unless he's confused about his own set up, which is highly probable at this point. Current implication would be that the fuse is still good, but there's probably a point later in a branch that's compromised. With this being more widespread than originally thought, I'm hoping it'll nudge the narrative of grabbing a professional. However, it's also going to mandate a severe and much needed cleaning of our basement/garage because of their hoarder tendencies. And I don't even want to touch that unless I'm given carte blanche to throw nearly everything away. So, they're probably going to get unhappy with me again unless they concede, and if that doesn't happen, it'll be more stress on my end.

[Yabby]

This is 100% not a jab at any of you, so please don't feel that way. Sometimes I think my stepfather can be quite annoying. Then I come to this thread and I'm like... "Oh"... When seeing some of these things posted.

I think it is important to see other's life for this reason.

[Cantih]

Yar, after seeing peoples family issues, it makes me ecstatic I have the mother I do. Wouldn't have anyone else for the world.

[Tokitoki]

This Elsa bitch really fucked me.

Roof developed a leak above my bed. Dripped through the ceiling fixture. Conduit running from my well pit to the basement was spewing water. Another tree fell about 10-15' from my house.

We've now lost about 13-15 trees since we moved in 3.5 years ago.

[Tokitoki]

Just got about 6 hornet stings cleaning up the yard.

[Zealot]

Got some PS5 games I didn't want with my bundle so I went to trade them in. $30 store credit for 2 brand new games, but only if I unseal them and come back tomorrow since apparently GameStop doesn't take sealed games anymore? But again, I can unseal them and come back tomorrow. I might just try to sell these for $25 apiece.

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[Salodin]

Got some PS5 games I didn't want with my bundle so I went to trade them in. $30 store credit for 2 brand new games, but only if I unseal them and come back tomorrow since apparently GameStop doesn't take sealed games anymore? But again, I can unseal them and come back tomorrow. I might just try to sell these for $25 apiece.

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People used to steal games and return em for full price at whatever retailer they could get away with, or they'd buy the game and replace the disk with something else (or nothing at all) before resealing it and returning it or trading it in. Retailers have stopped putting up with that shit lol

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[Zealot]

Well accepting an empty case is hella dumb because you can tell if a disc is in there or not. I'm gonna put them on Marketplace and see if I can get $25 apiece.

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