09/21/02: I hate bugs

[juju]

The pest control guy for my apartment complex is completely worthless. He breaks into my apartment every week or so to spray for bugs, and I have yet to see anything come of it. What good he is? None! My wife tells me that the other day, he came in, sprayed a little around the kitchen, looked directly at a fucking roach crawling along the counter, and said, "Right then. Looks good!". Then, he left! WTF!? Is this maybe a sign that your poison isn't working? Couldn't he at least have made a show of spraying or crushing the roach? Obviously, his job is just for show. I mean, some people take pride in their work. He obviously doesn't.

This crummy apartment has roaches everywhere, and I honestly don't know what to do about it. I've tried all the roach motels on the market, and they seem to work for a little while, but then after a while I just start seening roaches again. I guess they build up an immunity to it.

We have a garbage disposal, and I use it. It doesn't matter, though. They just eat the crumbs off the dishes. I always rinse my dishes and put them in the dishwasher. My wife doesn't always do this. So I started picking up after her. Now, the damned bugs are going inside the dishwasher to get to the crumbs. I can now open the dishwasher at any given time and see roaches in there. I try running the dishwasher more often, but I can only run it so often. What am I supposed to do, run it when there are only three plates in there? Even when the dishes in the dishwasher are clean, they're still in there!! What the fuck are they eating off of clean dishes?? It's like it's their own personal nightclub.

I try not to throw food in the trash can, and i've never seen a roach in the trash can. So I don't think they go there. I do have sealed plastic containers that I use for my potato chips and cereal, though. They're not gettin' in there. I mean, i'm casing my apartment like Perth is doing his house. My only weak spot I think is the dishwasher. That, and my neighbors.

I'd like to feel that I don't live in a nasty roach-infested apartment. I'd like to know that roaches aren't crawling all over my silverware before I use it. Am I supposed to break into my neighboring apartments and pick up after them to? Auggh!! I hate living with roaches! Could some please suggest something?

[darclauz]

...........move?







geo used watermelon juice and poison once..mixed 'em together, put it under the stove.

of course, that was for ants-- roaches, i dunno.

[elSicomoro]

We have had that problem on occasion. It started when we first moved in, and it seems to manifest when people move in and out of our building. We usually call the exterminator (who comes to the complex on Thursday), and it goes away.

One of the things the exterminator recommended was cleaning out all our cabinets with soapy warm water with a tad of bleach. That seemed to help a lot.

We just make sure we keep the joint clean, and especially make sure that we take our trash, newspapers, and recyclables out as needed. Although...we have an empty apartment again...someone's bound to move in soon.

[juju]

Okay, i've done a full investigation, and have engaged in all-out war with the roaches. I took a few blurry pictures with my cheap-assed digital camera to document the occasion. Hope you all don't mind. :) Perhaps the lens needs cleaning. Anyway, i'm not bucking for a Pulitzer, here, so I don't really care.




Wal-Mart was kind enough to provide me with these weapons of mass destruction. Above, you can see roach bait traps, duct tape, sealing caulk, and boric acid.

I found something that's supposed to be incredibly effective at killing roaches: boric acid. It's in a fine power form. It gets on their legs when they walk through it, and then they ingest it when they preen themselves (Roaches preen themselves? Who knew?? I mean..they actually have a sense of cleanliness and self-respect?). They also absorb it through their skin. It sucks all the water out of their bodies, dessicating them, and they they die.

I also found out what their shit looks like: little tiny black dots. If you see this you're supposed to clean it up, because the scent tells other roaches, "Hey, there's all kindsa food in here!"

Last night I moved the microwave to put boric acid under it. I didn't get a picture of it, and you should be glad. That was some nasty shit. Little black dots and roach corpses everywhere. Holy shit. I cleaned that shit up and sprinkled boric acid all over the space. Then I freaked out and started moving everything in the kitchen and cleaning everything. I started seeing little black dots everywhere. Nasty. I cleaned everything I could find. Then I put all the roach bait traps down.



Then I opened the cabinet doors, and I noticed this:



What the fuck? Maybe you can't tell from so far off, but that hole is way too big for that wire. I mean.. who designs kitchens this way? Do the engineers want any bug to be able to run all over my dishes?




Then, I bent down and looked under my kitchen sink:





In all, there were 5 humongous holes under the kitchen sink where pipes went through. There were also equally huge holes under my bathroom sink. Between the kitchen and the bathroom, there were probably 10 holes in all. I'm only showing pictures of a few of them here for brevity's sake.


Okay, i'm no engineer. I'm not even good at fixing things around the house. But I think that whoever designed this building needs to be slapped hard in the face. Look how big those holes are!! Do they not feel the need to seal them up? No wonder roaches are getting in! Hell, I might as well just leave my door open all the time. I guess it's these kinds of things that make me only have to pay $275 a month in rent. So, I sealed all those holes up as best I could with duct tape.






This morning, my wife woke up to find that the little buggers were now getting into the house through the drain in the sink. These are some determined fucking bugs. How they're getting into the pipes, I don't know. I guess they're coming in from another apartment's sink drain. Either that, or there's a leak somewhere. Or, my wife was wrong, and it only looked like they were coming in through the drain. If she's wrong, then there's another hole somewhere that I must find.

