The roach world, while it resembles ours, and exists in ours, is a separate part of the universe. God originally was going to make roaches THE intelligent beings on earth and then changed his mind. That's why roaches can be chased, sprayed and killed but never eliminated. Let's look around the roach world for a bit.

It's a constant search for food in a world of large creatures trying to kill you. It's like living in a cave where there not only isn't any indoor plumbing but no outhouse either. It's unpleasant. It's the way we humans started. Roaches never got beyond it and we did. Roaches don't really care. They don't really know. All they know is we came up with containers with lids to make their life a little more miserable.

The reason we hate roaches, besides the way they look, is the fact that we don't know where they've been walking. Roaches know exactly where they've been. They also are totally immune to every disease, bacteria and virus.- including all the ones we cooked up in our former germ warfare labs. The Army, denying we ever did it, tested all the germs on monkeys and roaches. The monkeys all died and the roaches came back for seconds. We should have studied their immune systems instead.

"That wasn't our mandate. We wanted to kill not cure", General Clark always said.

We always say, "There's a roach scurrying around. Quick! Kill it".

We can't catch it much less kill it. On those rare occasions we accidentally step on one, crunching it with our shoe or, worse, our bare feet, we yell out, "Ew!".

The roach hopes to find the crumbs since the containers are impossible to open. They like your little children and your teenagers more than you do. The kids always leave crumbs around. Find a home with a teenager and you find a home with a roach problem and a teenager problem. The teenager problem is another story. You're not allowed to step on them.

Roaches, like vampires, hate the light and love the dark. Open your cupboard and the roaches scatter. So do you. Your teenager doesn't notice them. He, or she, is used to them. They think they are an interactive decoration. Your son keeps on in a jar on his desk next to the petrified gecko and the ex-snake.

You get up in the middle of the night to get a snack. As you walk through the kitchen you hear crunching sounds. You turn on the light to see dead and dying roaches. That's bad enough. Worse is that the crunching you heard had to be you stepping on some of them. You have dead roaches on your feet. You run to the bathroom and wash your feet for an hour.

You go to get some cookies for a snack and notice that your teenager has left the lid off again. After eating the second cookie you see the dead roach. You run to the bathroom and lose your cookies. Fido steals the rest of the cookies and the dead roach and eats them. He doesn't mind the roach or where it was walking before it got into the house.

The pest control guy was careful not to say he could prevent roaches from getting into the house.

"I will spray and set up a barrier that no roach can survive", he tells you.

No, they can't. They don't know it and come in. No, they won't survive. They will come in and browse around. They will get into things. They will be on your floor. Not a real barrier. Yes, they die. You know that from all the roach corpses. You also wonder about all the little corpses you don't find. Eating all your meals out comes to mind. Then you realize that roaches don't know the difference between a house and a restaurant. You don't know how careful the cooks are. Hmm, eating out just lost something.

Every roach is told at birth, "Find a home with a teenager and enjoy it while you lasts".