If you thought your job was bad, then how about trying your luck at exterminatingrats and cleaning up after dead bodies for a living?
Well, that’s exactly what Dubliner Trevor Hayden does. Working in IT for years, Hayden decided that the typical 9 to 5 office lifestyle wasn’t for him.
This week The Gazette caught up with Hayden to see what a typical day for him is like as a pest control manager and crime scene cleaner.
“We get a lot of calls from people complaining about rat infestations in their homes. When I’m out on call we set up traps as opposed to poison because if a rat is poisoned you have no control over where it dies and it can begin to smell really badly.
“We have also invented a trap that remotely tells us whenever it has caught a rodent at a specific address. Recently, I was at a very nice Georgian house where they had a rat that died underneath their floorboards. Although it smelled very badly I managed to remove it with great effort and clean the area around where it died. I have bit of OCD when it comes to cleaning and I’m very happy when I do a thorough job.”
Hayden added that on a typical day people would also call him about other types of pest problems, such
as cockroaches, flies and bedbugs (a personal fear of his).
“We get a good few calls about bedbugs during the summer months or when people accidentally take them home when they return from their holidays. We deal with them a lot, but the thoughts of bringing one of them home just freaks me out.”
His experience in the pest control business eventually led to another field altogether – cleaning up after
human remains have been removed from a scene.
Deaths
“Now and again I would get a call to clean up the area of a place where someone has died. Most of the jobs we are called out to are unattended deaths. If someone has died and no one has found them for a number of months we then would have to clean whatever has been left behind.
“When we’re cleaning a scene we have to be 100% thorough. You could wipe a surface down and it may look clean but it could be full of germs and bacteria so that’s why we have to be extremely careful about not overlooking anything.”
Asked if this type of work carries any emotional burdens after he returns home after a long day of work,
Hayden said: “The very first job I did played havoc with my mind with all sorts of stuff running through my head while in bed. Now I don’t even think about it.”
