Another reason I went back to college

There's no way to describe it without sounding like I'm exaggerating.

I'm talking about the most cockroach-infested home I saw when I worked in pest control.

The owner of a rental duplex called and said one of his residents was griping about roaches intruding from the adjacent unit. He seemed exasperated by the complaint and gave the impression that he was hiring us just to shut her up.

A co-worker and I treated her place first. Then we went to the other unit -- The Chamber of Horrors.

The door opened into the kitchen, where the sink, counters, oven and table were heaped with grease-caked pots, pans and dishes. The walls, ceiling, appliances and furniture were yellow-brown with grease. On the floor were paper grocery bags disintegrating from the rotting garbage that filled them. The linoleum floor was so sticky that there was a crackly sound each time one of us lifted a foot to take a step.

There were roaches moving on every surface. Usually you won't see roaches in daylight because they hide in tight spaces until dark. If you see some moving around in the light, that's an indication of a nasty infestation, because it means there isn't room for all of them in their hiding places. And if you see hundreds and hundreds of them moving around the room like reflections from a mirrored ball at a disco ... well.

We decided to treat the other rooms first so they'd already have insecticide in place when we hit the kitchen and drove some of those thousands of roaches into the rest of the unit.

The home appeared to be inhabited by a woman and her teenage son. The son's room was a shrine to drugs and Satan. The notable decor consisted of two rows of various kinds of drug paraphernalia that converged on a painting of the devil.

We made our way back to the kitchen and started spraying insecticide in the usual fashion, hitting the cracks, crevices and corners, using our feet to scoot the decaying bags of garbage away from the walls to reach the edges of the room as well as possible. We puffed insecticide dust under and behind the oven and refrigerator.

With a bad infestation, it was standard to use a fogger that released pyrethrum, an irritating insecticide that spreads through the air and flushes out roaches to speed up the killing process. I got the fogger and my co-worker, who had been on the job a lot longer than I had, said we should put on hard hats, turn up the collars of our coveralls, and tuck our pantlegs into our socks. That can’t be good, I thought. Then we put on our respirators and I turned on the fogger.

The fogger worked, for sure. Roaches came bursting out from every direction like they were fleeing a soccer riot. Dying roaches rained from the ceiling and rolled off our hard hats and shoulders. I danced around like someone was shooting at my feet, trying to keep frantic bugs from crawling up my legs. I wanted to bathe in hot Lysol.

As the roach storm subsided, the landlord stopped by and stepped on a few insects that weren’t quite dead yet, as if killing a dozen of them meant he was doing his duty as a responsible property owner.

And on the wall was a framed photo of the woman who lived there, wearing a pink uniform, with a plate on the frame that said: "Housekeeper of the month."