Cockroach Control For Goodness Sake

Cockroach control! How do you control the pesky things? They are very crafty. They need only a fraction of an inch opening to penetrate a wall and once inside they lay eggs and the future progeny flourish by the thousands. Once inside, they can spread fifteen known diseases and God knows what else. Once inside they become candidates for pest exterminators, pest control companies, roach control, and the inefficient roach motels. But the optimal move is to prevent them from getting in at the outset. This is the advantage of a company like Orkin. Their prime goal is to prevent infestations. They are focused on cockroach control. Have you seen the Orkin commercial where the doorbell rings and when the man of the house answers the door he is confronted by a six foot cockroach standing on his hind legs who asks in a very polite and modulated voice if he may use the phone. His car broke down he says. Sometimes the roach poses as a pizza delivery man. “May I come inside and put your pizza on a table asks the roach. Then the Orkin man shows up and defies the roach to come inside. We see the Orkin man standing firm and tall and we see the cockroach driving away in his vehicle. The cockroach is a new star at the cinema. He is the new villain, difficult to bring to justice because of his assumed identities. But the Orkin man recognizes evil and swiftly ejects him from the premises. Such is the hallmark of cockroach control.

Did you know that the cockroach is over 320 million years old? And there are more than 3,500 species of cockroaches. They may be the first flying insect. Interesting facts? Now the cockroach emerges as a star, not just in commercials but as but as a subject of art. They do care for their newborn and they are now depicted in artwork that shows them as sentient, caring beings. They sit around the table for their evening meal and they congregate in living room settings. They act out the roles of judges, actors and comics. They act in concert, in swarm behavior, and manifest decision making and intelligence as a swarm. Perhaps this explains how they were able to survive for millions of years. Now we know why it is so difficult to find extermination methods that work for cockroaches. We can now see why so many pest control companies have arisen. We can now see why insect control becomes particularly difficult with roach control. We cannot seem to find the right pest repellent. The modern cockroach eats DDT for breakfast. And if we kill the swarm, we are not necessarily killing the eggs –the eggs which are spread in microscopic cracks, protected by position and coverage of the mother roach.

Human beings do not favor cockroaches. Usually the humans are repulsed by the roach’s leathery wings, their multiple sticky appendages, their smelly odor, and their penchant for garbage. They do secrete a hormone that carries a pungent brassy smell. From a human perspective this was just the way roaches were, but what about the roach taken from the roach’s perspective. Take Alice. She broods over her hundred eggs, protecting them as she best knows. She overhears the human beings describe her brood as filthy and unsanitary. One alludes to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It seems in this story the central character wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a human sized cockroach. He is lying on his back and has trouble turning himself upright. Alice decides that becoming a cockroach is a universal fear among humans. She decides to use her new insight to terrorize humans. She uses her knowledge of art to carry out her plan. She gets thousands of roaches to join her in a practical joke on the humans. First, they swarm to all the mirrors in the house and cover the mirror with their bodies except that image left on the mirror is a gigantic roach. Each human using the mirror is freaked out by the roach image. Each day Alice has her fellow roaches change the artwork on the mirror. The current posting now shows the head of a human and the body of a roach. The next day, the image is the head of a roach and the body of a human. Alice continued in this way to show the humans that they were not in complete charge. Human control had become cockroach control.