An Orkin exterminator’s decision to use a child’s sippy cup as a pesticide dispenser has gotten him suspended from his job after he left it behind in a house with three young children.

The tech had come out to the house in Chicago to deal with an ant situation. The next day, the mom spotted an unfamiliar Looney Toons sippy cup wrapped in paper. Upon further inspection, she realized it was what the Orkin man had been using to sprinkle pesticide.

“He was using it as an applicator. He had put the bait in a sippy cup,” she told the Chicago Tribune’s Problem Solver. “It was so blatantly dangerous that it threw me for a loop.”

After checking to make sure none of her kids had touched the cup, the mom was on the phone with Orkin.

They were kind of like, ‘Oh, did anyone get hurt?’… They were apologetic, but their sense of urgency wasn’t there. (The service manager) took the bottle as evidence. He said he would let me know what they were going to do and he would call me back.

Not surprisingly, they didn’t call her back.

When the mother was finally able to get someone on the phone again, she was told it couldn’t be discussed with her because it had become a human resources issue.

That’s when she contacted the Chicago Tribune’s Problem Solver column, who managed to get through to someone at Orkin’s parent company, Rollins Inc.

Said a rep for the company to the Tribune:

What the technician did was to use an unapproved dispenser… Unfortunately, he was using a child’s drinking cup to scatter the granules. That was completely outside of company protocol….

He was reprimanded… He was put on a three-day suspension without pay.

Additionally, the company agreed to cancel the outstanding $80 charge for the Orkin visit that started the whole mess.

The mom didn’t seem terribly impressed with the three-day suspension, telling the paper, “That doesn’t seem like very much.”

What do you think of the resolution to this situation?

Sippy cup used to apply poison [ChicagoTribune.com]

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