Posted on 08/20/2010 7:33:23 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is like a mattress left on the street, something best avoided in these times.
They dont want to hug you anymore; they dont want you coming over, said Mr. Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Youre like a leper.
At the Brooklyn district attorneys office, which recently had a bedbug breakout, defense lawyers are skittish about visiting, and it is not because of the fierce prosecutors.
Even Steven Smollens, a housing lawyer who has helped many tenants with bedbugs, has his guard up. Those clients are barred from his office. I meet outside, he said. Theres a Starbucks across the street.
Beyond the bites and the itching, the bother and the expense, victims of the nations most recent plague are finding that an invisible scourge awaits them in the form of bedbug stigma. Friends begin to keep their distance. Invitations are rescinded. For months, one woman said, her mother was afraid to tell her that she had an infestation. When she found out and went to clean her mothers apartment, she said, Nobody wanted to help me.
Fear and suspicion are creeping into the social fabric wherever bedbugs are turning up, which is almost everywhere: Public health agencies across the country have been overwhelmed by complaints about bedbugs, said a joint statement this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It was kind of nice in 1999, not at all nice around 1981, and in 2008 seemed to be slipping backwards. But whatever. Been there, done enough, and am happy to leave NYers to continue gazing at their own navels thinking it's the whole world. Please keep thinking that. Please.
Clemenza, you get an exemption. You have a bona fide preference.
Lots of DDT BS around,...when I was a kid, the city use to go down every street in Detroit and fog to kill misquitos and bugs.....Lots of us 70 and up adults didn’t suffer any problems.....Malaria was almost a global wipe out now it kills millions in the third world.....A lot of us adults have been around long enought to spot bull shit when we hear it...
LOL good answer....just what I want to sleep in...
Sometimes, we even followed the truck down the street...and played in the mist.
I'm sure the owner of that Starbucks will be glad to read this.
Biblical pestilence in NYC? Who would have expected that?
But GG, you’d be sleeping alone and bugless. :-D
btt
OMG we actually road bikes without helmets, climbed trees for fun and my mother caught me using the next door neighbors fense to climb on the roof of our garage...it was great up there for an 8 year old....had to get sneaky after mom caught me.....oh the horror and humanity....;O)
Not to mention playing dodgeball in grade school.
Worse, we went rabbit hunting...with our own shotgun. And varmint hunting, as well...with our own .22 rifle. And went fishing...down on the creek where water moccasins were known to hang out.
It wouldn't be much fun being a kid nowadays..
In High school, the ROTC brought their own rifles to school once a week for class...no drive by shooting either...people didn’t change, society did and now everything is to be feared...yuk.....and crooks are just victims of society, double yuk
Same here. we used to go out into the spray when they sprayed DDT for mosquitos along the Animas river in Farmington,NM back in 1956.
In the military we sprayed the inside of our KC-135 with DDT to keep the mosquitos down while on the flight line in Thailand.
A minor nuisance? From what I’ve heard it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of them. They not only hide in furniture, cushions, mattresses, pillows, etc., but also behind electrical outlets and vents and in hard-to-see places. I’ve read about people that just pick up and leave everything behind in their houses and apartments because they can’t get rid of them. I have some friends that no longer travel to Vegas or Hawaii because of the problem.
Thanks for the kind words. Some of us our two maladjusted to live anywhere else. Besides, it is high comedy making fun of your neighbors, particularly those who were not even raised in the area, yet adopt all the pretensions of the Manhattan/Park Slope Axis of Dweebals.
*I just returned from imbibing too much sangria, so my spelling was off in the earlier post.
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