I'm just going to come out and say this. I had cockroaches in my kitchen for a brief period of time. If you've been to my house for dinner within the past three months, contact me at Sorry@AboutThat.org , and I'll tell you whether your visit coincided with the minor albeit icky infestation. If you never want to come here for dinner again, I completely understand. I kind of don't want to myself.
They were German cockroaches, but I'm not sure if that's better or worse than regular American ones. As far as I could tell, their tastes in music and literature were no different from my other insects, and they had no discernable accents.
I know they were German cockroaches because I had to take a picture of one and send it to an exterminator to be identified. Apparently you can't just go to someone's house and squirt a multi-purpose poison to get rid of anything that falls in the Bug classification. And the exterminator receptionist/scheduler wouldn't accept my description of "shiny and disgusting" as adequate.
Taking a picture of a German cockroach is not easy. They refuse to stand still. I was reminded of the photo shoots for our family Christmas cards when we had babies and toddlers. The only reason my husband and I put ourselves in the picture at all was that someone had to pin down the 3-year-old and squeeze hug the 9-month-old so she wouldn't eat tinsel in the few seconds that we took our eyes off her and looked into the camera.
I had to sneak up on one of the roaches and put a clear plastic container over it. (I should have thought of that solution back when my kids were little . . .) Then I took a picture through the plastic. The container had at one time had spaghetti sauce in it, though, so it was a little pinkish and not exactly crystal clear. But thanks to iPhone technology, which seems to melt the stains away, I got a decent photo of the culprit.
"You have German cockroaches," receptionist/scheduler said. "Now, let's try to figure out where they're coming from."
I put in a good word for surrounding the house inside and out with every insecticide ever invented, just to cover all bases. But I was told that's now how extermination works. I had to be interviewed. No, I don't live near a restaurant that opened up around the time my bugs arrived. No, I haven't had crates of fresh produce brought into my house from a warehouse, although that does sound like a caper I'd get myself involved in. And yes, I have new neighbors just about every week. My house is surrounded by apartment buildings and I know for a fact that the clarinet player moved out, much to my chagrin. I don't know who took his apartment. It might have been a German fruit importer.
During the interview, I wanted receptionist/scheduler to know that I wasn't some 1950s girly bug-fearing over-reactor. "I lived in Florida before this," was all I had to say and she got the drift. In Florida, when you called the exterminator, you didn't have to identify your bug or take any damn pictures. All you had to do was call the office and say, "Gahhhh!" and strangle out your home address. The next thing you knew, a guy in a Ghostbusters suit showed up and started spraying from the tank on his back. Twenty-four hours later, you were sweeping up Palmetto bug carcasses the size of Snyder sourdough nibblers.
Just for the record, no one wanted to eat dinner at our house in Florida, either.