Your Best Bug Stories

[crokett]

In honor of Jim Boyd. Actually his post reminded me of a good story and I wanted an excuse to tell it so...

About 18 years ago my parents bought a farm in VA that they intended to retire to from NY. About 10 years ago they realized they were staying in NC so they sold the farm. I went up to VA to help them get the house ready for sale and when we got there the place was a wreck. The tenants were not the cleanest people and there were cockroaches everywhere. Enough so that I refused to sleep in the house the 2 nights we were there.

I went and got some of the bug bomb cans. You are supposed to use 2 per house (max). Right before we left I started in the back bedrooms. I put 1 in each of the 3 bedrooms, 2 down the hall 2 in the living room and 2 in the kitchen. Then I walked out the door and locked up. When my folks went back the following weekend they said they could not take a step anywhere inside without crunching cockroaches.

[Ed62]

Several years ago, we took our youngest boy and 3 of our grandkids to Disney World.

In our neck of the woods, there is not a big problem with roaches, with the exception of certain environments (grocery stores, etc.). So, even though the kids have heard of them, they didn't really know what they were except that they were not something we wanted to have.

While in Disney World, they overheard some people talking about roaches there. Nothing was said about it at the time. But on the way home, one of our young granddaughters said "What's the difference between a roach and a cockroach?" One of our grandsons, a little older said "The only difference is that one of them doesn't have a c***!" I had very hard time keeping the car on the road after he said that.

Ed

[sparkeyjames]

About 20 years ago I was working in a print shop on the night shift and being that it was nice outside we opened the doors up to let some cool air in. The inside lighting caused a few 6 legged intruders to wander in. One was a moth with a 4 inch plus wing span. It fluttered around for a while then like it had a death wish made a final approach right into the spinning ink rollers of my printing press. Was a fine mess too guts and wing fragments everywhere. Needless to say the press received a complete clean down.

[Whaler]

several years ago my wifes parents owned a cabin on Stevens pass.
The entire family used the cabin but no one wanted to maintain it. I took over the duty. One trip up I opened the attic, it was a mess with old carpet scattered about on the floor. There was a large window so I opened it and started pitching. When I got down to the floor there was a carpenter ant nest with a chunk of floor gone. I went to town and bought a couple cans of Raid and two of those bug bombs. I sprayed the Raid into the nest and onto any ant I could see. When we left I set off the bug bombs. Didn't have a problem after that.
I never did repair the floor though.
Nothing to do with bugs but I was using the out house one day and the floor went away no I didn't fall in. The next weekend was spent building a new one.

[jackellis]

I lived in Florida for a time as a kid. They have these things called Palmetto bugs that look like huge cockroaches and are usually out flying around at night. Small ones were about the size of a 747, or so it seemed.

Tohen again, to paraphrase the great Indiana Jones, "I *hate* bugs.

[cabinetman]

When my wife and I bought our present home, it was unoccupied for a little over two years. The day of the move it rained so much I thought I should build an arc. Anyway, after getting all our stuff into the house, it was real late at night, and my wife pooped out. I was setting up the bedroom so we could get some sleep while my wife went to the bathroom to take a shower.

After she turned on the water within 10 seconds, she starts screaming on the top of her lungs (she has big lungs). I run in there and she is standing in the shower in shock with hundreds of roaches running out of the drain trapping her in the shower like a horror movie. These were very large palmetto bugs, or called cockroaches.



So, she ran out and I just ran the hot water. We have a septic tank, and the roaches were not bothered for a long time. The city is now in the process of installing sewers in our area.

[sacherjj]

During the summer of 2002, I rode a bicycle from Yorktown, VA to Jackson, WY. At the Kansas and Missouri border, my Dad and Mom joined me for a while. (Mom in van, Dad on a bike.) My typical nights consisted of camping in city parks along the route where they allowed bicycle tourists to camp. If there was a picnic shelter, and the weather wasn't much past mild rain, I just roll out my thermarest and sleeping bag on top of a table to sleep. It was entertaining to see my mom do the same. As we rolled out our bags on tables at one shelter in a park at sunset, the cockroaches came out. We spent about 30 minutes stepping on cockroaches. By the time we finished, most of the concrete floor of this picnic shelter was covered in cockroach guts and exoskeletons. It was almost surreal how much we had squished.

Just as we were going to sleep, ants started coming out. We had just provided the biggest feast of their history. In the morning, the ground was 90% cleaned up. Ants must have come from all around.

[ChrisD]

Maybe not the kind of bug story you have in mind

But remember, David, you asked for it.

I grew up in a country with a rich culinary tradition, including some pretty bizarre delicacies. A few years ago (here in the States) while perusing the menu at Bob Chinn's (a popular crabhouse in Chicago), my friend confessed to everyone at the table that he hated shrimp because he thought of them as bugs. In an ill-conceived effort to convince him that they absolutely weren't so, I said out loud, "You should see the roasted grasshoppers I used to eat when I was a kid!"

[Jim Boyd]

I spent most of my teen years in the Panama Canal Zone. Ya'll think there are bugs here in the states, theres some REALLY scary looking one down there

[Slik Geek]

Mr. Cockroach?

