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I had my first ever cockroach encounter last weekend.
Husband stomped it into a t-shirt for me, although he left the “dead” cockroach and t-shirt lying on the laundry room floor, giving me the chance to open the laundry room door and scream as I watched a zombie cockroach limp its way toward me. It’s gone now. For good. I just hope I’m not seeing any cousins anytime soon.
Tell me about your disgusting cockroach experiences. I’m sure I’m not the only one!
I'm a mid-twenties SAHM/part-time photographer currently living in Chicago. My husband is from Poland, my son was born in April of 2010, and I'm LDS. I write frequently about parenting, adventures in the kitchen, my faith, and photography. I post daily because I love checking my inbox for new comments, so please take a moment to say hello!
You can also find me over at Jenna Cole, my photography site. If you like to smile and laugh then I would love to take your picture!
October 16th, 2009 on 8:40 am
Yuck. Once, i was sitting on the toilet, doing my business. I spun the toilet paper dispenser for some tp and a SWAMP COCKROACH (read, very large, elongated, extra ginormous cockroach) went flying ACROSS my lap and got flung into the shower. Turns out he was hiding on the underside of the roll. 3″ long cockroach, i kid you not. I screamed and yanked my pants up so fast, i probably had a little pee dribble going on and I could have cared less!
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October 16th, 2009 on 8:57 am
I lived in Japan for two years and worked at the recreation office on the naval base. The shower room was infested with cockroaches. And these kind are the size of your palm. Oh and they FLY! Was in the shower room rinsing out coolers with a co-worker. He handed me the cooler, and a cockroach on the bottom decided to fly right at my face! Screaming, jumping, spine shivering reaction from me. ICK!
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:18 am
OMG…I remember being at my parents’ house and we were watching TV. This HUGE thing came flying across the room. All Dad had to say was “COCKROACH” and we went running. My Dad is known to torture us when he kills a roach, and chases us around the house with it in a paper towel. ::dies::
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:30 am
Gahhh!!!! I had never had to deal with cockroaches before I moved to North Carolina (they’re not too prevalent in Connecticut…), but since the move I’ve had to deal with TWO!!! They are horrible and so. fast.
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:33 am
The big ones are gross. But once you’ve had a parktown prawn ( http://www.up.ac.za/academic/zoology/2003/doc/crickets.html ) jump AT YOUR FACE, you won’t mind the roaches as much.
(Sorry, I didn’t mean this to be a ‘my icky bug is worse than your icky bug’ comment; it’s just that I’m so terrified of the parktown Prawns that cockroaches pale…)
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:37 am
My two terrible times were once when I had just gotten out of the shower and while getting ready in the bathroom a roach flew at me and had me screaming as I ran into the first room with a door open - my parents room! Of course they freaked out when their teenage daughter screaming at them at 5AM! The roach chased me and my mom took care of it. (Dad doesn’t touch roaches!)
The second time I was just waking up in bed. I swear I can hear roaches walking on surfaces. I turned the lamp on and the roach was flying from wall to wall in my room. I reached for my phone and called my mom to wake up and come save me.
I live in Southeast Texas and between the rain and humidity - roach encounters rack up to at least 5 a year, even though we spray the house.
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:38 am
Worst experience ever was probably the honeymoon….saw three of them crawling around the open door of the restaurant we had just ate at…my stomach was unsettled for days after that!
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:44 am
Blech!! This gives me the creepy crawlies - roaches are the worst! My roach encounter happened in college. I was lying on the couch in my dorm, studying, when a huge roach crawled over the back of the couch right near my face. Lots of girly screaming ensued. My tough-as-nails neighbor came and grabbed it with her hands and took it outside. Ew ew ew ew.
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:44 am
wow… you are incredibly lucky if this is your first!! lol. well one time in my old apartment, my husband (well boyfriend then) was sitting in a chair watching tv when a roach fell out of the air vent above the chair and landed on him…. talk about GROSS!
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October 16th, 2009 on 9:46 am
I used to live in Hawaii; not only did we have cockroaches (and HUGE ones at that), but we had super long centipedes, geckos, etc. The Honolulu Star Bulletin used to run a contest on who can find the largest cockroach. I’m talking 5 inch cockroaches. No lie.
