From this NYT Article:
This is so, so unacceptable. If it is that one resident they mention, I hope they get rid of her. There’s never an excuse for roaches. I cried a lot on the inside while reading this.
The uncooperative resident is already dead. She will be found a week from now, her corpse already reduced almost to a skeleton by the tens of thousands of roaches that swarm over her remains, their carapaces glistening and shifting in the gloom like the scales of some unspeakably ancient demon.
That is revolting. I feel things creeping on me now.
Oh, I dunno. When I was stationed in San Diego, I lived in El Cahon. My ex was the assistant manager of the apartment complex that we lived in, and every time that somebody moved, she’d have to call an exterminator.
It was not unusual to find roach feces outlining every spot on a wall where something had been hung. Or turning on a hall light, and seeing the bottom of the globe (inside) covered in crawling things. Or finding them alive in the freezer.
One of the tenants has a somewhat cavalier attitude towards house cleaning, so it was unsettling to have dinner at their place one night, and watch her place the dinner plates (with food still on them) inside the fridge. Which was crawling with roaches, inside and out.
Her daughter had to pay periodic visits to the doctor, to have roaches removed from both ears.
And every time the exterminator sprayed, the roaches simply moved to the apartments on either side.
Should’ve nuked them from orbit.
::shiver::
We just got back from Kaua’i, where we rented a new, spotless condominium. Which had two species of roaches infesting the kitchen. I kept that kitchen completely spotless and dry after cooking, we emptied the garbage twice a day, and we sprayed insecticide all along the kitchen perimeter and under and behind the appliances and under the sink every other day.
But they kept. coming. back. How could they survive the insecticide?
I’m told that it’s just a tropical thing - all humid areas have roaches and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll stick to dry old California, thankyouverymuch.
Oh, yes - the first night, one ran over my husband at night while he was trying to sleep.
::shiver::
Oh. My. God. I think I’d have run screaming from the place. And then evicted them.
How can people, in a first world country, live like this?
My mom was not creeped out by bugs of any kind. That’s why she didn’t let anyone know when she first started seeing them in her house.
One day, I noticed that her end table was so close to the wall, that the lamp’s shade was askew. I pulled the table away from the wall and where the shade had been touching the wall… there was something that I could not quite comprehend. A large dinnerplate size dark, bumpy mass. Then it came to life and atleast 50 roaches scurried off in every direction on the wall.
20 years later and I’m all twitchy just typing it.
We only had roaches twice and both times it was when particular neighbors moved. One was a slightly disabled batchelor whose housekeeping I prefer not to imagine. The other was a couple whose Rottweiller stayed home alone all day with a bowl of nice wet dog food.
Older places are pretty much guaranteed to have some. I cleaned several old apartments in Cambridge when I was a student and even with weekly thorough cleanings they still had roaches. I also remember seeing one strolling nonchalantly across the backs of the seats in front of me at Symphony Hall.
The most memorable was going out for pizza with a college friend at an older restaurant, also in Cambridge. About half way through our dinner she got a horrified look on her face and pointed at the table behind me. Another couple had left just a moment before and the roaches had already moved in on their leftovers. The oddest part was she had to convince me to leave, because I wasn’t sufficiently horrified. I’d never seen a cockroach before then and I wanted to finish my pizza.
Heh. I’ll be the first to bring up “palmetto bugs”, those massive flying cockroaches that swarm at certain times of year in almost any humid, subtropical to tropical locale. I’ve seen entire sides of houses coated in a seething mass of these things. Did I mention that they fly? And that they LOVE hair? And they’re huge?
When I was 16 I got a job as a helper to our appliance repairman. We went on a call in a tenement building in Patterson, NJ for a non-working dishwasher. When we took the back panel off hundreds of roaches poured out and scrambled across the kitchen floor, including crawling over the baby who was sitting there. They had eaten through the wiring inside. I still get skeeved thinking about it.
This lawyer is convinced (referring to himself in the third person, no less) that the tenant who won’t allow spraying is responsible for the “plague” - but it could well be one or more other tenants who are complete slobs and are providing prime roach habitat.
