Bug Exterminators of Reddit. What was your, we're going to need a bigger boat moment?

Spent the summer between high school and college working for a local, family-run exterminating

company. Nice gig. Residential treatments during the day, mosquito fogging at night, and the occasional

dairy farm treated for flies and rats. One day, I'm at one of these dairy farms and enter the milking parlor to spray

and set up traps. See a rather large cat across the parlor from the front door. Good for him, I think,

growing fat, eating rodents and whatever else he's caught over the years. I entered the parlor

and the cat moves, and I realize the cat is not a cat, but a rat, easily the size of a 12 to 15 pound

feline and running down a drainage pipe, decided that I did not want to be a sacrifice to the

rat king that day and noped out of their fast.

Rats, rats, we're no rats.

I'm not an exterminator, but that didn't stop my Anne from asking me and my brother from taking

care of a hornet's nest. I figured that I could handle it. Heard somewhere that WD40 supposedly

kills Hornets, so one night we go over with a can of spray foam and a half dozen cans of WD40.

It was quiet, so I quickly spray the entrance shot with the foam, and we go to town

on it with the WD. That's when we heard an unholy and frankly terrifying sound come from the nest.

We should have ran, but we kept spraying. However, the Hornets were not going without a fight.

They somehow tore open another entrance and poured out. That's when we started running.

Luckily, I parked my car close by and had the doors open, but I had a couple dozen stings,

as did my brother. Two out of ten would not try it again. That said, the Hornets did abandon

the nest, and a couple of days later, when the swelling went down, we went back, cut the branch

down, and lit the nest on fire. It went up in a puff of flame and smoke, so that was fun.

But never again am I going up against Hornets without calling an exterminator first.

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