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:15 am
living in florida, palmetto bugs are pretty prevelent, not that i’m used to them, but they are normally small and dead when i see them but some of them are huge and it’s a little hard to tell them apart from roaches. I had a roach in the house a few months ago and i absolutely hate bugs and since i’m by myself (even the cats were scared of it) i’m climbing on the couches and tables trying not to touch the floor - i know - overly dramatic - but i don’t want to touch it. I grabbed a huge and heavy book and i slammed it down on top of the roach and just left the book there in the hallway until my husband came home and made him get rid of it. Yick!!!
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:31 am
Oh you don’t EVEN want to know my cockroach stories. I lived in a house made of paper and spit for 10 months in Mississippi. I killed and/or found dead or dying roaches almost every day of the time that I lived there. I always left the dead ones for my husband to pick up, but when they were running around live I had no choice but to stomp them myself. The first few months were bad, but eventually I hardened myself to them and just got annoyed when they would scuttle past me.
The absolute WORST experience was the morning that I woke up to feel something itchy on my chest. I absently scratched at it, then felt it move into my hair. It was a 2 1/2 inch long cockroach. I sat straight up in bed, started flinging pillows and blankets everywhere, shaking my head around like a crazy woman, and screaming for my husband to come kill it!
Ugh… the next worse was when one fell out of a ceiling vent on to me. I HATE COCKROACHES and I am so glad that we moved out of that house and Mississippi. We’re in Florida now and they are still around, but in fewer numbers. More tiny lizards, but I will take those any day.
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:44 am
I had just moved into a new condo on Waikiki Beach. The condo was fully furnished, so I was cleaning all the kitchen cabinets and such, (think Monk). I was noticing a lot of tiny black dots all over everything, think sesame seeds. Turns out the kitchen was infested with roaches, in one weekend I am pretty sure I saw 10 different ones from the dishwasher to the drawers to the sink.
Let’s just say I didn’t eat at home for the first week I lived there! And in the morning it was hard enough to even enter the kitchen to make tea.
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:56 am
My husband and I lived in Misssouri in 2002-2003. We rented a very nice duplex (especially since we were a young married couple that had recently moved from our first apartment of 420 sq. feet to a 1300 sq ft. place). It was nice, however, except for the cockroaches. They were awful. One time we had to leave somewhere right after dinner, so we cleared the table and then left the plates on the counter. We came home several hours later, turned on the lights, and the counter moved. Seriously. It was COVERED in cockroaches. I was hysterical (I was also, unknown to me, newly pregnant and extremely hormonal at the same time!) We finally convinced our landlord to get an exterminator. We have since found out that BORIC ACID works wonders!!
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:59 am
I am soooo glad I don’t live somewhere where they are THAT big! That looks like a beetle to me!! ugh. All the ones I have seen have been tiny, like earwigs really.
They do say that if you see one especially in daylight then you most likely have many, many more as they are nocturnal and you rarely see them.
Not to make you freak out or anything.
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October 16th, 2009 on 11:51 am
I can deal with slimy things like worms, snakes, and frogs- but I HATE creepy crawly things with legs and wings. The more legs the worse. Ugh. Grosses. Me. Out.
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October 16th, 2009 on 12:24 pm
I’m a Navy brat, so I spent the first years of my life living in Navy housing designed like townhouses. Although we had Orkin come MONTHLY we still got whatever our neighbors had. Talk about gross. I still can’t deal with roaches… which means I love my husband on a whole other level, he did the summer pest-control thing for three years and although the majority of the time was spent as a salesman he started out at one of the house-treaters (I can’t think of the name). He knows how to tell if a home or apt does have or ever has had an infestation and he knows how to treat for them when we end up stuck in a place that has ‘em (as WAS our current situation).
I have learned and will pass on a few tips:
1-Bug bombs are bad, some will die, the others just flee and come back.
2-Roach motels work wonders.
3-There are some pretty good chemicals available out there. Combat sells one that is comparable to some of the stuff he used on the job.
