I hate roaches, I have nightmares about them crawling into my ears and lodging there. The sight of them makes me sick and makes my skin crawl. Since I have moved to Las Vegas every once in awhile I will find a HUGE roach all by its loansome usually being killed or dead by the cat. Good cat. Better cat if you would eat it so I would never know. People here tell me that these arnt the german cockroaches that infest houses but just “natural” desert roaches wandering in for water. BULLSHIT! they are FREAK-O-NATURE Andre the Giant roaches that will attack and kill you just as soon look at you!! I can testify as such. If you know differently please tell me.
What follows is a tale of a killer roach and the disgust that ensues.
A few days ago I awoke at 5am to get ready for work as I always do I got to the bathroom and flick on the light when what to I see? A HUGE FUCKING ROACH IN THE SINK. I swear to God this thing was 2 inches long and an inch wide. When the light flicked on it REARED its UGLY HEAD and whipped around and looked at me, I do NOT make that up. I SWEAR the thing squeeled threats at me! It gnashed its teeth in my direction and ran at me!!! I screamed the high pitch scream of a frightened teenage girl. It was trying to run up the sloped side of the smooth sink to get at me (with its tounge hanging out while it screamed an attack yell) but it couldnt get traction. I managed to grab a can of lysol and sprayed half the can on it. This made the sink slippery so it couldnt jump at my throat like it wanted PLUS it was germ fighting and what are roaches made up of if not germs?? When it got used to the lysol I sprayed a plethera of shower shine on it.
I had the thing dead to rights now… it retreated from its attack and tried to run down the sink drain. The sink stopper would only let it go so far though and it only got half way. I was sure it was dead by this point though… and had ended its life struggling to get down the drain.
I carefully pulled down my briefs and sat down on the toilet for my morning poo. The whole time watching the dead roach not 2 feet from my face. I didnt even take my eyes off it to make sure I whiped my bottom well enough. I then showered making sure to look out every once in awhile to make sure it wasnt alive and planning attacks against me.
After I got ready for work I decided it would be a GREAT IDEA to leave the HUGE KILLER COCKROACH for my Ex-girlfriend/roomate to deal with after I left. When I returned from work I found the ROACH gone and my PERSONAL pair of favorite CHOPSTICKS laying on the bathroom sink.
Seriously though, I agree. Roaches are the only bug that really creep me out. Surprisingly though, they are very clean bugs and not known to be germ or virus carriers.
I really think cockroaches are out to get us. They’re tired of waiting for us to blow ourselves to bits so they can go on and evolve to be the next major lifeform on this planet, so they are finding ways to push us off the edge of the earth.
Another cockroach story that confirms this…
About 7 years ago, I moved into my very first apartment. Rent was cheap and I was only a few blocks away from the beach (I could see a little strip of blue from by back door)–and when you’re 21, hey, that’s all that matters. But, the neighborhood could have been better, and this place was the biggest heat-trap I’ve ever been in. On a very hot and sultry August night, I decided to keep my back door wide open to try to get a little sea-breeze. Time comes to go to bed, and as I go to shut the door, I notice this HUGE roach on the door knob.
First thing I do is run and get a can of Raid and start spraying the heck out of it. It FLIES towards me–YES IT HAD WINGS–as it was obviously drinking every drop of Raid and it wanted more. Drunk as a fratboy on Friday night, this roach was still trying to come after me, although it had completely given up on flying… it was skittering towards my bare feet as quickly as I could back up the hallway. By this time, I’m screaming like a banshee to get my then-BF (now ex) to come and “do something”. Now, even though he swore he’d jump in front of a train for me, he was absolutely terrified of roaches <snort>. He brings over the largest book we have–6" thick encyclopedia–and just drops it on the roach. We think it is over. We sigh with relief.
He picks up the book, and plastered on the other side is the roach, still wiggling and waving as it thought it was still going to get me (Terminator Vermin?) This was enough. I scraped him off the book and flushed him down the toilet.
We had a screen door installed on the back door the next day.
Nope, sorry. They are not very clean bugs, unless you mean that they groom themselves regularly, as most insects do. Roaches leave their fecal matter all over the place, and you have no idea how disgusting it is to perform pest control service and see roach shit in the corners of all the cabinets and under the sinks.
Roaches also have been known to carry salmonella, and their droppings and the dessicated bodies of dead roaches produce allergens which aggravate asthma and other respiritory disorders. The dirtier the environment, the better roaches like it. They eat garbage, for crine out loud! They are not clean!
B_Line12, what you saw was not a German cockroach, it was an American cockroach, which are native to the Americas and are sometimes called water bugs. They are around 2 - 4 inches long, and they are ugly bastards. Rather than spray them, which is not all that effective, try a bait, preferably one with Baygon (if you can get it) or Boric salts. Read and follow label directions (I’m serious about this, you don’t want accidental poisonings because of misplaced insecticides. Besides, and this is a minor point, but shows how important proper usage is, it’s a federal crime to use pesticides in a manner inconsistent with their label directions).