The bathtub facet has started constantly dripping water. That's supposed to be bad, because one drop of water can feed them for a really long time. So, i'm getting the landlord to fix that. After he does that, I'm going to re-caulk the entire bathtub. All the previous caulking is all falling apart, and some of the wood is rotted in the corners. They're not going to get in that way, either.

Anyway, I hope this isn't too boring. It's my own personal war, so I felt like posting it. :)

[perth]

good luck juju. i hope you get every last one of those fuckers.

[Undertoad]

Hey, I don't know where I heard it but they say to stuff steel wool in those holes before you tape them up.

Whether it is irritating to their little feet, or what, I don't know. Maybe it's just hooey.

[Tobiasly]

Roaches are very clean critters. I read where if they touch a human, they will immeidately scurry away and preen themselves.

Your building wasn't designed that way.. engineers generally tend to keep wires inside the walls. :) Looks like it was remodelled at one point and some new wiring was added. Anyhoo, I agree, pretty shoddy retrofitting job there.

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Tobiasly
Roaches are very clean critters. I read where if they touch a human, they will immeidately scurry away and preen themselves.

As I understand it though, they are carriers of germs and viruses.

Maybe this will help, juju.

[juju]

Originally posted by sycamore
Maybe this will help, juju.

That's a great link. I really like the Maxforce Gel they advertise. Check this quote out:

The unique action of Fipronil (the active ingredient in Maxforce Gel) makes it an ideal active ingredient for killing roaches. After consuming a lethal dose of bait, cockroaches return to their harborage where they excrete feces containing Fipronil. As other cockroaches consume the contaminated feces, they too receive a lethal dose. When the roaches die, other roaches may consume their carcass and die as well. Tests have documented that this can result in one cockroach causing the death of up to 44 other cockroaches. Our customers have reported seeing thousands of roaches die from one application of Maxforce Gel.

That is really messed up! They eat the shit of other cockroaches? They eat the dead carcasses of dead cockroaches?? And yet, we're so repugnant to them that they flee in terror and wash themselves vigorously after we touch them? WTF??

Still.. I like that stuff. It sounds very effective.

[juju]

Originally posted by Undertoad
Hey, I don't know where I heard it but they say to stuff steel wool in those holes before you tape them up.

Whether it is irritating to their little feet, or what, I don't know. Maybe it's just hooey.

Hmm. That sounds like a good idea, but i've already taped up all the holes. I don't think I wan't to go to the effort of re-doing them. If I get really frustrated I just might, though. :)

[juju]

Originally posted by Tobiasly
Roaches are very clean critters. I read where if they touch a human, they will immeidately scurry away and preen themselves.

That's crazy. That tells me that they have emotions, and that they think we're disgusting. I wonder if they have just a small subset of our emotions, or all the same emotions as us?

Well, I will still kill them. I hope they cower in fear whenever I tower above them, and I hope they incur extreme emotional distress when they find that I have massacred their families.

Originally posted by Tobiasly
Your building wasn't designed that way.. engineers generally tend to keep wires inside the walls. :) Looks like it was remodelled at one point and some new wiring was added. Anyhoo, I agree, pretty shoddy retrofitting job there. [/b]

Yeah, I didn't think of that, but I guess you're right. Even below the sinks, where the pipes go through, there's a different, cheaper kind of wood there. Like someone's cut a huge square hole out from the wall under the sink, installed new plywood, and cut holes in it to add new plumbing.

[MaggieL]

In my salad days, we had a basement apartment partially below ground level (in Roxborough, for Philly folks) that had a roach problem for a while. What was actually attracting them was unsanitary conditions in the communal trash, which was being stored indoors in a service corridor adjacent to our apartment, abutting on our kitchen, as it turned out.

What ultimately solved the problme was:

1) getting the trash storage moved

2) dusting with a commercial roach powder based on borax...if my memory does not fail it was "Roach-Pruf" There were some other components to the powder beyond the borax, but they were by nature of bait and dessicants to keep the borax dry and clingy. It was very effective, and we spread it behind the stove and in a lot of the dead spaces in the kitchen cabinetry.

To the extent possible, wash any greasy surfaces in the kitchen, even if they're not exposed. Roaches love grease. If the surface is inaccessible, just make sure you duust it with the borax powder.

But as we discovered in those days, you can bomb with toxics all you want in your own space, but if there's somnething attracting/feeding them elsewhere in the same structure, efforts in just your space alone is pretty much futile. You may kill everything that comes in, but you'll still have more coming in the next day.

Also--you can duct-tape everything in sight, but I doubt you will *ever* close up every cranny small enough for a roach to crawl through.

[russotto]

Get some RTV or other sealant and replace your duct tape. It'll work better.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by sycamore
As I understand it though, they are carriers of germs and viruses.

Whoops, I wasn't disputing that.. when I said they're very clean creatures, I meant they are concerned with their own cleanliness, although their idea of clean is, as juju points out, pretty fucked up.

[juju]

The boric acid seems to have worked. I now only see 1-2 roaches per day. This is, sadly, a great improvement. It's also very satisfying to see lots of dead ones. I guess Maggie's right. I'll never find all the holes. I can damned sure try, though!