“Ms. Bagert has stopped cooking gumbo from her native New Orleans”
Silly Ms. Bagert. Boiled roaches add that necessary piquancy and texture missing from so many gumbo recipes.
I used to live in a highrise in the city. I was not so naive as to think there were no roaches in the building, but I never saw them in my apartment. One night I was watching TV, went up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, right in the empty floor between the bathroom & the couch was a gigantic, dead cockroach. It was huge…one of those 2-inch-long ones. I have no idea how it could have crawled out of somewhere, all the way into the middle of the floor, and died in the time I was in the bathroom (or maybe it fell from the ceiling? Even a worse possibility.) Still gives me the shivers thinking about it.
I keep a pretty clean apartment. I’m a bachelor, but I don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight, I keep my trash can covered, and I take out the trash once there is any food garbage in the bag. But this is humid, subtropical Florida, so I still see the occasional roach. Mostly dead, but I’ve seen two live ones since moving in here over the summer. One was one of those damn flying palmetto bugs, so as I was about to hit it on the wall, it flew up into the spinning fan blades, which knocked it halfway across the apartment like a pinball, onto the white popcorn ceiling. I had to use a spatula to kill it, which promptly got rinsed off and then went in the dishwasher. The palmetto bugs are larger than your average cockroach (some as large as 3"), but slower too. Even though they fly (and always tend to aim right for your head), they are easier to kill than the smaller, faster ones.
I live in a brand new spotless condominium on Kauai and have the same problem. Our condos are new, but are infested none the less. My brand new dishwasher was clogged with roach parts. I pulled it out from under the cabinets and every crevice on the outside was full of newly hatched roaches and empty egg sacks, same with the fridge. I put down boric acid in every behind all the appliances and under the sink where we keep our trash can and they seem to have decreased significantly in number. We still get the giant ones (2.5") that fly every now and then including last night near my daughter’s bed.
–gag–
Ooh, yeah, the dishwasher. I filled it up and ran it, and when I opened it a few hours later to put away clean dishes, it was running with roaches. They were not only inside on the clean dishes, they were on the sides and top of the dishwasher door. The worst was that the door roaches all ran up towards my hand, making me jump and shriek - they were all making for the hole of the latch and the thin crevice between the facing and the liner of the door. I washed all the dishes by hand and then we sprayed inside the dishwasher and down inside the facing and inside the lock and ran the washer empty a couple of times. I’m betting they’re back by now freaking out the next week’s guests.
The place was probably too new to be properly inhabited by geckos. Give it a month or two and the fauna will stabilize.
When I moved into my house we had roaches. The prior owners kept rabbits, and did not clean up much. I had roaches you could saddle and ride.
When I remodeled my kitchen and bathrooms about 13 years ago, I made sure that all openings in the wall were sealed, I sprinkled boric acid into the walls whenever I opened them. When I went under the house for plumbing, I sprinkled more boric acid. When I put down a new subfloor, I sprinkled more boric acid. before I set the base cabinets I sprinkled more boric acid. I sealed all the seams of the cabinets with RTV silicone, and sealed the backsplash and baseboards.
The results? No roaches.
I’ve heard stories of places where people have to eat dinner with their plates raised off the table, lest roached crawl on the food while they’re sitting their eating it, so this sounds tame in comparison.
I don’t know why I read this entire thread. :shudder: Especially because it reminded me of the time we went to visit my husband’s elderly grandmother in Miami Beach. She was quite blind and had no idea the number of roaches in her kitchen, but unfortunately I wasn’t so lucky. She kept offering whiterabbit, who was 5 at the time, some coffee cake, but when I went in to get it and saw the roaches, I suggested we take her out to eat instead. Then I spent the rest of the day cleaning as best I could, with inadequate supplies and a surfeit of repulsion. :shudder:
One of the great things about living up here in the tundra is that everything with more than four legs dies in October. Even on the rare occasion where you see some kind of infestation in the winter all you have to do is turn off the heat and open some windows. You’ll be insect free within hours.