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.
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?
Thank you for passing through to read my advice. By all means please share the advice to anyone that happens to need it…
I also read your post, and I can fully agree from the Gulf Coast of the USA, that swamps can be rather nasty and have lots of weird bugs and slimeys, but usually not quite as bad as you described.
Maybe lay off the shrooms and smoke some green instead? 😂🤣
Haha shrooms just need space, and I didnt get the meaning of “setting” back then. Living in a tight space with parents downstairs and a very hot night is simply not a good idea
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.
I worked at a high school doing IT. I kept student-returned laptops in a laptop cart. One day, to my absolute horror, baby cockroaches start crawling out of the cart, and infested my entire work area.
The cart was quarantined and treated by Terminix. After a while the cart was returned to me, and I had to sort through and clean/wipe all of them. I wish I could have just e-wasted the whole thing. Another round of hatching happened a few weeks later, from another laptop, but luckily I had put them in air-tight containers by then.
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.
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.
I was with my family in a small vacation house, near a lake. Very wet and swampy surrounding, hot wet summer night, I really needed to go out and get some fresh air.
Walked barefeet and without artificial light, you know back to the roots and stuff.
The grass was just verry sticky and slimey, it was pretty weird so I got my phone, turnes on the flashlight and damn… hundreds of slugs and snails everywhere, around my feet, in front and behind me.
I hate slugs so much, it was the most disgusting moment in my life. Ran very carefully to the lake, onto a dock, to wash my feet off. Slugs everywhere, on the dock even. The lake was full of weird tiny insects racing around, the air was full of mosquitoes and flies.
This planet can reall, be hostile, its crazy. And thats in a state where the climate is so nice life is flourishing.
Learned: living near standing water sounds nice but is horrible.
Also I was on a shitload of mushrooms, which was not a great idea. The grass was basically all fractals and differentiating slugs from sticks didnt make it better. Damn, what a night.
Edit: this was about Cockroaches only? Idk I never saw one haha, Germany seems quite nice?
I just stepped on a slug on accident the other day without noticing. I had flip flops on, and the flip flop acted as dead a slug catapult as I stepped forward. It landed on the back of my bare leg while wearing shorts. I was so grossed out. Washed tf out of my leg. My story pales in comparison to yours, but fuck slugs.
My wife and I were offered to live in her father’s rental house for free as long as she was in college. We were very excited to move in and pulled up to the house a week after our wedding. We opened the door and it was a disaster zone. It looked like someone had left all their belongings but trashed the place before leaving. Overturned couches, clothing everywhere, and ROACHES… oh god, SO MANY ROACHES! I walked into the living room and picked up a discarded baby sock in the middle of the room and at least three roaches fell as I picked it up and scattered. Every single item in the house was the same.
After throwing everything in the house away, we had to bug bomb the house a dozen times to finally have some semblance of a home without roaches everywhere. We would still see them at night after turning on a light in a dark room for at least 4 months. Had to keep all food locked away until we stopped randomly seeing them.
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.
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.
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.
I’m an emt/firefighter. I’ve gone in places during the day. With the lights on. Where the roaches were so bad that you could still see a hundred of them. Including the ones that fall from the ceiling onto you.
It’s usually a med call for something that isn’t an emergency situation, but something ignored/abused so long that they need to see a doctor, but no one there has a car so they dial 911 for an ambulance ride.
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.
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.
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.
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