Cockroaches
I used to like them. Well, not like, but you know, cockroaches treat me with the respect that I deserve. (unlike a lot of other living things)
I mean, I walk in the room, turn on the lights and it’s like I could hear them screaming in terror. “RUN! IT’S ZEBRA! RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!” And when the carnage was over I could imagine them in their hiding places. Little kids crying over their crushed mothers, their dad just saying “Bitch should have run. Zebra came in. Don’t fuck with him.” Basically cockroaches treated me like I was Samuel L. Jackson. And I should be treated that way.
But lately…
This is no respect. There is no terror. I can turn on the light in the bathroom and it’s like they don’t even notice. I can be making something in the kitchen and they’ll just pop up looking at what I’m making. “Hey is that tuna? Can you make sure it has a lot celery in it?” “Hey! why are you trying to kill me DUDE? Chill!? Oh OK I’ll leave.”
Bastards!
Anybody else notice this shift in cockroach personality?
After I moved into my current place I saw a roach one night. Like a reasonable human being I immediately lost my fucking mind. I looked up batten and hatches in the dictionary and then did the one to the other. I bought a shitload of poison and then somebody said birds and frogs eat roaches so I bought a bunch of birds and frogs. Then I poisoned the frogs and the birds to show the roaches I wasn’t fucking around and bought a goddamned Blackwater arsenal to commit individual murder against every one of them and set individual fire to each of their faces if they had faces which they don’t. I filled traps with other traps. I bought fifty of those electric potpourri dispensers and filled them with roach spray. It was like the fucking fountain show at the Bellaggio in my kitchen every night, only instead of Celine Dion it was accompanied by the death rattle of entire generations of little alien monsters. I covered the floor in cilantro, just in case they hate that. I rented a second fucking apartment just so I would have a safe place to store illegal poisons in case my place got Raided. I painted a Rothko on the floor of my kitchen in roach bait. You really had to see it in person. To understand how many roaches it was going to kill. I would have happily burned the entire block to the ground rather than walk into my own personal kitchen ever again and see one of those Hitler bastards creeping along underneath the cabinet where I keep my own personal god-damn Rachael Ray fluorescent eggplant crepe pans.
When I was younger, my friend in another city lived in an apartment with roaches like that. I used a Zippo lighter at the time, so I had my fuel with me when I went to his place to stay for a few days. We discovered an amusing trick. Make a circle about 3 or 4 inches in diameter around them with the fuel, then light it. At first, the flames go straight up, making a ring of fire around them, and they get confused and don’t know which way to go. Then, when the oxygen is used up inside the fire ring, the flames flow inward, then upward at the center. The roach dies horribly and turns crispy. We left lots of funny brownish looking rings on his kitchen floor when he moved out.
I wonder why he never got his security deposit back?
That was friggin’ great, Jimmy C. Are Rachael Ray fluorescent eggplant crepe pans the new colander around here?
OP, I’ve noticed that roaches that have been poisoned (bait traps, etc.) often exhibit exactly the behavior you’re talking about: being out in the light, not scurrying away from danger, etc. The Other Shoe mentioned the same thing: his family moved into a house with a roach problem when he was little, and after putting out a shitton of traps, they started seeing them acting all non-roachy. Then, after a while, they were all gone - poisoned to death.
So I imagine the poison interferes with their instincts.
My business shares a wall with a chinese restaurant. It used to be that if I worked late (past 10:00pm) I’d encounter a few roaches in the hallway in the back of the building. In the last year the roaches have grown in numbers, doubled in size and no, they do not scatter when the light goes on.
The restaurant did change hands. I don’t know if it’s a new strain of giant roaches or the new people’s food is better and these are the same roaches, just eating more.
One night, sort of late, I heard an unusual sound. I followed it and discovered two tremendous roaches eating a dropped cracker. I shrieked and went back into my store. When I left the cracker was GONE.
I have my store sprayed twice a year and they still come into my space once in a while but there isn’t food lying around so there’s no incentive for them to stay.
One more reason why I’d never want to own a restaurant.
You are an inspiration to us all. My cousin Vinnie is impressed, and he doesn’t impress that easily. He wants to know if you’d like to become part of the family, because he could USE a guy like you.
I had a roach problem in an apartment we had once. The little bastards would run, but then they’d stick their buggy little heads over the edges of the cabinets or out of the crevices behind things to check on my progress. “Hey, you done yet? Ya MIND? Trying to eat here!”
I hated the spying worse than the actual bugs themselves.
I hope it’s a sign that all the poison I’ve put down is working. I’d hate to think I’m going to be stuck with mutant mentally challenged roaches THAT DON’T SHOW ANY RESPECT!
Don’t feel too bad about the cat. On the few occasions when my cats can be bothered to eat a bug, they generally puke its exoskeleton up somewhere I’ll step in it when I’m not looking.
We’ve got the opposite problem. It first generation of roaches where, like, “hey, it’s a foreigner, we must be cool” type and they barely deigned to moving until it was too late and they were flattened.
Too damn many of them, so I started putting out the roach motels, got the poison and attacked in full force.
Threw true evolutionary principles at work, the DNA of the laid back ones have been forever eliminated and I’m stuck with those fast suckers and their children.
I hate to tell you this but if the cockroaches are “talking” and you believe they have “personalities” the problem may not be just the cockroaches.
Mind you I think I once started a thread to ask if I was the only one to notice that a cockroach will sit calmly looking at you until you think of grabbing the pest spray, and then it will suddenly disappear. But that’s a sane and sensible observation.
