Bugging out.


Okay, okay, sorry, bad pun. But it's time for another cockroach update. This morning I was greeted by 3 tiny baby cockroaches in my bathroom. While the baby ones are most certainly not cute, they aren't really awful either. Easy to squash with a finger and then just throw into the sink. But - where there are three, in the period of like 2 seconds, we know there are many more (hatching?) just waiting to crawl around on my makeup and hairspray and bathroom mirror. And that they will grow into adults if they are not exterminated. Like, right now. Guess it's time to put down some boric acid or something. They always come from the same place - sort of behind the bathroom mirror, maybe from inside the walls?

I left my coffee in there for maybe three minutes (I was in a hurry this morning, and drank my coffee while washing my face and that sort of thing - well, not really at the SAME time as when I was washing my face, that's just silly) and when I came back in to get the coffee, I spotted two more tiny cockroaches in the vicinity of the mirror and then two FLOATING in my coffee. I am glad they are floaters, because it was easy to just scoop them out with the spoon and drink the coffee still.

But then, this morning at work - well, let me backtrack a second - the other morning at work, a huge waterbug ran out from somewhere near my garbage can over to Katie's desk and then underneath a filing cabinet. I wasn't scared, I was just ready to kill the fucker. But we couldn't find it! We kicked at the filing cabinet, moved part of the desk, even slipped paper under there to try to scoop it out. No luck. But I could feel it nearby, waiting...watching...patient...but sort of cocky, too. I knew it'd make a mistake sooner or later and then we'd have our man.

So today, I mention the bugs in my bathroom to Katie. And about 15 minutes later, Thompson states, rather calmly if maybe a bit annoyed, that he felt something on his foot/ankle and when he looked down, there was a cockroach on him! He brushed it off. I asked if it was big and he said, "Yeah, huge!" and he's from the south and therefore he knows bugs and he's not at all scared of them. I knew it was Mr. Unwanted Officemate, thinking he could outwit us again. Well, we went after him, but he scurried under Thompson's desk and over to Dan's desk, and still, we could not catch him. A minute or two later, Dan comes walking by and says he just saw a roach the size of a mouse run into Amelie's office. Thompson takes off after it and a minute later I hear him say, "well, it's dead now" with that cute little southern accent of his. I said, "did you find it?" and he said, "my whole foot is on it" - so it was clearly smushed. He threw it out, and I applauded. Cocky little motherfucker (the roach, not Thompson). Think you can hang around our office and we'll just let that go? No way, you nasty gross thing. Now send your little insect ghost spirit over to my apartment in Bushwick and give those babies a hint of what they're in for if they don't leave my cute and fancy bathroom stuff alone.

Okay, so now that all of this is over and I'm getting back to work (by "work" I mean, of course, not work at all, but internet surfing, crossword puzzles and just general time-wasting) I see this quiz Anya posted, about Which Director Would Direct The Story Of Your Life. I go to the site to take the quiz, and right there on the home page is some cutesy little message about a recent site bug that's been fixed - and this image:



Gross!

Enough with the damn bugs, already!

Also, there was some talk, as there usually is, about why I call them waterbugs, when clearly they are roaches. Well, in NY, that's what a lot of people call them, I swear! However, the majority of my coworkers are not from New York, and like most people, they think of these as waterbugs (since they are) and I recently found out about these and also these (ferocious??), which are nothing short of nightmarish creatures that should not, in my opinion, be allowed to roam the earth even if they are somehow the only living creature preventing the imminent extinction of some species of something somewhere - if that is the case, then I posit we no longer need that species, either. Also mentioned were silverfish (which some people think of as waterbugs, because you tend to find them in your sink or bathtub) and then, because someone thought they looked like silverfish, earwigs. Okay, I'm officially done with bugs today. Ready to move on...to...FREE PIZZA! Which would taste so much better if I wasn't just thinking about roaches, roaches, roaches and not the good kind, either.

And now I can't stop thinking about this which I simultaneously love and hate.