How To Handle Finding Your First Cockroach

by Rick Paulas

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Moving out of your parent’s house and into your first apartment is a big event: one full of joy, loneliness, a frightening newfound sense of interior design, and depression due to your upstairs neighbors having massive amounts of vociferous intercourse. The good news is that these problems are easily solved (in order: downers, uppers, watching sports while eating red meat, and heightened TV volume.) The bad news is that you still have to deal with your first cockroach.

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Do: Quickly obtain an object that will be used in capturing the cockroach.

Don’t: Turn off the kitchen light, slowly back out, and leave your apartment, trying to forget about it. When you return, days later - after 16 rounds of intense, short-term-memory-loss-inducing hypnosis – it will be near impossible to open your front door, seeing as the roaches (taking a cue from your upstairs neighbors) will have multiplied to the point where they cover the bottom three-feet of your apartment floor.

Do: Play an orchestral score on your stereo. Not only will it sooth the roach into a false sense of security, but it’ll also get you into that “roach-killin’ mood”.

Don’t: Play a Broadway musical cast recording on your stereo. Once the first song’s chorus is sung, you will forgo your roach-killing duty in favor of having an emphatic sing-a-long. Especially if your choice is a Disney adaptation. That shit’s tough to get out of your head.

Do: Slowly stalk the cockroach until it finally pauses long enough for you to capture him with your cockroach-capturing device.

Don’t: When the cockroach begins to move, run away (screaming profusely) and hide behind your couch, arming yourself with shoes, quarters, and blank CDs to throw into the kitchen from a safe distance. The odds are better finding an un-tasty can of Canada Dry than hitting the cockroach with your quarters and blank CDs. And you don’t want your shoes in your kitchen. You just washed the floor in there yesterday.

Do: (for women) Run across the hall and get your hot neighbor to take care of your problem.

Don’t: (for men) Run across the hall and get your hot neighbor to take care of your problem.

Do: Crush the roach deliberately slow, making sure the disgusted beast of Satan knows the true meaning of pain before it’s delivered back into the depths of Hell. This won’t only serve as a lesson to the hundreds of roaches eyeing your squalid living space as somewhere they can call home, but it’ll also piss off Satan. And nothing’s funnier than a tiny red man with a pitchfork balling his eyes out.

Don’t: Show remorse when killing the roach. That ugly bastard will notice it, and instantly put on his “puppy dog” face, making the task that much more difficult, as killing puppy dogs is generally a tough thing to do.

Do: Purchase a roach-killing spray to use on the perimeter of your apartment, following your systematic execution of Roach Zero.

Don’t: Eat hot dogs for two months.

Do: Dispose of the roach’s corpse by a controlled fire near the dumpster (under the supervision of the fire department) and spread the ashes in the small patch of grass next to the dumpster. He would have liked it that way.

Don’t: Try to tame the roach - the first recruit of your 400-roach army; to be used to enforce payment on money owed, act as a distraction while you pillage and plunder, and to mimic the sounds of a woman’s orgasm, to build your sexual reputation in your neighbors’ eyes.