‘A secret cabal’: Jake and Spike riff on the pest control industry’s door-to-door playbook

If you’ve had a young man approach your front door offering you a deal on spider treatment and casually dropping the name of a neighbor you’ve never heard of, you’re not alone.

Jake Skorheim and Spike O’Neill, co-hosts of “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio, compared notes on the pest control salesmen who have become a fixture of summer in the Pacific Northwest and found the pitch is always the same.

Jake is convinced they’re all the same company

Jake said the door-to-door pest control visits have been happening since his house was built five years ago, and that the salesmen are so uniform in appearance and approach that he suspects a coordinated operation.

“Who in the pest treatment industry decided unanimously there’s like a secret cabal where they all meet up?” Jake said. “I’m convinced that they’re actually all the same company. They just go around with different names, cause they all look exactly the same. Their uniforms are very similar. They’re all on hoverboards. And they’re always, like, clearly young, back-from-college guys.”

The pitch, Jake believes, never changes.

“They come up to the door, and they say, ‘Hey, we’re just stopping by because we’re working on your neighbor’s house,’ and then they give me a name that I’ve never heard of,” Jake said. “And they just assume that I don’t know my neighbors, but I do.”

Spike takes the pest matter into his own hands

The conversation turned to spiders, and Spike dropped a revelation about his home life.

His wife has a system: she traps spiders under an upside-down pint glass and waits for Spike to come home and release them outside.

“If I come home from work and I see an upside-down pint glass along the edge of the wall downstairs, I got a job,” Spike said. “I got to go find a piece of cardboard, slide it under, carry him outside, wave him off into his freedom, and point him toward the neighbor’s house.”

Jake asked if his wife thinks he actually does that.

“No,” Spike said. “I squash the crap out of these puppies.”

He said the logic is simple.

“They found their way in last time,” Spike said. “They’re coming back. What do you think, just cause I give them a stern talking-to? ‘Go out and make something of yourself, young man, get out there, the world’s waiting for you, full of opportunities.'”

Spike added that the spider he killed the night before was so large it wouldn’t fit under a pint glass, and that he wished he’d taken a photo.

“I’m hanging his license plate in my garage as a trophy,” Spike said. “That’s how big this one was last night.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3