Neil Humphreys: Brave Singaporeans must stand tall... against a baby cockroach

While the world deals with oil shortages, power cuts and an American President who wants to pick a fight with a dead Elvis Presley, Singapore has serious problems of its own. The hunt is on for a runaway cockroach.

Naturally, this isn’t just any cockroach. It’s a particularly small, scrawny cockroach. The minibeast was recently spotted hanging around some steamed buns. 

We’ve all been there.

In truth, the cockroach was making less progress than a bumbling teenager on a first date. He was fiddling with the edges of the packaging and getting nowhere, when a supermarket shopper filmed the pest’s feeble efforts.

The video went viral. Of course it did. This is Singapore, where we aren’t required to capture natural disasters or drone attacks on our phones so we go all in on a baby cockroach stalking some buns.

Such a serious incident demanded action.

First, Scarlett Supermarket Singapore was contacted for comment. 

A representative said: “We settled the matter immediately. We called in Ah Seng from his smoke break, and he stomped on Colin the Cockroach with his yellow wellington boot. Ah Seng had considered stubbing out Colin with his cigarette, but we take our health and safety standards seriously. Besides, Ah Seng didn’t want to waste a freshly lit cigarette.”

Of course the Scarlett Supermarket representative didn’t say that. Recognising the gravity of the situation, a representative actually said the company regretted the unpleasant experience.

What counts as an ‘unpleasant experience’?

When I was 16, I worked in a supermarket in East London. Watching drunks fight over the turkeys was an unpleasant experience (they were fighting over the turkey freezer. They were not fighting over which turkey to take out for the night. They were not insane.)

Watching an auntie slide down my freshly polished supermarket aisle was an unpleasant experience. Actually, it was a rather entertaining experience. She took off like an Olympic skater, before pirouetting near the frozen carrots.

Watching shoplifters steal the prime beef, wiping graffiti off the supermarket wall and dealing with violent customers were all unpleasant experiences.

In the grand scheme of things, a bun-fondling cockroach is not the most unpleasant of experiences. It’s barely an experience.

But this is Singapore. And not a great deal else happens, so the matter had to be “escalated”.

According to the Scarlett Supermarket spokesperson, who’s had a very productive week, the company “immediately escalated the matter to the outlet team for a thorough inspection and corrective actions have been taken”.

How do you escalate the hunt for a cockroach? Does the supermarket floor manager shout: “Eh, Ah Seng. Enough smoking already. Go catch Colin!”

And what are these corrective actions? Do they send in monitor lizards to patrol the bakery aisle? 

At least that would be the end of the drama, right? Of course not.

In Singapore, we must escalate the escalation so the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) confirmed that it is also looking into the matter. How this specific matter will be looked into is anyone’s guess.

Personally, I’m going to be very disappointed if folks in SFA polo shirts are not spotted at a Scarlett Supermarket, fumbling their way through the steamed buns.

I’d like to see an SFA officer with a red pointer, presenting slides: “We thought we’d tracked Colin to this bakery shelf and called in a SWAT team. On closer inspection, however, the skinny brown object proved to be one of Ah Seng’s cigarette butts.”

The ‘ick’ is real, but…

Look, I’m not dismissing the ick factor. The person who shared the video said the incident gave her the “ick” and she lost her appetite, which was understandable. If I’d spent my evening zooming in on a nifty cockroach, I wouldn’t fancy a bun either.

And unless Colin was the Harry Potter of cockroaches, he presumably has Mummy and Daddy lurking nearby. There might well be an entire infestation within the vicinity. The appropriate hygiene measures will obviously be taken.

But the fact that a tiny cockroach crawled across plastic — he didn’t come into direct contact with the bread — and still went viral is a testament to Singapore’s attractive dullness. This is as bad as our bad news gets. 

When I was a kid, I grabbed the handle of a saucepan of soup and a mouse jumped out and ran across our kitchen. The soup was tomato, so the mouse left blood-red pawprints, and I was left screaming like a soprano standing on a rusty nail.

I’ve suffered with suriphobia — or musophobia — ever since. But the soup-gorging rodent was hardly worth coverage in my local newspaper. Town council representatives didn’t call my mother, promising to “escalate the matter”.

Perspective is always handy in such situations. It was a small cockroach in a dense, tropical city. The icky scene was unhygienic, perhaps even disgusting, but it wasn’t the end of the world, thankfully. 

That said, if you hear someone screaming like a soprano standing on a rusty nail, you’ll know I’ve just seen a mouse.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning writer and MONEY FM radio host, a successful author and a failed footballer.

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