Roach Motel

With little time off in the past few weeks we have had absolutely no time to do anything with the disgusting fridge that was given to us by our boss.  For two weeks it has sat on our front porch in the same pitiful state, dirty, moldy, and literally crawling with cockroaches.  Last Saturday we finally had a spare forty five minutes and we attacked.  We went through an entire bottle of bleach, several buckets of near boiling water, two old toothbrushes, and three different rags before the fridge even began to look usable.

The worst part of the whole fridge was the back near the bottom where a combination of high humidity, darkness, and regular warmth produced by the condenser created a breeding ground for cockroaches.  The day that we got the fridge I noticed that, in addition to the horrid smell of mold and rotten something it produced, the fridge was home to a whole civilization of cockroaches.  At least three cockroaches about the size of honey bees crawled out from underneath it when I moved it the first time.  I found two more on the porch later that day, and during the week Melissa and I both killed at least two each that had made their way inside our house.

However, the real surprise came last Saturday during cleaning.  From the underside of the fridge, I personally flushed out no less than fifteen small cockroaches that had made homes in the warm, dark, nooks and crevasses around the condenser.  Not only did we find entire families of cockroaches, but what looked like a Utah county maternity ward worth of cockroach babies.  By the time we were finished, the cockroach carnage was almost unbearable. Dead roaches, and roach parts were strewn about our front porch, and the smell of bleach stung in our noses.

Though I washed off the porch where the massacre took place, roach remains are still evident if you look closely.  However, since the siege, we have not seen a single living cockroach, and with a freshly purchased supply of bleach, we will hit the fridge one more time this Saturday before we again consider bringing it into our house.