I worked just west of the loop in downtown Chicago during the early 1980s in a vintage building. Cockroaches were in abundance. One time we found an extremely large one (about 2 inches long / 5 cm) and we encased it in clear RTV as a memorial.

Several of my co-workers were serious coffee drinkers and they made heavy use of the "Mr. Coffee" machine. To use it, one poured water into the top of the machine through a plastic grate. (The openings in the grate were roughly 1/4" square, IIRC). There was no cover, the grate was always exposed.

One day a heavy coffee drinker decided to clean out the device. It was getting really slow at heating coffee, so he concluded that there must be a build up of mineral scale inside.

When he disassembed the Mr. Coffee, he discovered that there was a different kind of material slowing down the brewing process: There was a layer of several inches of cockroach bodies in the lower section of the heating chamber! The cockroaches at the bottom had been there so long, and soaked in water and heated so many times that they had turned white (sort of clear).

Cockroaches love warmth and moisture. At night, when we all went home, the resevoir was a welcome place for the cockroaches as it cooled down. In the morning, when water was poured in, there was apparently no means of rapid escape so the new roaches were boiled to death. I guess you could say that all the coffee drinkers were enjoying "Chock-full-of-roaches" coffee!

There was a bunch of sick guys at work that day when the news spread! Coffee consumption dropped significantly for a time, even with a newly cleaned, fast-brewing Mr. Coffee machine.

[scmhogg]

Slightly OT.

LOML and I were staying at a lovely hotel on Kauai, HI. We decided to stay a couple of extra days, but the hotel was over booked. The only place we could find was pretty run down.

During the night, we were awakened by a loud clicking sound. When I turned on the lights, the walls and ceiling were covered in Geckos. I was relieved when LOML decided they were cute. Needless to say, no bugs in this room. In fact, a lot less than the Sheraton.

Steve

[tedkitch]

I know that technically spiders aren't bugs, but I hate them and have a funny story about an incident with one. First a little history, at 5 years old I go to get into bed and a spider runs out from under the covers right at me. Sets the tone for the rest of my life. Then while on a trip in the Amazon I see a bird spider (just look a pictures and you'll see what I mean) that further traumatized me.

Here's the story, my younger brother and I are floating up the Buffalo River in Arkansas on a canoe. The water is only about 8" deep and we are trying to move closer to the opposite bank where the water was deeper. In doing so we go under some low tree branches and after coming out there is a large garden spider on my brother's back. I don't even think this through (due to the extreme fear of spiders) and I take my paddle and smack him on the back with everything that I've got. Needless to say, he freaks out and tips the canoe and everything goes into the 8" of water. He's screaming at me for smacking him. He didn't seem to appreciate that I saved his life from a garden spider. We didn't talk much for the rest of the day. He also had a huge red mark on his back for the remainder of the trip.

[linear]

My dad owns a pet store, and for most of my childhood I worked there (cheap labor). At one point, he had an arrangement of 2x2 foot wire cages that stacked two high and held critters. These were set up in two rows of four on top of a sheet of masonite paneling which was set up on top of the carpet (not the greatest plan, for reasons that will become apparent shortly).

So the carpet eventually got soaked with animal urine, and despite the best efforts at keeping the area clean, it was clear the only thing that would work would be tearing this setup down. We knew that the liquid was soaking the carpet beneath, so we had the shop vac set up for wet and ready to go.

A couple guys lifted up the soiled sheet of paneling, to uncover the largest colletion of roaches I've ever seen, which proceeded to disperse in every direction (bug bombs were not an option, they'd kill the other critters too).

I fired up the shop vac after a moment of shock and awe, and filled a five-gallon bucket about three-quarters full with roaches. Add a little bleach and bickety-bam, you have the family size bucket of dead roaches.

I'm glad I wasn't one of the guys lifting the sheet up now that I think about it. The recollection still nauseates me.

[Mrs. Wallnut]

Well we don't have roaches around here, at least that I know of anyways. But our daughter is so afraid of spiders that its actually a little funny.

One day I was sitting in the living room and was watching tv or reading a book, I am not sure which one, when all of a sudden she lets out a scream. I jump up and head for the bedroom thinking that she hurt herself because it was one of those alarming type screams. Get to her room and find her standing on her desk chair. I ask her what is wrong and she yells there is a spider on the floor. I laughed and took care of it.

Then after that she was sitting on the couch and one crawled on her, I have never seen her move so fast, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs.

Now me I don't like snakes and one summer Marks family was over here and I know that we have little garden snakes around here so I am always looking out for them and steer clear. Well one of Marks brothers caught one for the kids to look at and as he headed to where we were all sitting I took off for the house.

[scorrpio]

Had a bug not long ago, at work, old code written by someone else. There was one particular line of code that appeared fine, but something about it still seemed hauntingly strange. After spending 4 hours running in the debugger, putting trace all over the code trying to find the bug, it finally dawned on me that the line in question had condition clauses backwards...

And don't start me on thread concurrency bugs...