posted on 17 December 2011 | posted in Home and Garden
Up-close and personal encounters with cockroaches are one of the more unpleasant aspects of life in the tropics. I was used to house flies in my native UK, and I easily dealt with them via fly killer. No, these unsightly cockroaches appear at the most inconvenient times and inevitably they manage to evade the bug swatter. Either they are too fast or they fly away. In the past, I had hired pest-control experts to come and spray my home's perimeter with insecticide and it worked for a while. Eventually, though, the roaches returned and I grew complacent in my pest control efforts. The other night, however, changed my mind. My son and I had just gotten in the car and we prepared to back out of the garage. Turning my head toward the rear of the car, I let out a yelp. "Roach!" A large, black roach with long antennae stared me down from its perch on my car roof's interior. My son opened the car door and jumped out to retrieve a can of Raid bug spray that was in the garage. Quickly, he poked the Raid can inside the car and aimed it at the giant cockroach. I jumped out of the driver's seat and out of the car, so I would not inhale Raid's fumes. Mission accomplished. The mammoth roach fell to the ground and I quickly swept it up. I was not so naive to think that there was only one cockroach in my car, so I paid my son to do a thorough fumigation of my car and the garage with the can of Raid. One thing we learned after his pest-control operation: Bug spray works! We have not had a close encounter with insect pests since.