when I was 17and needed extra cash I got a job on the recommendation of a friend selling cockroach control to people who lived nmear the docks in Durban. Its a little known fact, but cockroaches do fly, and for the (mainly Indian) people living near the docks, close to their jobs, and cheap, cockroaches had become household pets in practice - we were dropped off by a van and given areas to canvas (I only did this for one fear inducing night by the way) I knocked on a few doors that told me to go away and then one house let me in to sell this revolutionary cockroach deterrent - I sat on the faded and dillapited settee and started telling the man of the house about the product. While I was doing this I was looking around; the carpet shredded may as well have been eaten by the cockroaches there were so many in the house - it didnt help that the wife was in the kitchen preparing food that was obviously just a day in day out stew that new foodstuffs were added to and there was no hygiene, everywhere I looked there were congregations of cockroaches having foraging meetings, the kitchen scuttled and squirmed as much as I was sitting on the sofa, but the guy was so earnestly looking at me with such desperation that I said that the things didnt actually work and that if he didnt want cockroach problems that he shouldnt live where he was as cockroaches flew, and no matter what happened, he would always have them. Resignedly he thanked me and offered me dinner...
much more distressing and memorable than I can eloquently describe, and not that funny really.
(much more distressing and memorable than I can eloquently describe, and not that funny really.
Alfie,
Wed 12 Nov 2003, 19:36,
archived)