In Praise of Xe Services

“Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, has come under intense criticism for what Iraqis have described as reckless conduct by its security guards, and the company lost its lucrative State Department contract to provide diplomatic security for the United States Embassy in Baghdad earlier this year after a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.” – The New York Times, December 15th, 2009

It all started when my wife whipped up a batch of her famous double chocolate chip cookies. After gorging on them, we placed the rest in a Ziploc bag, which I unfortunately forgot to zip lock, thereby inviting all creatures and critters within our home to feast.

And feast they did. The next morning, as I went to enjoy a post-breakfast cookie, there, treading on our cookies, were dozens of ants. Yecch! Ants – as you may know – have six legs, and who knows where those legs had been!?

A week later, as we were cleaning up after dinner, we noticed the cutting board was littered with ants. They were lifting up gigantic crumbs of sourdough bread and carrying them off to the bowels of our house. We weren’t planning on eating these crumbs but still, the audacity! Under closer surveillance (a microscope) I followed their trail to a crack in the wall by the microwave oven where the critters poured in freely. We had a regular insurgency on our hands!

I ran to the google machine and typed in the words “Insurgency” and “Defense”. I clicked on the first hit and was taken to the website for Xe Services, or the artist formerly known as Blackwater. It seemed they had recently lost a contract or something, yada yada, and were opening their doors to domestic employment opportunities. I called and scheduled and appointment for the very next morning.

Well, first let me tell you that those guys are punctual! At exactly 8:00 AM, or O-eight-hundred hours, as they called it, a black Hummer pulled up in front of the house. Three men exited the vehicle and I ran out to greet them. I was surprised they sent three people, and that they were wearing all black, including black face paint, but the Yelp reviews had been mostly positive so I held my tongue.

The driver introduced himself as Norton, ex-navy seal. He had a grizzly neck beard from which two veins as thick as breathing tubes ran down his shirt. He introduced his “associates”: ex-navy seals Thurman and Green, who were both, it seemed, incapable of blinking.

I welcomed the gentleman into the house and directed them to the last known whereabouts of the insurgency. Norton said something in unintelligible military jargon and suddenly Green began sniffing the cutting board. He followed his nose to the microwave oven, and then behind it to the crack in the wall. Thurman did one of those double-pointy things with his fingers, first at his eyes, and then at the microwave oven. I didn’t know ants had such good hearing! Norton nodded, and suddenly Thurman ripped the microwave oven from the counter. Underneath, dozens of ants scurried about in fear. Thurman made a strange sound in his throat, like someone attempting to start a lawnmower, and before I knew it, had spit the largest volume of saliva I’d ever seen onto the scurrying ants. I was about to say something like, “Hey, you just spit on my counter!”, but then I noticed the effectiveness of his technique: caught in the quarter-dollar sized globule were a dozen ants who could no longer warn the other cells of their impending doom.

At this point Norton told his men to retrieve the artillery, which sounded intense, I’ll admit, but they had located the insurgency in less than two minutes and were already reducing its numbers. At this point Norton also advised me to leave and return in no sooner than one hour, citing the “ugliness” of what was to come.

I walked to my favorite café, had a coffee, read the paper, and then made back for the house. At first I was quite concerned, due to the plumes of smoke rising from our home. I ran up the steps and found the gentlemen waiting in the kitchen, smoking cigars.

“What the hell happened here?” I screamed.

But Norton calmed me right down when he showed me the complete and utter thoroughness of Xe Services.

“Those ants will no longer conduct operations in the vicinity of your microwave oven,” said Norton with authority, and right he was! There was a gaping hole in the counter where the microwave oven used to be.

“We located all the cells and torched those six-legged freaks,” added Thurman.

They lead me down to the basement and showed me the charred remains of the ants. The main cell, they told me, was behind the washing machine, and was now totally incapacitated, due to the fact that the washing machine was now a smoldering pile of charred metal.

“We took out all the roaches too,” said Norton. “They appeared to be operating in league with the ants.”

“Great!” I responded.

Then I noticed the pile of dead spiders next to what used to be the dryer.

“And were the spiders in league with the roaches and the ants?” I asked.

“No,” replied Norton. “We dismembered those motherfuckers. For fun.”

I must’ve given Norton a strange look at that point, something that he probably interpreted as, “What could possibly be fun about dismembering spiders?”

“Oh and uh, also, the spiders appeared hostile,” Norton added, with a reassuring smile and wink. What a stand-up guy!

I’ll admit, the price was relatively steep, and due to the compromised structure of the house, and the toxic fumes that may have been released in the destruction of the insurgency, we have been spending the last month living out of a hotel. However, I have visited the house on occasion, and at no time have I seen any signs of the ants, roaches, spiders, or any living thing for that matter. They really did a meticulous job and therefore I can honestly recommend Xe Services. In fact, I’m thinking of calling them again. There is this girl at work who has been going all jihad on the communal coffee machine and boy am I miffed.