I think for the first time ever, I felt sorry for a cockroach. It was a weird sensation, though the end result was the same – I killed it. Out of pity. Or something.

It was a very big roach, I’d put it between 6 – 7cm probably. It was in the ladies restroom, which is pretty tiny. It was right there when I opened the door and I think we surprised each other. Well, I had to use the bathroom so… I kicked it, curious as to how it would react. It went to one of the sides, then started crawling about, startled, but not really all that quickly. I thought they moved faster than that. Maybe this one was old or already dying. Or disoriented. Since there was really no room to move in, it started going around in “circles” – by that it was quite literally running around the entire floor. I didn’t really want it to crawl up my leg in panic though, and in the end I realised just how terrified it would have been, that poor creature with nowhere to go (though it probably didn’t know it was kind of trapped).

So I squashed it. It took me two goes, the first time it was still moving since I didn’t stomp too hard, so I had to try again. This one had black guts, rather than the usual greenish yellow I used to see. Poor thing. It didn’t even do anything wrong. Now I had another problem. It was in a highly visible area right as the door opens… so I had to get rid of it. What an unpleasant thought. I did consider just kicking it into a corner so that it’d be left there, but then I thought, I really should be responsible and dispose of it since other people use the bathroom too. So I reluctantly took some paper and picked it up. It was stiff hand towel paper so at least I didn’t feel too much of it and it collected quite cleanly so the guts must have mainly still been intact and didn’t appear to leave a mark on the floor.

In the bin it went.

The end!