Fumigate - Freewrite

Steven's apartment wasn't exactly what I expected.

It was one of those motel style apartments.

When I say that I mean that there were several units really close together and it was pretty run down, but the same time it seemed more like a small grouping of tenants than an actual apartment building.

Sure there was a billiard room and it had a couple of old jukeboxes in it but nobody ever went in there. In fact, the place was completely covered in dust. We tried going to play pool on occasion...... but it wasn't very fun to be there.

Source: Giphy.com

The laundry room was like a ghost town also.

Most of the people that lived there were of the older variety so I had this image in my head of a bunch of people with dirty clothes thrown everywhere. They didn't really have anyone to impress anymore so they weren't really too interested in doing their laundry or taking care of themselves.

Sometimes just walking by people's apartments in this motel style housing development you couldn't help but smell odors that would be better off left alone.

I wondered if there were people in here that were never taking their trash out or if there were people in here that had absolute garbage dumps in their living spaces.

Of course, the worst part of it all happened the first night I stayed there.

This was Steven's first apartment so he was a little bit uncomfortable to stay there by himself the first night. I offered to spend the night with him and it turned out to be quite an eventful experience.

At about 3:00 in the morning I got up to use the restroom. Immediately upon flicking on the lights I noticed there was a lot of dirt on the wall.

"Now that's interesting." I thought to myself.

"That dirt wasn't there before."

You're probably thinking that it wasn't actually dirt and you are right.

It was a bunch of little baby cockroaches and they were all over the walls and floors of this apartment.

Needless to say we fumigated the heck out of this place for the next few days.

That seemed to do the trick for a while but within the next week or two the apartment was full of cockroaches once again.

It occurred me that with all of the older people that didn't seem to do the laundry, and with all of the apartments that stunk so bad when you walked by that you couldn't help but try to not vomit, that it was very likely that most of these apartments were actually full of cockroaches.

No matter how often we fumigated this apartment the cockroaches in the neighbor's apartment would always find a way in and lay their eggs there.

The answer actually was in those little combat roach traps.

We put out a whole crap load of those after fumigating one day.

The next month we fumigated again and then laid another crap load of those roach traps again.

The roaches go into the traps and they take the poison out and then they feed it to the other roaches.

Finally we got rid of the roach infestation and we probably got rid of the infestation in all of the surrounding apartment units.

The building crew should have paid us but instead these people probably didn't even notice.

I guess that there's a lesson to be learned here.

Don't rent without fully checking for cockroaches.

There's a heck of a lot apartments that have cockroach infestations so you really have to be careful.

If you do find an infestation you will have to fumigate but you also have to lay traps out to make sure that the apartments near you aren't suffering from an infestation that's transferring to your unit.

I know it's pretty gross but it comes with the territory when you're dealing with apartment life.