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?

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 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.

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.

I was laying in bed and trying to get to sleep. I kept hearing this tapping, or scuttling, noise coming from somewhere in my room, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Decided it was just old house noises and tried to ignore it. Then something fell from the ceiling and landed on my face. Shouted, slapped at my face, and heard something fall on the floor. Flipped on the light and saw the roach trying to scurry away. Hit it with a book until it was dead. Maybe not the most horrifying, but it was one of the worst experience I've had with a roach, so far at least.

First time in Singapore I saw a cockroach sitting on the floor, I went to kill it and then discovered there are flying roaches. Hilariousness of course ensued as a fled out of the apartment, screaming like a terrified little boy.

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.

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'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.

A flying cockroach. Need I say more?

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.

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.

Cockroaches exist. Sometimes I see them. That's horrific enough for me.

Unfortunately, I had one crawl on me while I was driving a few nights ago.

Fuck. That. Shit. Forever.

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.

Was playing FFXIV and my headset at the time had the mute button on the cable which usually rested on my chest. At some point a cockroach crawled up the cable and sat where the button normally is before i noticed the dark spot on my chest stopped being plastic and grew antennae. The worst part was that I was already paranoid about literally this exact thing happening.

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.

Two horror stories - I’ll write them as two separate posts

Story one: we had a mouse in our house once. My mum is petrified of mice so we were told to buy an old fashioned mouse trap with a spring trap. We put it in an area where the mouse was seen and went to sleep. We heard the trap go in the middle of the night so thought our troubles were over. Next morning we checked the trap and under the spring was a HUGE cockroach. Not the size of a mouse but bloody close. So my brother takes the trap, pull open the spring to throw the cockroach away and the damn thing is still alive. It dropped out of the trap and just scurried away under a cabinet. I’m not sure if it survived or not but that thing had no right to be alive after getting caught full force by a mouse trap.

When I discovered my old apartment had cockroaches I was very high and just saw a small blurr out of the corner of my eye. Not exactly a horror but it was camouflaged against my hardwood floor and I spent the rest of the night ripping away furniture from my walls trying to find it.

Story two. Our neighbours were disgusting. House full of trash, garden like a jungle and just complete neglect of their property. The landlord kicks them out and has to do a complete refurb of the house top to bottom. It turns out that the thousands of cockroaches that lived in that house suddenly had to up sticks and find a new house. That house was my house. After a few months we had cockroaches everywhere. In the toilet, bathroom, kitchen. Just everywhere. Daily occurrences: switch on the kitchen light and be greeted by hundreds of cockroaches running off. Open a cupboard and cockroaches would drop out of it onto my feet. Shoes with cockroaches in them.

We called up an exterminator and after describing the shape, size and color of these things he told us they were an invasive species and there was very little we could do. He said if we could find the place where they were breeding we could have a chance of getting rid if them. My dad and I knew the kitchen was there base so we started to pull cabinets up and see what was going on behind them. We pulled up a large cabinet and saw a few signs that there had been cockroaches on the back of the cabinet. But once we turned the cabinet upside down we saw near rows of thousands of cockroach eggs. And I mean thousands. All ready to hatch and send even more cockroaches into our house. It was something out of an alien movie. I can still those eggs to this day (this all happened in the 90’s)

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.

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.

How do you call a group of cockroaches? ChatGPT insists it is “intrusion”. So imagine a sound a dense intrusion of cockroaches makes when it separates from a wall and falls to the floor. I heard it once in my life when I moved a piece of furniture from the wall in a student dormitory, long time ago. I am still disgusted.

Probably not that bad compared to others, but I opened my drawer to get ready for work one day and the little fucker was staring at me. After a brief moment where we were both shocked staring at each other, he scurried into the back of the dresser, behind the drawer. I was running a little late for work and had a very important meeting with our hardware vendors, so I closed the drawer and left. I ended up wearing something that was in the dryer as it was the only thing not covered in cockroach germs.

I got home that evening and couldn't find the little fucker anywhere. I washed all my clothes again, because it freaked me out having a cockroach touch all my clothes. I wiped down the inside of all of the drawer with a Clorox wipe. I just couldn't find him.

Days later, my wife comes running out of the bathroom and says the little pervert tried to attack her while she was on the toilet. The cockroach was actually in the light fixture. I sprayed it with some bug spray, probably a little too liberally. But he was super dead after that.

Crisis solved!

In Cienfuegos in Cuba the lady was showing us around the room we were staying in at her house. After she left my girlfriend came up to me cringing and said there was a huge cockroach on her leg. No sooner had she finished telling me this that the lady came out of the opposite room stamping her feet on the floor chasing this monster cockroach. I swear she stamped on it three times before it stopped running.

Honeymoon in New York City. My wife and I get back to our hotel after seeing Wicked on Broadway with the original cast. Our suitcase is full of cockroaches. They heard my wife screaming twelve floors down.

When I couldn’t afford a new species that I wanted to keep :(

Okaaay I got one.

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?

Aaaaaaaaaah, I hate it.

New neighbour moved in earlier this year and brought them with them, and they're just little German cockroaches, but seeing them at all freaks me out. I'd probably die in your case.

Landlord's done a full "move all the furniture" spray treatment, and bi-weekly gel treatment, and they just keep coming. Mostly babies, but no matter how clean the kitchen counter top is I still find them scurrying about on it.

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.