I worked at a high school doing IT. I kept student-returned laptops in a laptop cart. One day, to my absolute horror, baby cockroaches start crawling out of the cart, and infested my entire work area.

The cart was quarantined and treated by Terminix. After a while the cart was returned to me, and I had to sort through and clean/wipe all of them. I wish I could have just e-wasted the whole thing. Another round of hatching happened a few weeks later, from another laptop, but luckily I had put them in air-tight containers by then.

One of my closest friends, whom I often shared a roof with, loves insects. One day she found a cockroach and decided to make friends with it and give it its own area. Convincing her to get rid of it required jumping through tedious mental hoops on the basis that “a cockroach never killed anyone” and “he has as much a right to stay in the house if he follows the rules”. His stay in the house ended just short of her successfully teaching him to do tricks. Thank god.

Worked at Office Depot back in ~2012-2014. Was the lead tech, and was the primary hardware fix guy. Had a guy bring in this old dell clamshell case PC with an xp sticker. It and him already smelled…off. After discussing some issues (no power) and finishing the paperwork, I cracked it open. They came spilling out. Dead, alive, and various sized. All the droppings too. It was one of the first machines I refused to work on. The guy had no choice but to leave with it. Didn’t really say much after that.

The only other PC that came close to that were those of chain smokers. Where the tar buildup was actually sticky to the touch, coating everything, outside and in.

Honeymoon in New York City. My wife and I get back to our hotel after seeing Wicked on Broadway with the original cast. Our suitcase is full of cockroaches. They heard my wife screaming twelve floors down.

Spending a night by myself in one of mexico’s shitiest hotel. Wake up in the middle of the night because weird noise. Hundreds of cockroach on the wall, inches from the bed. Leave lights on. Cant sleep for the rest of the night so start to write a story about me meeting and becoming friend with a french cockroach that got lost in Mexico.

A flying cockroach. Need I say more?

In Cienfuegos in Cuba the lady was showing us around the room we were staying in at her house. After she left my girlfriend came up to me cringing and said there was a huge cockroach on her leg. No sooner had she finished telling me this that the lady came out of the opposite room stamping her feet on the floor chasing this monster cockroach. I swear she stamped on it three times before it stopped running.

My wife and I were offered to live in her father’s rental house for free as long as she was in college. We were very excited to move in and pulled up to the house a week after our wedding. We opened the door and it was a disaster zone. It looked like someone had left all their belongings but trashed the place before leaving. Overturned couches, clothing everywhere, and ROACHES… oh god, SO MANY ROACHES! I walked into the living room and picked up a discarded baby sock in the middle of the room and at least three roaches fell as I picked it up and scattered. Every single item in the house was the same.

After throwing everything in the house away, we had to bug bomb the house a dozen times to finally have some semblance of a home without roaches everywhere. We would still see them at night after turning on a light in a dark room for at least 4 months. Had to keep all food locked away until we stopped randomly seeing them.

I’m an emt/firefighter. I’ve gone in places during the day. With the lights on. Where the roaches were so bad that you could still see a hundred of them. Including the ones that fall from the ceiling onto you.

Okaaay I got one.

I was with my family in a small vacation house, near a lake. Very wet and swampy surrounding, hot wet summer night, I really needed to go out and get some fresh air.

Walked barefeet and without artificial light, you know back to the roots and stuff.

The grass was just verry sticky and slimey, it was pretty weird so I got my phone, turnes on the flashlight and damn… hundreds of slugs and snails everywhere, around my feet, in front and behind me.

I hate slugs so much, it was the most disgusting moment in my life. Ran very carefully to the lake, onto a dock, to wash my feet off. Slugs everywhere, on the dock even. The lake was full of weird tiny insects racing around, the air was full of mosquitoes and flies.

This planet can reall, be hostile, its crazy. And thats in a state where the climate is so nice life is flourishing.

Learned: living near standing water sounds nice but is horrible.

Also I was on a shitload of mushrooms, which was not a great idea. The grass was basically all fractals and differentiating slugs from sticks didnt make it better. Damn, what a night.

Edit: this was about Cockroaches only? Idk I never saw one haha, Germany seems quite nice?

Was playing FFXIV and my headset at the time had the mute button on the cable which usually rested on my chest. At some point a cockroach crawled up the cable and sat where the button normally is before i noticed the dark spot on my chest stopped being plastic and grew antennae. The worst part was that I was already paranoid about literally this exact thing happening.

First time in Singapore I saw a cockroach sitting on the floor, I went to kill it and then discovered there are flying roaches. Hilariousness of course ensued as a fled out of the apartment, screaming like a terrified little boy.

Long time ago I’m pretty sure one managed to get into our closed dishwasher in our apartment. Luckily we don’t have an infestation or I’d die of fright.

How do you call a group of cockroaches? ChatGPT insists it is “intrusion”. So imagine a sound a dense intrusion of cockroaches makes when it separates from a wall and falls to the floor. I heard it once in my life when I moved a piece of furniture from the wall in a student dormitory, long time ago. I am still disgusted.