Living in the Great White North here, I have never seen a roach. You may keep them, though, the little buggers creep me out. We have spruce bugs that are roach like but bigger and can fly.

4................

Ugh...Why don't you call an exterminator?...I could never live with bugs in my house...We have a few spiders in the basement, but I can handle those...Anything else, and either they'd be gone or I would...

No...Way...In...HELL

I haven't killed an insect in years.

I don't know for sure, but it would ne in the thousands!

You should have seen this one place I lived in...the rent was dirt cheap, very agreeable in that respect. But man! A million cockaroachers, and two roommates who refused to do anything about it and forbade me to do anything about it. So many roaches, they would fall out of the kitchen cupboards when you opened them to get a packet of oakmeal or something. Literally. So one day I am feeling pretty silly and I go to the store and spend ten dollars on those fumigator things that you add water to and they steam up and give off this roach choker. A couple hours later, roachers are coming out of every little crack, out of the heating ducts, the fireplace, the kitchen, from under the furniture, everywhere. All running around like little maniacs, very unhappy about my roach fogger purchase decision.

yeah, i cant stand them. thats why i vowed to destroy and kill everyone roach that crosses my path.

Between various methods, easily over 1000...
Kill a roach with an egg-sac, and you've killed 50.
But yeah...it's a hot country with bugs aplenty...not saying I keep a filthy household at all, just that seasonally, the things WILL try and invade your house/apartment. You go away for a weekend, and they invade.
It's like they don't even need an obvious foodsource....they even eat cardboard n shit....breed like motherfuckers. Here, in the hotter times, if you're not using preventavie measures, they WILL invade.
I don't like killing anything, and feel bad about it...but, I will NOT have my kitchen, bathroom or bedroom used by anything but humans.
That said, no need for an exterminator unless you've got termites or something IMO, roaches are easily dealt with.

I read that they even eat the plastic coating on electrical wiring, and can cause people's houses to catch fire that way...And for water they can live off of the condensation on cold water pipes...It just seems like they're so resourceful, that they'd be really difficult to get rid of...

Oh...ANTS!...When my daughter lived here with her cat...The ants would come in EVERY summer and make a trail to the cat food...Each year we only had to throw a couple of ant disks around (one behind the armoire that the cat food dish was sitting next to, and one in the crack of the kitchen door where they were coming in), and they would disappear until the next year...They were the kind of disks where the ants would go in and get the stuff all over them, and even CARRY the stuff in their pincers, take it back to their anthill, and the entire anthill would be wiped out in just a few days...Less than a week...