COCKROACHES
To the people in our office, this is one of the big mysteries in the world. It’s right up there with who really shot Kennedy, who built Stonehenge, and is there intelligent life on other planets.
Our office is in Florida.
Where it rains a lot.
And when it rains a lot we invariably get a few roaches in the office.
Down here they call them palmetto bugs. Kind of like calling a garbageman a sanitary technician. A fancy name for something not really fancy. They’re cockroaches, plain and simple.
When a live one scurries across the floor you know that event is happening by a scream from one of the ladies in the office, followed by a piercing yell, “Get it.”
The “Get it” is directed, of course, at one of the guys in the office.
So much for gender equality.
A paper towel is grabbed, the offending insect is scooped up, and quickly flushed down the toilet.
We have a pest service that comes in to spray every month and, for the most part, the bugs are kept at bay. Unless, as I mentioned, it rains a lot.
When it does, the live roaches we can understand.
It’s the dead roaches that have us spooked.
Every now and then, for about a week we will daily find the skeleton carcasses of roaches out in plain sight in the office.
“Did the bug man spray this week?”
“No.”
“That’s strange.”
You can walk across the same clean, debris-free carpet in our office for hours and then, all of a sudden, you will find a dried up husk of a cockroach smack dab in the middle of the carpet. It didn’t just crawl there from a hiding place and die because it’s a crispy shell that will turn to dust in the paper towel in your hand. So just how did a long-dead cockroach manage to crawl across yards of carpet to leave it’s unattractive shell in the middle of our walkway?
I can understand them all dying at the same time. There could be a Reverend Jim Jones cockroach who convinces all the other roaches to drink the Kool-Aid.
But I can’t explain how, or why, their dried-up corpses always end up out in the open.
Just like I can’t explain, how, or why, you can wash and dry three pairs of socks, and when you go to fold them, one of the socks will be missing.
