I’ll start. Apt next door is having a cockroach infected. 4 days ago, I was playing sims on my laptop, wearing my eyeglasses. Right lens got blurry, took off, huge cockroach was crawling across inside of lens. While I was wearing them. Freak out ensued.
Life Pro Tip
A really cheap and effective way of getting rid of roaches, without even using poison…
Get a medium to large metal coffee can, or any old metal can I guess. Make sure it’s cleaned out and dry to start with, and is not rusty.
Then get some spray cooking oil and a few scraps of bread. Spray the inside of the can with cooking oil, then drop some bread scraps in there.
Now you have a roach trap, set it near where the roaches are generally at their worst, and they’ll crawl out of the walls and into the can to get their munch on, but won’t be able to crawl back out.
Check it every couple or few days or so, eventually the roaches will start piling up and most of them that have been in there for a bit will end up dying because they’re covered in the cooking oil and apparently can’t absorb oxygen.
Take the trap as necessary and either dump it in the toilet and flush them away, or if you have access to a bonfire burn pile, bag the little demons up and burn them. Then clean the can out and reset the trap as necessary.
Even with the worst infestations I’ve ever seen, this tends to eliminate over 99% of them within about two weeks, if not less.
A few thoughts about the different approaches between my trap vs poison…
If you poison them, then they just go back into your walls and die, further stinking the place up, is more dangerous to people and pets, and honestly isn’t even nearly as effective as people would hope.
But roaches are simple and stupid. They’re really easy to trap, and why the hell would I want them going back into the walls in the first place? Especially when I can just flush them instead?
What is the reasoning behind the not rusty warning?
The whole method of operation of the trap is to make sure the roaches can’t crawl back out after they get in. So you need a totally smooth surface plus the cooking oil so they can’t climb back out.
If by chance you were to use a rusty can, that would give them a textured surface to grip onto and likely manage to crawl back out, which would defeat the trap.
Edit: It probably won’t hurt if the can happens to have only a couple or few small spots of rust, as long as it’s not so rusted as to give them a brown brick road to crawl back up and out. Any which way, the goal is to make sure that once they get in, they can’t get out.
Greatly appreciate the tip
Was gifted a lightly used Keurig machine. Partner started noticing little roaches everywhere in the kitchen. She was halfway through a cup of coffee when she opened the water reservoir and spotted a few floating in the water. I opened the machine and the machine was full of them.
Roaches can lay up to 32 eggs/week, and I think a roach mom had at least one good week in the Keurig.
Friend had said he didn’t want it because it was attracting roaches. He claims to not have known it was carrying them.
A few years ago my partner and I lived in a slumlord-owned apartment above a crack dealer. We had a storage unit in the basement. For some reason, the only light switch was at the end of a really long and creepy hallway.
When a hurricane hit the area, the whole neighborhood flooded horrifically. The sewers were backed up with trash so nothing drained. There were cars floating down the street. The basement oozed with mildewy dampness for the next few days.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever watched Cloverfield? Do you know that scene where they go down into the subways and turn on the camera’s night vision, only to see a wave of alien creatures rushing at them?
Well, the next time we went down into the basement was exactly like that. That moment felt like a Lovecraftian nightmare as we ran past at least a dozen cockroaches crawling on the cold concrete walls, each one the size of my palm, all lit by the glow of our phone flashlights. Their antennae were like toothpicks. These were the single largest roaches I had ever seen. It was unreal. I have had nightmares about that moment.
Never again.
Giant cockroaches. Why did it have to be giant cockroaches.
I stayed in an apartment that was infested with roaches and they followed us when we moved out. They started to try and establish a colony in the new house we were renting but we waged a war on them. We bombed the house with bug spray, foggers, and diatomaceous earth but it was still a struggle getting rid of them all. At one point my computer was getting dusty so I decided to clean it out when I noticed that a pregnant roach had kamikaze’d head first through a case fan. Her upper body was completely torn to shreds but she had managed to make it inside and laid her egg which hatched and dozens of babies lived in my computer. I was equal parts horrified and impressed.
Removed by mod
I used to work for a computer repair place long, long ago and I was on the laptop repair line.
I went to unscrew a laptop but for some reason my screwdriver wasn’t catching the screw… a coworker took the screwdriver and put more force into and there was sickening crunch that wasn’t hardware…
He removed the screw along with an impaled dead baby cockroach…
But this isn’t the end. Oh no.
When that screw came out with its buddy they had friends.
A lot of friends.
Flooding out of that tiny screwhole like something from a god damn horror movie.
We bagged that up and sent it back to the customer. It did not get repaired that day to say the least.
I was 7’ish, living in Florida and spotted something shiny in my black bean bag. Reached down, grabbed it with my hand then screamed as it wiggled its way out. I am almost 50 and still traumatized by it. Mind you this is ginormous Florida cockroach /palmetto bug bigger than my child size hand.
I was going to reply to OP with “They aren’t cockroaches, they’re palmetto bugs.”
Like, I absolutely get that these things exist and will be a part of life in Florida. But when we’re staying in your fancy hotel and complain about the bugs scurrying away from the light in the bathroom, you have to do a little better than argue semantics with me.
A flying cockroach. Need I say more?
Yeah, I’ve experienced this one. It was huge and flew right at my head.
Worked at Office Depot back in ~2012-2014. Was the lead tech, and was the primary hardware fix guy. Had a guy bring in this old dell clamshell case PC with an xp sticker. It and him already smelled…off. After discussing some issues (no power) and finishing the paperwork, I cracked it open. They came spilling out. Dead, alive, and various sized. All the droppings too. It was one of the first machines I refused to work on. The guy had no choice but to leave with it. Didn’t really say much after that.
The only other PC that came close to that were those of chain smokers. Where the tar buildup was actually sticky to the touch, coating everything, outside and in.
Ok. First off, the precipitous decline of insect populations scares me more than any other climate related catastrophe, but oh my God if I never again see a mating swarm of palmetto bugs, it will be too soon. That is something that hopelessly scarred me for life.
Spending a night by myself in one of mexico’s shitiest hotel. Wake up in the middle of the night because weird noise. Hundreds of cockroach on the wall, inches from the bed. Leave lights on. Cant sleep for the rest of the night so start to write a story about me meeting and becoming friend with a french cockroach that got lost in Mexico.
I want to read that
Seconded.
One of my closest friends, whom I often shared a roof with, loves insects. One day she found a cockroach and decided to make friends with it and give it its own area. Convincing her to get rid of it required jumping through tedious mental hoops on the basis that “a cockroach never killed anyone” and “he has as much a right to stay in the house if he follows the rules”. His stay in the house ended just short of her successfully teaching him to do tricks. Thank god.
Not me but my wife
My wife grew up very poor, like might not have running water poor.
So her parents were in jail for the umpteenth time and she was staying with her aunt and uncle. They were just as poor, however, the aunt did not care about home cleanliness like my wife’s mother and they had roach infestations like no other. Every electronic shorted out from roach bodies. You could not set a drink or food down or it would be swarmed. It wasn’t only one time either. Each home that these people went to was condemned soon after because of the infestations and unwillingness to clean.
What geographic location did this occur in?
East Texas
Long time ago I’m pretty sure one managed to get into our closed dishwasher in our apartment. Luckily we don’t have an infestation or I’d die of fright.
Ogtha.
