I had been busy all afternoon in my New Orleans kitchen, preparing dinner for a guy I liked. After the meal, we headed outside to enjoy the magnolia-perfumed breeze drifting off the Mississippi. As I coyly sipped my wine – SMACK! – a flying cockroach touched down straight on my cheek. Releasing a staccato scream, I spasmodically jerked my arms upward and sent a waterfall of red wine down my date’s face and white shirt. He stood there, stunned. That roach ruined my date.
In the worst cases, roaches actively impact the victim’s life. Psychologists report patients too terrified to get out of bed at night or to go to the kitchen for fear of encountering a cockroach. Emily Driscoll, a documentary producer in New York City, once became trapped in a hotel room in India because a roach was sitting on the door handle. “I couldn’t move, I was paralysed,” she says. “I needed to keep in it my sight.”