Jaycee Scott sent this to the Goose's Nest as a submission to The Other Rant. It is one heck of a story so I put it up to stay.

Cockroaches and Armadillos

By Jaycee Scott

One day in late April as the campus begins to show its spring colors and thoughts turn towards finals and the summer; I received a phone call from a distressed male senior. What began as a routine call about a roommate issue soon hit warp nine in the weird category. Our student had been rooming with four other young men in an old country house just outside of town. It had been a cute little farm home at one time. Now, it had all the trappings of a Baghdad bomb crater. Seems our students had had the misfortune of their home sliding down into chasm, well the one half the house really, it had broken in two. Adding to their plight, the roommates were being sued by their landlord for the damage. What could have caused such a calamity? This is where it gets freaky.

One of our students was an entomology major, or as it is better known - the study of bugs. He had a little hobby of raising giant Africanized cockroaches in a terrarium. For the layman it was a roach farm consisting of a fish tank full of dirt and bugs the size of cell phones. As the fates would have it, during a rather rowdy party, the glass enclosure for the mega-insects was shattered and the buggers bolted. The Jurassic sized insects rapidly multiplied and soon the students had an infestation.

The people of Georgia pride themselves on solving their own problems; it is eternal rebel in them. These young scholars were no exception. Another roommate, an Animal Science major, had access to the cockroaches’ worst enemy, the dreaded armadillo. Our collegiate tenants hatched a devious plan. They acquired a few armadillo puppies and set them lose around the house to enjoy the roach buffet.

This was the second shot in a war that would last a full semester. Armadillos also breed at an incredible rate, but not fast enough to keep up with the bugs. Our students now had two infestations roaming inside and outside the house. The critters were found in the beds, oven and even coming up through the pipes into the toilets. Makes you think about looking twice next time before you sit down to take care of business! Again, our hotheaded learners thought they could handle the newest crisis. In true Southern fashion, they believed firepower might solve their worries, namely .22 caliber rifles and 12-gauge shotguns.

Most people would have fled the home and called animal control. Not our brave undergraduates. For two weeks they stalked their adversaries. In the process expended two hundred rounds of ammunition causing damages from exploded shower tiles to punctured ceiling fan blades. They claimed that they had “…bagged thirty roaches, three armadillos with another ‘dillo kill unconfirmed. We last saw him in the foyer.”

Yet, the animals still had one last weapon of mass destruction up their furry, scaly coats. During the proceeding months the armadillos had expanded their dens, tunneling all over the property, especially under the house. This brought down the party shack one night with a thunderous crash as the boys were awoken to find that they had plunged into the armadillo-engineering project. Don’t worry. Everyone was safe, including the pests who scattered to the four winds after their glorious victory over the awkwardly resourceful humans.

After the dust settled on this extraordinary tale the students mediated the matter with the landlord and hammered out a plan to work off the damages that totaled over $25,000.

To wrap up this creep-crawly story, all the boys went on to graduate, hopefully a little wiser in the ways of pest control, selection of pets, home construction and urban combat. Yet, there are some lingering questions that still haunt me:

• Where do you get baby armadillos? Can you buy them like dogs or cats?
• How could you parent-proof this home when Mom and Dad came to visit?
• Two hundred rounds of ammunition!
• Unconfirmed kill?
•  Is 13 hours of college classes a full load when you have this kind of free time?
• What was the landlord’s move-out walk through like at the semester’s end?
• Did any of these students go into the military?
• Did these students subscribe to "Foyer", Martha Stewart Living and Guns and Ammo?
• How would you ever impress a coed by explaining you were a bug major?
• Did they finally kill all the cockroaches or are they still out there?