Last night, I went into the kitchen and turned on the light. Sitting on the counter was a HUGE cockroach! It was at least 2-1/2 inches long! AT LEAST! Naturally, I screamed, and then yelled for my husband. “There’s a giant roach! Come kill it!”
He came in, probably assuming I was overreacting, since normally I’m not all that bugaphobic. But when he saw it, he yelled too. “Holy shit!” I do not blame him, because this was one of those ginormous prehistoric roaches you would see at a natural history museum. He ran off to find something to kill it with, and came back with one of his big workboots. I told him to knock it off the counter to the floor, then squish it. I didn’t want gallons of bug guts on my counter. He managed to knock it off, but somehow Bugzilla ran away and was never found.
I feel silly because I am just as capable of killing a bug as my husband, but I immediately called him in anyway. And then neither of us actually killed it. In retrospect, I think I was more startled than genuinely scared. But in that moment, I needed a man to protect me from a large but harmless bug.
For the record, this is the first roach I have ever seen in the kitchen since we moved in. The kitchen was clean and the dishes were washed. We live in Houston, so life includes the occasional, unavoidale bug. Still, ewww.
I don’t have a phobia about bugs so much as I have a phobia about squishing any bug larger than a mosquito. I can’t even think about it without cringing. But I would have been happy to capture your bug and politely usher it outside.
One of the results of my no-squish policy, by the way, is that I’ve been much more tolerant of sharing my house with invertebrate-Americans. I used to get totally wigged out by my house centipedes, with their long and creepy legs, but now I regard them almost fondly. Plus they keep down the spiders, I think.
Ha! If there’s ever a giant bug in the ladies’ room at work, I’m just going to alert HR. That’s an all-female department, so I’m sure they would recruit maintenance to come remove the hazard to our well-being.
Sal, I would have accepted an offer to take the bug outside. I don’t bear it any ill will, but I don’t want it living in my house. If it offers me money for rent, we’ll talk.
I’d guess that bugzilla is not an indication of a serious infestation if that helps. Usually the giant roaches would much rather be outside and it probably wandered in by mistake. I had one of those puppies (really they are the size of small dogs) get into my house in So IL via under my shirt. To say the least, panic ensued when that thing flew out of the top of my shirt. Poor guy didn’t mean any harm, but I hunted him down and probably drowned him in pesticide before the pesticide could take effect.
Hey, it’s ok for a husband and wife to depend on each other for doing things that the other is uncomfortable with…a loving husband and wife compliment each other quite well to make a great team. I’ve taken great pride in dispensing all sorts of beasts that my wife has freaked out over, up to and including a couple of snakes in the house…she even stepped on one in the kitchen!
I have come to find that if you don’t keep your man feeling needed, he might get bored. If you’re a awesome, independent, tough broad don’t think of it as losing any status, just think of it as an exercise to keep your man in check
I hadn’t thought of it that way, ZipperJJ. I know he likes taking care of me, but it’s hard to let myself be taken care of unless I’m truly and completely incapable of doing something on my own. I never feel bad about making him open jars for me!
Perhaps we can salvage this another way, my feminist friend. If another WOMAN had been in the house, would you have squealed like a little girl and screamed “There’s a giant roach! Come kill it!”? I know I would have. Therefore, it is not a weak female issue, it’s an I-really-hate-big-bugs issue. I’m certain that women are perfectly equally equipped to deal with giant roaches. I’m just as certain that I’ll always be startled by them and try to pass the buck to anyone else, regardless of gender!
Don’t feel bad. Last year my GF saw a wolf spider for the first time in her life. In the bedroom.
Not only did it fall upon me to get rid of it, but she was in near hysterics until it was gone - blankets up around her ears and backed into a corner. (She’s not usually like that at all, but they don’t have 'em where she’s from.)
I still want to make a needlepoint sampler that says “If I’d Have Known It Was Harmless, I’d Have Killed It Myself,” after the similar anecdote in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.
If it’s any consolation, I went to an all-girls’ school with an emphasis on women’s and equality studies for grade five to ten. I suppose none of the girls in my fifth-grade class will ever benefit from the teaching: a mouse sneaked in one time after school, with the result of twenty or so ten-year-olds standing on the desks and shrieking.
(A female teacher eventually got rid of it–I think she trapped it in a box and then set it free outside…)
If it had been a spider that size, I would died of a heart attack right there. Spiders terrify me.
WhyNot, if it had been another woman, I would have screamed anyway because that part was involuntary. I think I would have summoned my female friend to also look and marvel at the hugeness of the bug. Then we might have collaborated on a roach removal/annihilation plan, unless she screamed and ran away. I could have dealt with the roach if I had to; I’ve dealt with worse things. Hey, the roach got away last night, so if I’m confronted with it again I might be on my own.
