You booked a roach treatment, and now there is a date on the calendar with no real idea what happens when the technician shows up.

Two spiders account for a fair share of the sightings that get reported around South Florida yards without any real problem behind them: the wolf spider and the jumping spider.

The report lands in an inbox after the inspection and gets opened on a phone at the kitchen counter.

The buckets are gone. You walked the yard on a Saturday, tipped out the wheelbarrow, emptied the plant saucers, drilled a hole in the bottom of the kids' old sandbox lid, and felt good about it. Then the sun drops, you step outside to move the sprinkler, and inside a minute, they find your ankles again. Same whine, same welts, same yard you just cleared.

You spot it at dusk: a large, dark roach clinging to the soffit near your gutter, or dropping out of a palm frond onto the lanai screen.

Ask where a roof rat got into an attic and the answer is rarely a hole punched through something solid.

If you live in a duplex, a garden-style apartment building, or an attached townhome, the roaches in your kitchen are not necessarily a verdict on your own housekeeping.

It starts again around midnight. A scratch, then a scurry, then that hollow rolling sound of something moving along the top of the ceiling above your bed. The exterminator came weeks ago, set traps, maybe left bait, and told you it was handled. For a while, it was quiet. Now you are lying awake listening to the same tenant move back into the same space, and you are wondering what you paid for.

Nesting material pressed against an air handler, or gnaw marks along a supply boot, is usually seen first by whoever is servicing that equipment, since the area immediately around the unit gets looked at as part of the service and rarely otherwise.

You find a large roach on the second floor, in a guest bathroom or hallway, nowhere near the kitchen, and the usual advice doesn't apply.

A mulch bed pulled right up against the foundation. A palm crown still carrying last season's dead fronds.

A web strung low across a hibiscus hedge or a mailbox post, big enough to span a couple of feet across, with something small, white, and spiky sitting dead-center, shows up in South Florida yards often enough that most homeowners eventually walk face-first into one.

You had the enclosure built so you could eat dinner outside without waving a hand in front of your face every few minutes.

A German roach spends almost its entire life pressed into a crack you never look at: behind the toe-kick under the cabinets, in the hinge recess of the dishwasher door, inside the warm motor housing of the refrigerator. It comes out to feed in the dark and ducks back in before the light finds it. That single habit is the reason a treatment aimed at open surfaces rarely holds.

A woodpile and a shed corner don't look like habitat. They look like storage, something stacked and left alone between uses.

On a single block in Coral Springs or Parkland, one row of houses backs onto open water and the row facing it does not.

Once the noise overhead has been identified as coming from rats rather than squirrels or raccoons, the question changes.

You clear the pool cage on Saturday morning, corner posts, the screen door frame, the light fixture over the spa, and by the following weekend every one of those spots has a new web strung across it.

Open the cabinet under your kitchen sink, and the first instinct is to blame the plumbing.