WARNER ROBINS — As Don Ferguson turns left onto Joseph Avenue on the city’s south side, a man standing in the street waves frantically to get his attention.

“I’m sure glad to see you,” the man says to Ferguson, wiping his hands down his arms in dramatic fashion. “They’ve been eating me up.”

Ferguson, 66, with a compact stocky build and mostly white beard, just smiles. He says the reaction to seeing him could have been a lot worse.

The truck Ferguson drives for the city four nights a week is equipped with a machine spraying a synthetic pesticide into the atmosphere to obliterate all the mosquitoes in its path. It has been done in the city for 16 years. There’s no way to measure how effective the spray is. Even residents along Ferguson’s route offer varied opinions as to its effectiveness.

“But there’s a lot more people telling me it works than telling me it doesn’t,” he says.

Public Works Director Joe Musselwhite says the city sprays mostly during the summer months when the bugs are at their highest concentration. The demand for spraying -- his department gets calls as soon as the weather heats up -- has kept them on the road, navigating their way through the city’s main roads and subdivisions.

“There are a lot of people who want it,” Musselwhite says, “because it works.”

Two men — Ferguson and fellow public works employee James Haslem — fill the machines on the backs of their trucks four days a week with Silvex mosquito spray, a chemical compound that also helps kill flies, fleas and cockroaches, among other insects.

From there, they set out on four-hour shifts, at 10 miles an hour, traveling through a section of town. Ferguson, who handles the south side, can usually get through about 25 to 30 miles of the city during a shift. It takes two weeks to complete his part of the city, which stretches south of Watson Boulevard.

Before that can even happen, he says, the department gets calls for spraying in his service area.

“Two or three days after you go through, you’ll get people wanting to be sprayed again,” he says.

It’s a job Ferguson didn’t even want starting out. He was the alternate for another public works employee, who wanted the overtime, but not the late hours.

“He decided he didn’t wanna spray at all,” says Ferguson, a motor equipment operator for public works’ street department by day. “I kinda just took it from there.”

Most nights, it’s just him and Goose, as he calls Haslem, making their way through their respective routes. Occasionally, a resident along the route will wave his way. Sometimes, they only wave one finger. He doesn’t mind. He knows the job isn’t a hit with everyone.

Once, a lady ran up to his truck screaming about the spray. She claimed to be allergic. Others put their hands up to cover their mouths and noses. If he sees a pregnant woman, or children nearby, he turns the machine off until they’re out of reach.

Often, he gets people wanting him to back the truck into their back yard, putting the spray to good use in their problem areas. There, he’s offered the occasional beer, maybe a buck. He turns it all down, he says.

“It’s my job.”

He sticks to the Pepsi in the small cooler that rides shotgun. Or the beef jerky and pretzels bagged up behind the seat in the truck’s cab.

But how do you find value in a often thankless job that doesn’t even show you concrete accomplishment?

“When I come back around (to a neighborhood already done) and the people are telling me how good it was, that makes me feel good,” he says.

Four hours a night of Bug Muggin’. Or Mosquito Zappin’. Those are some of the names for the job made up by the guys in public works. Ferguson sees it as easy overtime, a way to pay off a few bills.

But it’s his last summer on the shift. He’ll retire in the fall.

“Will I miss it?” he says. “No. But I make it interesting. You know how boring it would get driving around at 10 miles an hour?

He revels in the job’s intricacies. Like making sure you turn the air conditioning off in the truck when coming out of a cul-de-sac. Or turning off the machine when backing up toward the bushes at a dead-end street. If you don’t, you’ll get a good whiff of the spray. Not a good idea, he says.

Or remembering how he got into some of the many subdivisions where he finds himself. That, he says, is the easiest one to mess up.

There’s one off Feagin Mill that I went in and got turned around,” he says. “I came out on (Ga.) 96.”

“I’ve been told you can’t do that from that subdivision. But I did.”

For the next few weeks, he’ll be out there, slowly making his way through town, zapping as many mosquitoes as he can. If you get stuck behind him, he said, drive around.

And wave — with all five digits.

To contact writer Marlon A. Walker, call 256-9685.