INSECT TRAP

— Once we had an invasion of ants, a bunch of pests. And I thought, "I have to make something to get rid of them". And so here it is, a "mousetrap for cockroaches". It's electric, runs on 220 volts. It's a very simple thing. You get a piece of plywood, and on both sides you put foil from a tea packet. Not the whole piece, but you just use strips, leaving a gap of 1-2 mm, about the length of an ant. These strips are soldered to the ends of wires and this cord plugs in to a 220-volt socket. And then you put it somewhere where there are a load of insects. The diode is like an added feature. The idea is simple: when an ant crawls across from one strip to another, it should get a shock from the electrical current (...) But they turned out to be more cunning than me, even though their brains are a lot smaller. So, one crawled onto the strip — so far, so good. The power was on and everything. But it didn't crawl across to the next strip. It stayed there. The little bastard, like, felt the potential voltage, felt that 220 volts were waiting for it on the other side. And that was it. It turned back around (...) So this was just lying around for about 5 years. Then suddenly we got cockroaches and I tried to use it again (...) I killed two. Turns out they're not as clever.