Animal carcasses lurching out of nowhere. Dark, suffocating spaces that make a coffin seem roomy. And stenches thick enough to bring on dry heaves.
No, this isn’t the latest episode of an extreme-dare TV show. For many neighborhood residents, it’s all in a day’s work.
They are the men and women who do the dirty jobs that somebody has to do. As we work from the safety and comfort of our air-conditioned desks, they work in extreme conditions, facing things most of us could not.
So read on – if you think your stomach can handle it, that is.
Name: Brian Potvin
JOB: Aquarium curator at Dallas Zoo and the Dallas Aquarium at Fair Park.
MOTTO: “The best part of this job is no one day is ever the same as the one before.”
YUCK FACTOR: Raw fish food. Feeding time at the aquarium consists of everything from capelins (“an oily fish that can really reek,” Potvin says) to whole squid, whose ink sacs have to be removed so they won’t foul up the water (“I’ve had a few of those explode on me,” he says).
DIRTIEST DAY ON THE JOB: Potvin’s former boss at the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi had a pelican egg sitting on his desk, and its contents had never been drained. Potvin didn’t know this, however, until he picked up the egg and gave it a little squeeze. “All those years of sitting in that eggshell all came back at me. It was the most hideous smell – a rotten egg times 10,000,” Potvin recalls. “We had to vacate the area for several days, and he made me clean it up. I will never forget that, nor will I ever do anything like that again.”
BELLY UP: One of Potvin’s assignments as a marine biology student at Texas A&M University at Galveston was to pick up dead animals that had been floating around for weeks and perform necropsies (autopsies for animals). “Some of these animals can start to smell pretty quickly, so performing a necropsy on a dolphin that’s been dead for three weeks – that stays with you,” Potvin says.
THEY CALL HIM “STINKY”: That’s Potvin’s nickname at the Starbucks on Garland and Buckner. He once told an employee she needed an iron for her shirt, and she retorted, “Well, you stink.”
Name: Erin Vancil
JOB: Dallas Fire and Rescue paramedic.
MOTTO: “The best lesson you can learn working on an ambulance is: Breathe through your mouth.”
YUCK FACTOR: “I’ve experienced pretty much most bodily fluids,” Vancil says. She regularly deals with homeless people who have urinated or defecated all over themselves. Blood is also a given, but Vancil can handle that. The one thing she can’t handle is vomit, especially when someone erupts all over her. “That makes me want to throw up, and I’ve come close a couple of times,” she says.
DEATH AND DECAY: Walking in a house to find someone who has been dead for days is never pleasant, especially in the summer. Vancil remembers finding one woman who had been dead about a week in an extremely hot home. “It had gotten to the point where the body was kind of caving in on itself, and the smell was pretty bad,” she says.
DIRTIEST DAY ON THE JOB: The story Vancil’s friends and colleagues always beg her to tell is the one about the “maggot man.” She was summoned to a liquor store for “non-emergency assistance,” and she arrived to find the ambulance crew talking to a man sitting in his car. “They both had masks on, and as soon as we got close, I found out why,” she recalls. It turns out the man had not left his car for two months. The liquor store employees had been bringing him food and drinks, but called 911 when he started to smell. “It was two months of going to the bathroom and whatever in this car, and it was covered in feces and flies,” Vancil says. The man would hardly stand up, so the paramedics had to carry him to the ambulance. As soon as they lifted him, maggots began dropping to the ground – they had moved into the gaping hole in the side of his leg. “We were trying not to gag,” Vancil says, “and we went really fast to the hospital.”
Name: Shirley Darnall
JOB: Darnall Pest and Termite Control.
MOTTO: “I’m not in the best of businesses, but I’m good at what I do.”
YUCK FACTOR: Rat carcass removal. And the only way to do that, Darnall says, is to follow the smell. She digs them out from beneath insulation, where they often die after eating her poisonous bait.
DIRTIEST DAY ON THE JOB: Darnall lifted a ceiling tile to retrieve a dead rat, and it fell out – right down her shirt. “Now I lift ceiling tiles away from me,” Darnall says.
YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A FLEA PROBLEM WHEN: She arrived at one woman’s house to find her in white pants that appeared black from the knees down. “I hate doing fleas,” Darnall says. “They jump all over you, and then they get in your truck, and then you have to treat your truck.”
WATERBUGS? LET’S NOT KID OURSELVES: When Darnall flushes roaches out of a kitchen, they drop out of the cracks and crevices and land on her. “I can tell you that if a bug touches me, it will die – no chemical needed,” she declares. She says she always maintains her composure inside a home, but once down the street, she’ll stop her truck and jump out to do the “heebie jeebie shimmy.”
NO JOB TOO SMALL: Darnall has driven across town to pick up a dead cockroach lying under a Kleenex on a woman’s living room floor.
SURPRISINGLY ENJOYABLE: Pinpointing carpenter ant nests. Darnall loves the challenge of knowing a nest is somewhere inside a wall and searching to find it. “When you actually get it, ants just come bubbling out of all the cracks and holes and eaves,” she says.
THE GENDER ISSUE: Not many women enter the pest control business, but Darnall is putting men’s doubts to rest throughout our neighborhood. “When I was working for another company, one time a guy answered the door and said, ‘Oh, no no no,’ and he called the office and said he wanted a man,” she recalls. “The man didn’t get the job done, so he called a week later, and I went out there and took care of his problem.”
