A couple days ago I was shutting the garage windows because rain was forecast (it didn’t happen) when I noticed several pesky flies became trapped between the window and the screen. It wuz doomsday for them.

But, those pesky flies brought back a memory of a successful practical joke I played on some roommates way back in the 1960s when I wuz in college at Bea Wilder U.

Since last week’s column wuz dedicated to humorous practical joke stories, please consider this practical joke story as a continuation of last week’s column theme. Here’s how it happened:

I had moved out of the dormitory and wuz living in one of two rental apartments in the upstairs of a private home close to campus. I had three roommates in my apartment and four other close friends lived in the other apartment. We basically lived as eight roommates one big apartment, separated only by a hallway.

An outdoors stairway led up to our apartments. The stairs led to a single door that opened into a hallway separating the two apartments. All this background information is crucial to this pesky fly drive joke.

It was in the fall when the houseflies were abundant and persistent in seeking indoor living space. Well, on the day of the joke, one of my three roommates decided to “air out” our apartment when he went to class and he left open both the door to our apartment and the outside door to the hallway. He wuz the last one to leave for afternoon classes.

Well, when we returned to our apartment late in the afternoon, we found that a regular “bee hive” of pesky flies had invaded our apartment. It wuzn’t just a few, it wuz literally hundreds, maybe a thousand. They were uncountable.

Of course, all of us came down hard on our careless roommate who had “aired out” our apartment, but that didn’t change the fact that we needed to get the pesky invaders out.

One roommate got a swatter and began killing flies with it. His method was clearly going to slow and messy. That’s when I wuz struck by a brilliant idea spawned by something my sainted mother used to do when she had too many flies in her kitchen. She drove them out of the kitchen by shooing them out the door with a tea towel.

So, here’s what we did. All the guys in the other apartment were gone. So, first we four roommates closed the outside door to the hallway. Then we pulled the shades down and turned out all the lights in our apartment and turned on the light in the hallway — knowing that flies always go toward the light.

Then we all got tea towels or shirts and began “driving” all our flies into the well-lighted hallway. It took us quite a few minutes to drive fly horde into the hallway.

Then, we opened up the door to our pals’ apartment and quickly drove/shooed all the flies from the hallway into their apartment. And we retreated to our apartment and began swatting the few flies that escaped “the drive.”

We’d scarcely had gotten the joke pulled off when our pals began returning to their now-fly-ridden apartment. Soon, one of them stuck his head into our apartment and innocently asked, “Do you guys have a lot of flies? Our apartment is buzzing with them.”

Pausing in my fly swatting, I replied, “Yep, we’ve got a bunch, too. We’re killing them with a swatter.”

“When you get done, can we borrow your swatter?” he asked.

“Sure. I’ll bring it over when I get through with it,” I replied.

And that, folks, is what I did. But, I never told him how come his apartment had so many flies, or how he and his roommates could “drive” them out.

It took them hours to swat all the flies in their apartment, and my roommates and me were smirking all the time at the practical joke we’d pulled off.

***

Earlier this week, I read an article in the online Wall Street Journal about the rapid advancement of “autonomous farming” in America. The article described how self-driving tractors and combines, drones, robot fruit and berry pickers, and myriad ways artificial intelligence in being applied to farming and ranching.

It included such “incredible things as being able to apply water, fertilizer and pesticides only where they’re needed down to the square foot. It even described machines that can selectively identify weeds and kill them as the machines move through the field. Another can “soil test” for fertility, organic matter, and compaction from the air.

All of this new tech is pretty amazing and stupefying to an old geezer like me who can still remember his dad farming with horses.

I know it’s impossible to put a damper in new technology. Nor would I advocate for doing so. However, it does raise one big question is my mind. When will the terms “farmer” and “rancher” become obsolete and they both become known as “food and fiber production operators?”

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Most days at the Old Geezers’ Gaggle and Gabfest, someone expresses a “zinger” that’s worthy of passing along.

This week’s zinger is this: “I’m moving so slow these days I got run over by my shadow.”

To which another geezer replied, “Heck, my recliner trapped me the other day!”

***

Words of wisdom for this week: “You save 100% when you don’t buy anything.”

Have a good ‘un.