I begin this story, not talking about cockroaches, but talking about smoke detectors. On a certain morning in early November, at 5:27 am, our smoke detectors went off. The noise was piercing. But then it stopped. And then it went off again. And stopped. And went off again. Nothing appeared out of order; none of our neighbors seemed to be rushing out of their apartments. I opened the door to the hallway so that I could see if the hallway smoke detector would go off when our apartment detectors next went off. But neither alarm went off. Knowing that our neighbor across the hall leaves every morning at 5:40 am, and so would already be awake, I went ahead and knocked on his door, asking if his smoke alarm had gone off. It hadn't. Puzzled, but not feeling anxious about any danger of fire, I called and left a message for management. By the end of the day, we had new smoke detectors.
About a week later, a similar thing happened. In this case, it was around 7 am, and only one smoke detector made a little chirp, and then the light, which was normally green, had turned red. I decided to check with the downstairs neighbors, to see if anything going on below us might have triggered the alarm. When they opened the door, we saw at least eight cockroaches, in clear sight. We had been having trouble with cockroaches, and were surprised that after two rounds of Combat bait stations, we were still seeing them. Now we knew the cause! When I called management about the smoke detector, I also told them about the cockroaches, and specifically asked if they could check out the surrounding apartments.
That day, we got a new smoke detector, and had an exterminator come the following day. Having the exterminator come was an involved process. We had to empty out all of our kitchen cabinets. Do you have any idea how much we can fit in our kitchen cabinets?
This much.
On top of that, we had to move things away from the baseboards as much as possible. In other words, put lots of stuff in the center of the room. (I didn't take any pictures of that.)
The exterminator told us that they had sprayed downstairs, and it was terrible down there. He knew they would have to spray again after the tenants were evicted, and possibly even a third time. Yuck.
A few days later, we were once again disturbed by the smoke detector going off, this time just after having fallen asleep. Since the smoke detector had some strange light patterns going on, I pulled it off the wall to read the label on the back describing what they meant. While pulling the detector off the wall, I spied the outline of a cockroach inside. Well, at least I knew the cause of the smoke detector failures! After another week, and some more disturbed sleep, we took the problem smoke detector down, and called management to simply notify them that we would be leaving the smoke detector down, and the battery removed, until the cockroach situation was resolved. After all, we still had two other detectors. That day, they came and installed a batter powered one on the opposite wall. Insurance reasons.
After about two weeks, we were still seeing and killing many roaches a day. This time, management arranged for the entire complex to be sprayed on the same day. The exterminators said the situation downstairs was the worst infestation they'd ever seen. It was slightly comforting to know that we weren't doing anything wrong.
Now we've been sprayed three times, emptying out our cabinets each time (we're getting more efficient at it). No, this hasn't inspired a great purging of stuff, but I am gradually reducing, and I'm being particularly cautious about acquiring new things.
We've had cockroaches trigger the smoke detectors at least 4 more times. I really don't like cockroaches.