Ever since we moved into the new office, we have been having a problem with gnats. One of my coworkers looked them up and they appear to be fungus gnats, the sort of tiny little bug that isn’t harmless to humans, but nests in plant soil and dead leaves, and is just generally annoying. As part of the whole ‘greening the office’ thing my company has been doing, we drastically increased the number of plants we’ve got, so we figure either one of them was infected, or else there were some eggs in one of the bags of potting soil we used to set all those new plants up.

At the peak of infestation I had to keep a little cover on my coffee cup because otherwise I would consistently find at least one or two dead gnats floating in it every time I turned around. They like warmth and damp, which means that they seem to have great affection for trying to fly up our noses. As I said, they’re harmless, but they are incredibly annoying.

The problem with these sorts of bugs is that, short of getting rid of the plants, there is no quick way to take care of the problem. One of my coworkers got some spray for the plants themselves, and some water treatment, but that only worked for a little bit before they started coming back. So, short of the drastic measure of taking every single plant outside, removing every bit of existing potting soil, and then repotting them in sterile dirt, we decided to try a few other options. One of those options is to cover the top of each pot in a thick layer of sand, because gnats need organic material in which to lay their eggs, so this limits their options significantly. And the other option, taking by one of my coworkers, was to set off some bug bombs on Friday, in the hopes that they would take care of all the existing adults, and then the sand would take care of any future ones setting up camp.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Most of us have used those bug foggers in the past, and they’re easy to set up. My boss was the last one out on Friday, so he agreed to be the one to set them off.

Here’s the problem. When we have all used these before, it’s been at home. And one big difference between home and office is that most homes do not come equipped with an automatic sprinkler system. Do you know what the difference is between a cloud of bug spray and a cloud of smoke? Not if you are an automatic sprinkler system, you don’t!

Oh, but it gets better. Once the automatic sprinkler system sensor was triggered, that triggered the building’s fire alarm. And when the building’s fire alarm goes off, all the elevators shut down, and the fire doors shut automatically. People can still exit through the stairs, but those stairs are locked from the inside, so the only way out is through the ground floor; getting back up to our office becomes impossible. Oh, and did I forget to mention that the fire alarm *also* triggers an automatic call to the local fire department?

Luckily the firefighters who came were very understanding (apparently this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened). As was the building manager, who came over to figure out what was going on. Even more luckily, the sprinkler system didn’t actually turn on over just a little smoke (or else we’d have had a lot more worries than just a few gnats.

And in the meantime, there were significantly fewer gnats in the air today at the office. I lugged one fifty pound bag of sand in last week and covered about one third of the plants, and this week I’ll lug in two more bags to take care of all the rest of the pots, while another coworker is treating the soil, and there’s a fresh bottle of the incecticidal soap ready in the kitchen. So it’s possible that we’ve finally started to turn the tide on these gnats. But just in case this all doesn’t work, next time we’ll have to come up with something a bit less…exciting…than bug bombs to treat them.