I was once at work holding a pen when I
noticed a two inch long roach crawling
on my desk. I proceeded to flip the pen
at it and managed to decapitate the
bugger!
Depends on where you live, I believe. Really warm climates, like Florida, do have American roaches wandering the streets unescorted. I live in the NYC area, and I see plenty of American roaches inside, mostly in dark, damp basements and crawlspaces.
Find some granular bait, man, I swear by the stuff, and I’m a professional assassin.
Whenever I see one, I like to slap it with a shoe or any kind of flat object. Usually, it doesn’t die when I do that. It just kind of sits there disabled trying to walk away.
At this point, I’m able to pick it up by its legs with a pair of pliers. Now comes the fun part. There are several things you can do now that it is at your mercy.
You can hold a lighter up to it, and torch it. You can pull of each leg with another pair of pliers, then throw the limbless dying carcass outside to die.
But what I like to do is feed it to my fish. After the legs have been removed, I’ll throw it into the tank, and watch the fish swim up and pick at it as it slowly comes to a painful death.
Of course, I haven’t been able to do that since our home has been exterminated. Oh well.
I live in a very nice, well-maintained building. I don’t have a roach problem, in the sense that sightings are few and far between, but picture this:
It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’ve just finished cleaning up my apartment. I’m relaxing on the couch with a book, my cat is stretched out on the floor. I see… something… out of the corner of my eye, over by the front door. I look up out of pure reflex, figuring it’s just a trick of the light, but nope! It’s a giant, evil roach, toddling in under the door (note to self: speak to super about gap between bottom of door and door sill). Invading my home without a care in its little roachy head.
The little freak was on the floor, not trapped anywhere convenient, so I had to chase it. The only cool part was when my cat whacked it into some kind of stunned submission, and sat there holding it down with one paw until I arrived with a shoe to finish it off.
a few roach horror stories… #1–my mother was the school nurse at my elementary school. She was doing her annual hearing tests on the classes, and this one kid in first grade could hear practically nothing in one of his ears. My mother asked him when the last time he had cleaned his ears was… He said it had been a few weeks. So, she looks into his ears with that ear-looker-in-thingy (sorry, it’s late and i’m at loss for the name), and, sure enough, there’s a roach. She sent him to the hospital to have it removed. #2–About 3 years ago, I was getting ready to get into the shower. (our bathroom is right next to the back door, so bugs frequent the room) I had removed my clothing and was standing there in front of the tub. I pulled back the shower curtain unaware that a huge roach had perched itself on the rod above. It fell on me as I ran screaming out of the bathroom (of course I brushed it off first). I found a towel and rushed back into the bathroom whacking that spawn of satan with my shoe until it was completely dead. Not my finest hour.
now for torturing roaches…sometimes when my brother and I spot the demons on the back porch we perfrom this little ritual we figured out while bored one summer nite. I run and grab the hair spray from the bathroom. He grabs a liter- or matches. I spray the sucker. Then he lights the match and places it on/as near to the roach as possible. Burn baby burn. ha ha ha. a great way to make them suffer. …this makes me wonder how pitiful and deranged my childhood memories must sound… oh well, I don’t live in the nicest neighborhood, and we were never “well-off” or rich. gotta have some kind of entertainment.
While stationed in Miami for the Navy I moved into a house that was, unbeknownst to my roommate and I, INFESTED with roaches.
The fiberglass shower was peeling away from the wall and those huge 3-inch things would get disturbed by the water smacking on the fiberglass and crawl up the walls to look at us <insert creepy horror movie music here?.
The first night we lived there I came home and stuck my arm into a bag of dog food to feed the dogs. Hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of roaches crawling up my arm. Fortunately, the Navy working jacket had elastic sleeves. Unfortunately, the working uniform also includes bell bottoms.
Still grosses me out.
On the plus side, those little piddly German things that hang out in Hawaii don’t bother me at all
College teacher once told me of living in a house years before in New Mexico, I believe, with five or six other guys. All smokejumpers, all very bacheloresque. Imagine how dirty the house was.
Anyway, in the middle of the night, my teacher got up for a drink. He goes into the kitchen, leaving the light off (somebody was sleeping in the living room, connected by an open doorway). He pulls the fridge door open, checking what’s there.
And then he notices, by the light of the open door, that every surface of the kitchen is crawling. Floor, counters, walls, ceiling. He said it looked like people had come in with buckets of roaches and tossed them everywhere.
He freezes for a minute, and then decides to get the hell out of there. So he slams the fridge door, preparatory to turning and running. The slamming door rocks the fridge, the fridge bumps the wall, the wall shakes the ceiling, and he’s engulfed in a rain of roaches from above as he runs like a bat out of hell.
