Okay, my skin is crawling from reading this thread, so now, lucky Dopers, the time has come for me to bust out the Worst Roach Story Ever until the next one comes along®
One East End home I lived in developed a chronic roach problem. It was a duplex, so it had the built-in advantage of having someone else to blame for being the dirty bastids who brought the roaches in. I won’t bore you all with the long and tedious account of the lengthy and futile struggle to keep their numbers down with various and sundry pesticidal measures, but instead skip ahead to the day that still gives me night terrors:
One day, I spotted a bit of movement on the microwave oven’s LED clock. Closer investigation revealed nothing untoward. Maybe a week later, when I went to heat up some food, I espied a fat roach sitting right on the LED readout – behind the plastic. This didn’t do much for my appetite. “My god!” I thought, “a roach has managed to get in there, and since I saw some movement there last week, it doesn’t look to be going anywhere soon.” The vaguely unsettling idea of it dying in there occured to me. Who wants to cook your food in something that has a dead bug in it?
So I moved the thing onto the kitchen table where I could get at it. Keep in mind that this is in the mid-eighties, and the thing was a behemoth by today’s standards. I located the screws that were holding the cover on and removed them, and then slid the whole works off.
And then I screamed. Like a little girl. Suddenly there was a confusion of motion. Roaches seemed to pour like fluid from the interior of this neat little device in which I prepared food for convenient consumption several times a day. Roaches ran up my arms, both inside and outside my shirtsleeves. They were in my hair. Inumerable scurrying things, radiating outwards from the opened oven.
I had a friend standing my impotently with an aerosol can of Raid. The offending oven was carried outside, roaches still dropping from it. Apparently, every cubic centimetre of its interior had been occupied by roaches.
The microwave, apparently, was the roaches’ home base. IT was the reason we were fighting a losing war, no matter how carefully we sealed our food in impenetrable containers for storage, how dilligently we cleaned every exposed surface in the kitchen, and how liberally we dispensed lethal chemicals. “Here’s a place they won’t think to fumigate!” the cunning little fuckers schemed. “Nobody sprays where they eat!” Even better, it was a constant source of vapourized and evenly-distributed nourishment for them. AAAAAAGH!
You know They Just Creep Up On You, in Creepshow? Small stuff, strictly.
After the microwave was thoroughly dismantled and sanitized, our roach problem vanished practically overnight.
I’ve never lived with roaches again, thank god. They’re just about the only excuse for arson I can imagine. “Sorry, Mr. Landlord, but the roaches just took it.”