I was visiting my parents at Christmas, and on the 26, Terminix sent out one of their "licensed inspectors" (the words of the agent) to look for termites.
She entered the house, went upstairs and looked in the infirmary where my bedridden (she has MS) aunt lives. There were some wood chips and dust on the floor along the floorboards, and she told us that they were termite droppings. She then stuck her head in the attick for 10 seconds (seriously), and immediately told us that "ooohhh yeah. You guys have termites. There are lots of droppings up here." She close the attick, climbed down the ladder and took my parents downstairs where she began to fill out an invoice for tenting. When we asked her about alternatives to tenting, she told us that spot treatments dont work, and that if in order to try them, we'd have to "rip open the entire wall, and it would cost even more than the tenting would". She then proceeded to give my parents some doomsday crap about how they needed to take care of this immediately, and blah, blah.
She seemed suspect to me (especially with a $2,500 invoice in front of her), and so I pressed her for more information, and demanded that she go back up to the attick and get me some evidence of the termites that she was so sure were there. She went back up, and turned and searched and searched some more before she swept some dust off onto the paper towl, telling me that what she'd handed me were termite droppings. I was even more suspicious.
I told her that she could leave, got in my car, and drove down to the office that she came from. I presented the "evidence" to her manager and another inspector who assured me that the dust and wood on the cloth had absolutely nothing to do with termites. They sent out another inspector the next day who again confirmed. There was no termite evidence.
Make no mistake, she came to my elderly parents house with the intention of scamming them out of their money, and after her doomsday speak and hard sales pitch, they would have signed that invoice if I hadn't been there. They would have had to move out during Christmas, find a home for my involent aunt to live in during that time, and even with knowing all this, she still sat at their kicthen table and lied to our faces about the existence of termites.
Was it an isolated event? Not a chance.in fact, that same inspector told me that she had a bunch of other customers who were moving out for tenting during the next week. During the holidays! AVOID TERMINIX IN SANTA MARIA AT ALL COSTS. They employ an inspector who I believe was named Andrea that will scam your family with no regards for the upset and problems that her lies and scams may cause. She's about 5'4", 200 lbs, and around 35 years in age. Beware!
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