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October 16th, 2009 on 12:28 pm
I lived in an apartment in college that we got through a friend. It was her older brother’s and an AMAZING, plus apartment close to campus. However- by January we were swamped in roaches. Turns out the brother and his friends? Yea, not so clean. They had to tear that place apart to clean it up (I guess too many spilled beers and leftover pizza crusts) and in January… they were so bad in our kitchen we had to wear hats since they’d FALL FROM THE CEILING. ((shudders)) I hope to NEVER live like that again.
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October 16th, 2009 on 2:12 pm
Lol. After living in the Philippines, Africa, and BYU housing, I’m not sure anything scare me anymore
. I’m pretty sure cockroaches are nearly invincible though. Oh, and you know they fly and bite?
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October 16th, 2009 on 5:51 pm
Well, Im Australian and live in Queensland, so seeing cockroaches is pretty much an everyday occurence. I hate them- and i especially hate the flying ones- yuck! They go away in winter, but its summer now and they’re everwhere.
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hannah Reply:
October 18th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
I am Australian too and Sydney is infested with them. The ironic thing here is that the wealthiest parts of Sydney (that are also the oldest and used to be slums in parts) are the worst for them. I was at a newly renovated, $8 million dollar home on the weekend and a GIANT roach scurried across the kitchen. Ew.
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October 16th, 2009 on 10:28 pm
My roach story is not my own:
My cousin had a massive roach infestation in her food storage in NYC. She discovered it when a container of liquid laundry detergent leaked on the floor. When she pulled everything out to clean the detergent up, she found a massive roach nest with feces and larvae and all kinds of nastiness. Because of her experience, (and my experience with sugar ants) I am a total nut about keeping our food storage in plastic containers.
*shudder*
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October 17th, 2009 on 9:50 am
Oh my! Cock roaches SUCK! I moved into a house last October that was supposedly cockroach free. The owners bombed it and everything … then, one night, standing in the kitchen with one of my roommates, we notice a cockroach climbing on the ceiling! Then we started noticing more - it was AWFUL! How many times had we missed a cockroach that decided to just come visit our heads? Gross gross gross.
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October 17th, 2009 on 8:42 pm
Those ARE gross. And they fly when you try to kill them. YUCK!
Unfortunately, we have lots of them down here in the south. I absolutely HATE them but not quite as much as my daughters. They REALLY hate them. When we lived in our old house, we saw them very often during the spring and summer months. No matter how much we sprayed, and even had our Exterminator come out to spray, we still saw one or two every month or so. UGH! If there was one found in my middle daughter’s room, she would NOT sleep in that room that night, even after it was dead and gone. Thankfully, since we built our new house and moved here, I have not seen the first one. Thank the Lord!
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October 17th, 2009 on 9:45 pm
I don’t have a cockroach story per se, but looking at the photo literally made me shiver!
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October 17th, 2009 on 11:41 pm
We have wood roaches that live int eh yard behind ourhouse..my cats find them and tortue them before my husband removes them - word to the wise - dont kill them, they leave behind a scnet that attracts others…trap them and remove them, better yet have you cats/kitten torture them..they put out the word to the other roaches not to go to that house..lol
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October 18th, 2009 on 2:06 pm
One of the few things I do NOT miss about Texas. . .
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October 19th, 2009 on 1:54 pm
The mascot of the dorm I lived in for 2 years was the cockroach. Luckily, I only saw one once. Of course I screamed like a girl and jumped up on my bed refusing to come down until someone else killed it.
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October 19th, 2009 on 11:31 pm
*shudders* in college last year my friend and I were sitting in our lounge watching TV when all of the sudden out of the corner of our eyes we saw a BIG BLACK THING moving towards us from the kitchen. It was big and nasty. We screamed a giant blood curdling scream and curled up on the sofa. One of our roommates came out, grabbed the Raid can (hehe) and chased it around the lounge (it even went on the sofa…EW!) gross gross gross!!!
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September 30th, 2010 on 12:01 am
My husband spent 4 days in a cheap motel for work, he came home proceeded to tell me of the cocroaches in the motel room, I told him not to come in the house with his dirty clothes until we checked everything, aparently we missed something, a week later I woke up to go to the bathroom and when I sat down to go I saw the most sickening thing in my life, a cocroach was in my bathroom on the wall, I killed it but am wondering how many more are in my house? Help me how do I make sure there are no more?
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