Maybe that just means I’m lazy, and I knew my husband would get rid of the bad monster if I asked him to. Hmm…
Apropos of nothing: if you and your guy ever have the opportunity to visit sunny Florida, you’d probably be better off planning your summer activities exclusively during daylight hours… Just an idle suggestion, no particular reason…
This reminds me of the funniest thing I ever saw in my life.
It happened when my brother and I were little, maybe six and seven. We were snuggled into our bunk beds, preparing to go to sleep, or at least turn out the lights, when we saw a gigantic palmetto bug clinging to the curtains. We both hollered for Mom, and she came marching in with a can of Raid, a picture of determination in a low cut slinky nightgown. She took aim and doused that bug with the poison.
Now, whether the bug took aim or not will never be known, but when the poison hit him he leaped straight backwards and fell down Mom’s cleavage. Mom screamed in terror, threw the can of bug spray, and took off running through the house, tearing at her clothes and shrieking like a banshee. My brother and I laughed so hard we both wet our beds.
In fact, I think I peed myself a little just remembering that.
I was sitting at my computer a couple nights ago when I saw a spider walk down the wall. I was cool with it. I’m not really spider-phobic, I figured, “Hey, anything that helps keep the mosquitoes down is fine by me.”
A couple minutes later, it scurried across my keyboard, and I could see the big, red hourglass on it abdomen. And from that point on, I absolutely could not sit still in my house while it was on the loose. It took fifteen minutes for me to track it down and catch it, and I had the screaming heebie-jeebies the entire time. If I had to shift something on the desk, I would touch it with just my fingertips to turn it around, in case the spider was lurking on the back of the item where I couldn’t see it.
Finally, I caught it in a drinking glass with a copy of David Lynch’s Dune on top to keep it trapped, then released it in the bushes outside. Once I had it in the glass, I was fine with it. I kept it for a good ten minutes, turning the glass around so I could see it from all sides. But the idea of having it loose in my house was almost more than I could handle. Which is wierd, because I know black widows aren’t really dangerous, except to small children or people with serious health issues. I wasn’t going to keel over dead if it bit me. I don’t think it would even require a hospital trip. But the whole, “red hourglass equals DEATH” concept has apparently taken a much firmer hold in my mind that the “spiders equal ICKY” concept.
Too bad my mom was out of the country at the time. It would have made a great Mother’s Day gift.
I’d probably do that too, and I’ve used oven cleaner on roaches when no bug spray was available (hint: it’s not that much deadlier than water, it fouls your lungs, but at least you get the satisfying feeling of using the extreme stuff)
I met one of Florida’s fine fellers. Was a couple inches long, at least, in the bathroom of my hotel room. He didn’t appear to be very happy with the situation. I found something (forget what) to capture him in and took him outside. I don’t like bug guts, either, and try to help any critters who are in my place out of my place rather than dispensing with them.
However, do not do this with houseflies. :eek: They - um - multiply if you don’t dispense with them rapidly. I think the cat box became home to them or something, even though it got scooped daily. I finally got rid of them all but it took a few days and a lot of swatting. That’s a mistake I won’t make again. We don’t have screens in the windows in my building; it’s not a very buggy city - but when I’ve got the window and balcony door open, five flies will fly in and fly around in circles in the living room (not six or four - five - I think they have meetings to decide who’ll visit each day. That or it’s a club). I usually manage to shoo them all back out the door but I didn’t get one out that time and it must’ve been a momma.
Icon be damned. Everybody’s got something that gets under their skin or past their defenses. Its not strange or weak that you hate roaches; a lot of people do. A roomate I had for one semester of college would not go into the dorm apartment kitchen at night. At. All.
He was a bit of a tough guy too, but he couldn’t handle bugs. You need to cut yourself one big slice of break; you did nothing wrong.
Re: that dorm apartment: We tried everything too, but they’d just move a building over and then back a week later after the exterminators were gone. Damn things chewed poison bait like a farmer chews tobacco; they’d spit it back at you, too, if you pissed 'em off. We got lucky as housing reassigned us all after one semester because the apartment would flood when it rained. I think I threw out everything stitch of clothing and bedding that I owned that was in that room with me. I know I threw out every one of the posters. The tape on the back of them holding them to the wall was covered with insects like a Shell no-pest strip. :eek:
I agree with Count Blucher completely. What a real feminist icon should do is dispell the myth that ONLY women freak out at creepy crawlies. Spiders and cockroaches totally weird me out. I’ve gotten better with spiders, but haven’t had experience with cockroaches in years. Of course I will soon be moving to Missourah so here I come.
