Now, pretty much any kind of insect scares the piss out of me, especially ones that are larger than say a carpenter ant, or have stingers, or have more than 6 legs, etc. For most of my life I'd been harassed mainly by bees, mostly harmless spiders, and house centipedes. These are somewhat manageable, minus the centipedes. I was fortunate to have not seen a single cockroach in my life... that is, until I moved to Chicago (well, Evanston) at 17. Roaches are the biggest insects I have ever seen, so naturally it disturbed me quite a bit to see one in my domicile. I ended up trapping the first one I ever saw under a solo cup, and wasn't able to touch the cup (with the roach still trapped) for a week because I was scared it would do something ****ed up like run towards me.

Then I moved to Houston, which apparently is the ****ing roach capital of the US of A. So far, I've had three traumatic experiences here regarding insects: 1) roach brushed my foot while I was fapping, causing record-time "flaccidation", 2) found a roach under a newspaper I picked up to read while I was taking a ****, and finally, the reason for this rant, 3) found a roach IN MY ****ING DISHWASHER. It's affected me so much that I now imagine these tickling sensations on my lower leg every so often during the night when I'm at my computer. Pest control comes in to my building every Monday, but I haven't been able to submit a work order for my unit since I'm in the middle of drying a recent ganja harvest.

Anyway, post your most traumatic experiences with insects and how they have scarred your life forever.

PS: Is it okay to run the dishwasher with a cockroach in it? Will it disintegrate? Will it get caught in some sort of mesh (I'm afraid to check if there even is a mesh... extremely reluctant to open the dishwasher), leaving me with a dead cockroach carcass that releases its juices during every subsequent wash? A quick Google search reveals several people with the same problem, but no comprehensive post-wash cycle trip reports. I also came across some delightful stories of cockroach nests inside dishwasher doors... seriously, **** these guys. **** **** **** ****!!!!!!!!!

PPS: These ****ers are on average about 2.5-3 inches long (no exaggeration). Wiki says the average length of an adult American cockroach is 1.6 inches, which is a gross under-estimation according to my limited observation of the ~5 Texan cockroaches. The one in my dishwasher right now is probably the biggest one I've seen so far, and it's easily 3 inches. I would take a picture but I don't have Raid, and I'm a huge pussy.

Did you make this post just to freak people out with big COCKroaches?

Vacuum frequently, never ever leave food or dirty dishes around, and buy some roach motels and stick them under furniture. Or you can pay an exterminator like $35 to spray your house every couple of months.

(Phoenix has a lot of roaches too. :))

Sensible solutions... I haven't actually vacuumed my kitchen floor in the one year I've been here, which in retrospect I guess is pretty sick, but I rarely if ever drop any foodstuffs on the floor (or if do, I pick them up right away), so the floor looks pretty clean besides some dust in the corners (no food bits). Mainly, I just don't want my Roomba defiled when it eats a live/dead cockroach, but I suppose I'll have to deal with that, SIGH. Interestingly, I had no dirty dishes in the dishwasher, or the sink, when I encountered the thing.

I want a Roomba.

flaccination. tee hee!

I've only come across about half a dozen cockroaches in my life, all in Spain.

They met a swift death, most with a dustpan.

Man up, jeez. Just think how scared they are of these giants that can easily squish them.

Never watch the movie Joe's Apartment then.

When I was in high school, my desk was right next to a column, and i was sleeping against it during class. A roach ran down the pillar, across the top of my head, down my face and into my shirt collar. I woke up pretty fast after that.

You ate it didn't you

Correction, watch the movie Joe's Apartment.

watch it if youre not ragna

Haha, so I guess I shouldn't tell you that they can fly? Not kidding. They only do it when they are sure they are about to get crushed, as they are faster on their feet than in the air. Being that they are pretty brainless, they rarely realize the likelyhood of the foot smushing them.

Also, Houston is a hole. I feel sorry for you for living there.

Yeah, Houston is miserable.

I had to temporarily block wikimedia images just to continue reading the OP. I hate cockroaches. Fortunately I've only seen two in the 8-9 months I've been in this apartment, and none at all in months. I assume they were just coming in because of the cold. Also got three or four pretty big ant invasions early in the lease, before I even had time to make a mess of the place, but that stopped pretty quickly.

Both of the roaches I saw got an immediate and direct application of bug spray. They may be able to survive nuclear war, but they don't do nearly as well with chemical war.

Raid makes an excellent repellant spray that you spray in all the floor/wall edges throughout the house (only use if you dont have indoor pets). It kills them on contact, you'll find them dead for about a month, then reapply, and you likely wont see them again. I'd advise as much as a monthly application to maintain (crawling) pest free living environments.

I woke up with one of these on my bare stomach one day. I have never gotten out of bed so quick...

I had one of these crawl over my face when I was a kid. These things aren't really dangerous as they usually run from you. They just look terrible!

What is that, buck?

Maybe a closer look is warranted?







It's a house centipede. I used to see them so often in my room back in Evanston that I just stopped killing them. I'm really OCD about cleaning up after killing any insect, and let me tell you, they make a huge mess by pretty much jettisoning half of their gross spazzy legs when you kill them.



Oh yeah? I was thinking about doing this tonight but I wasn't sure how effective it would be. Thanks for the protip.



I used to enjoy making fun of Texas and the South in general, but now that I live here.... SIIIIIGGGGHHHHHHH. Honestly, it's really not that bad here :-(.

**** this i'm staying in safe england where spiders and creepies arent bigger than crane flies

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Yeah, but we sometimes get Brazilian Wandering Spiders shipped to M&S in crates of bananas.

That **** is bananas.

ragna, I hate you

Yuck...

If you're going to spray, have an exterminator do it. Raid is weaker, you just end up with more and more raid-resistant cockroaches.

Also: Those centipedes are bad-***.

...They're not borg.

I'm afraid I don't understand.

If it has more than six legs it isn't an insect.

Have a giant isopod



Or make your own out of fabric.

I was about to call ya'll wusses for being afraid of bugs, but I would have freaked the hell out of that was on me.

Ohhh, Disturbing Pest Story Time!

Two years ago I spent the summer living in a dive apartment in the south side of Chicago (there were four of us crammed into a 2 bedroom apartment, for reference my part of the rent was $100 a month).

We had all sorts of bugs, mostly because we left the windows open all day (No AC), though I don't believe we ever ended up with roaches. What we did get, were rats, and plenty of them. So we did the logical thing, put out traps, and caught a bunch of them. Unfortunately the lot of us forgot about one of the traps we had set in the kitchen pantry...

It took two weeks for us to find it, as we just figured the smell was the result of the sink backing up again. But when we did check, not only was there a half decaying dead rat in our pantry, but it was completely covered in maggots. None of us wanted to clean it up, so we just poured an entire bottle of Lysol onto the mess and waited for all the maggots to die, swept the thing up, and poured another bottle of Lysol on the spot where the rat died.

Also, just to make a perfect epilogue, a couple of months after I moved out, I was talking to one of the guys who still lived there, and apparently one of the rats had decided to nest up inside the oven, that was until someone turned it on. They were still fighting with the landlord to get the oven replaced.

ewww incests are nasty

Tell that to the south.