We've all heard or been a victim of terrible, terrible incidences involving a certain little creature making life hell.
There was the woman who sipped her wine only to have one touch her lips because it was floating in her wine glass. And the man whose bedsheets seemed to attract them; he'd constantly wake up to a rattling sound, commencing another night from hell. Or the woman who leapt out of the shower, conditioner still in, due to one of them crawling across a bar of soap that rested on the shower caddy.
We're talking, of course, about those primordial monstrosities euphemistically referred to as palmetto bugs. Call them what they are: giant, flying cockroaches.
A new study demonstrates what the aforementioned victims already know: Tampa is the most cockroach-infested city in the U.S. (though we should note that Los Angeles wasn't taken into account in the Census Bureau survey of vermin sightings, so we very well could be #2).
The survey also looked at mice and rats, as if those cute lil' rodents were even remotely as terrifying as these godawful insects that have haunted our nightmares since that terribly sealed garage apartment we lived in for about a month during our sophomore year of college, until sleepless nights took their toll and we upgraded to a concrete, hermetically sealed bunker.
For the record, Tampa didn't do as poorly as other cities when it came to rats and mice; Philly had the most mice and Seattle had the most rats (followed by Austin).
As if that's anything to complain about.
Seriously, in a cockroach-infested hellscape, we need rats and mice. They eat cockroaches. Trust us. We don't want to tell you how we know (hint: dilapidated Treasure Island apartment life). But we know.
The study is based on the number of pest sightings in homes, but not outdoors or in public spaces. As Bloomberg writer Patricia Clark notes, the study is in some ways a measure of the quality of available housing in America's biggest cities. While mice can be found across the board in terms of affluence levels, rats and roaches are, of course, concentrated in areas with lower-quality housing.
Which is probably the best argument for socialism we've ever heard: redistribute wealth so no human ever has to wake up to one of those fuckers chilling in your bathroom sink on a summer morning because it crept in through a laundry vent. No one, no one, should ever have to experience that trauma.
