Inspired by this article (gift link, works for five weeks, they say)
I put this in IMHO because it includes a poll, and tag it food-drink-cooking for lack of a better idea. Feel free to share anything you want related to roaches and your experiences with them.
When did you see a cockroach for the last time?
today
yesterday
last week
last month
this year
years ago
so long ago I don’t remeber
0voters
I personally do not remember when I saw a roach for the last time, but remember them as a recurrent subjet on the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics in the '70s and '80s, and we had some at home too. Not waves on the floor, as claimed in the article, but some here and there. I also saw them ocasionally on the walls in restaurants in the '80s and in supermarkets.
I’m in CA and have been for some time, which is just not the land of the cockroach like the way I remember NYC was in my youth (I got two of the really big flying fuckers in my hair on two different warm summer evenings in NYC as a kid ). It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the west coast ~a billion years ago. I’ve seen them here just a couple times in restaurants, but it has been probably been a decade since the last one.
They don’t quite fall into the category of nature I can do completely without (fleas are on that list) and I can handle just about any gross bug these days. They’re amazing little critters in a lot of ways and many things eat them, which is good I guess. But I still have a lingering visceral distaste for them from those long ago NYC years. Stay out of my goddamn hair!
I’m in CA too and saw them crawling out of a manhole cover at night. I collaborate with a public works manager at work and he said that’s common all right.
There aren’t very many here in the UK (afaik).
The last and only time i ever saw any was when i was in a band and we
did a gig at a party for botanical students at Kew gardens. The students
there loved stamping on them. That was ~42 years ago
It was here at work, though. It was a juvenile and I terminated it and reported the incident. They had the exterminators, who come out on a regular scheduled basis, make a special trip. Haven’t seen one since God knows when.
I’ve seen roaches three times in the last year. Two of those times were in insect zoos, not in the wild. From context I assume the latter is what was intended.
The third time was in the wild. It was in a restaurant in the Caribbean, and there were several.
Haven’t seen a single one in the years I’ve been living in Europe.
I can’t remember any news coverage of cockroaches, ever. Rats, yes. But not roaches.
For the past 30 years, my wife and I have been living in single-family homes that we owned and where we’ve been able to control the overall cleanliness level. To the extent I thought about it at all, I assumed that the absence of roaches was due to the switch from apartments and other rental properties where you can’t control how messy your neighbors or the previous occupants were, to an environment where that wasn’t a factor anymore.
The most recent place where I’d have seen roaches was at the in-laws’. My MIL, who passed away six years ago, was a serious hoarder and her kitchen was almost always pretty messy. I know I used to see roaches there occasionally, which of course reinforced my background thinking of “we don’t have roaches because we keep a clean house,” since I had my MIL’s house to compare to.
Circa 1988 I lived in an apartment building in Landsdowne (west Philadelphia). I’d had no prior experience with apartments nor roaches.
One day we got a communication from management explaining that they were spraying for roaches. We opted out, since we were clean people. The day after the building (other than our apartment) was treated, every damn roach was in our unit. We requested that our apartment be sprayed.
That was my first/last experience with roaches.
A friend who lived in Texas for a few years told me he had to put his bed’s feet in pans of water so roaches couldn’t get onto his bed.
Every now and then, like every 3-4 years, I find a giant Madagascar roach on my basement floor. No idea where it comes from.
The two times it happened I chucked the thing out into the street. Seems unlikely to the be same one finding its way back into the house. But it’s only ever just the one. And it’s not like they’re native here.
While I haven’t seen a cockroach in some time, I am confident that if I do see one, it will be the last time I see it, as I will dispatch it as quickly as possible.
I am not sure the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers were referring to members of the order Blattodea when they spoke of roaches.
Saw roaches on two or three occasions this spring and summer. Never in the kitchen, always in other places. Oddest location was upstairs in my loft office, about as far from the kitchen as you could get. I finally realized that the drain trap for the upstairs bathroom tub had dried out, and sewer roaches were randomly finding their way in through there. Refilled the trap, and now have a habit of refilling it on a monthly basis. Haven’t seen any since.
Last time I saw a cockroach was in our hotel room in Tucson, about a decade ago. The thing was like 5" long. Only time I ever saw one that big. Mom sent me a NYT article about the jewel wasp that preys on cockroaches (pretty little thing).
My understanding was that what was left of a joint after it had burned down to the point where you couldn’t hold it with your fingers was named after the insect. At which point you held it with a ‘roach clip,’ of course.
There was also a one page story (which I cannot find a link to, sorry) where Fat Freddy works as a waiter in a restaurant where he smokes a joint in the kitchen when a customer, an old lady, complains there is a roach in her soup. Fat Freddy is afraid it is his joint, so he runs to the table, grabs the roach and swallows it without looking. It was from the order Blattodea! The old lady falls off her chair, fainting, Fat Freddy gets fired, and in the last panel there are some cockroaches (Blattodea) smoking the joint Fat Freddy has thrown away.
I live in Florida. I don’t see them with great frequency, but it’s not unusual. If I wanted to see one, I’d leave the dishes unwashed a few days.
My daughter sees a large one in her car from time to time. She calls him Bob (after Bob Dylan, because she thinks if a roach could sing, that’s who it would sound like. I think that’s silly. Obviously it would sound like Rod Stewart.)
Today I learned there are people who have never seen one!
). It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the west coast ~a billion years ago. I’ve seen them here just a couple times in restaurants, but it has been probably been a decade since the last one.