Strangest job.. so many of em. Slaughter house, caregiving for my grandparents while I was heavily into my LSD phase, rice farm.. let's go with rice farm.
So I was up in Chico around 1998 or so, I had a car but struggled to find work there. The town tends to prefer employing the college students which is fair, but it leaves others settling for pretty much only the jobs the students wouldn't even consider. I struggled to find work there until a friend put in a good word for me with a friend who knew a lady that owned a rice farm.
It was a pretty stretched out recommendation(my friend had a friend who knew a lady) but it was enough to secure me the position apparently. My friend relayed to me the following details that I'd need to begin the job;
"Arrive at the corner of 4th and Cypress at 4am, you'll pick up a guy named John who will be waiting there for you. John has worked this rice farm gig in the past, but he's been in prison. This is his first time back to work since being released, he doesn't have a car so you'll need to pick him up everyday before heading to work. The rice farm people know him and trust him. John will explain the rest of the job to you when you meet."
So I arrive on time, 4am I pull up to that corner and sit no more than a minute. John comes out of the house I'm parked in front of. Hops in the car and asks if I smoke weed. I'm like heck yeah I do! Pretty cool, I get to go to work high this is going really well already! I had a couple rolled up so we smoked a fatty and headed on out into the country.
John had me drive about 30 miles from town way the fuck out in the sticks. On the way he explained to me that we were prepping the silos for the approaching harvest. First day we'd clean the inside of the silos by putting shop brooms in 20 foot pvc pipes and pushing them up on the inner walls to brush the dust off. Then we'd sweep the grated floors of the silo and call it a day.
The following day John brought me a hand truck/dolly with a 55 gallon drum fastened to it. It had a shop-vac on the top with an extremely long hose. He opened a hatch on the side of one of the silos and explained my next chore. I was to go down in there under the floor of the silo and vacuum out all the old rice that fell through the grate from the previous year.
No joke there were thousands and thousands of mice all throughout this massive basement just completely loaded with rice. I left the vacuum hose down there and climbed out to ask John what I was meant to do about the mice. He said vacuum them up just like the rice. It was pretty awful, even though they were totally fine and well alive upon viewing them in the barrel of rice once it was filled.
I had to keep going down there and just repeating that process, vacuuming up mice and rice. There was enough just under one silo to take me about three days to finish. On the third day we got high on the way just like the other days. We arrived and it was the same plan, I would vacuum and John would do whatever it was he was doing up above.
This particular morning for whatever reason the mosquitoes were fucking fierce! You could see a blanket of black over the water of the rice farm rows, all mosquitoes. They were eating me alive while I was down there vacuuming up mice and rice. Through my jeans, on my face, lips, ears fucking everywhere.
I crawled up out of there and asked John if it would be alright if we held off on that chore till the mosquitoes eased up. They would usually be gone by 9am from what I observed on the previous days. John just blew up, completely enraged and snatched the hose from my hand, he stormed down under the silo himself exclaiming "If you want something done you just gotta do it your fucking self!" and began vacuuming.
I just quietly eased backwards towards my car, opened the door real quiet like. Hopped in, started it up and hauled ass outta there. That was the last I saw of that guy. He had a hell of a walk back to town I'm sure. It always made me nervous because Chico isn't exactly known for being all that big, I figured he'd spot me around town and fuck me up or something.
I ended up abandoning my car and hitchhiking out of town shortly after that. Don't really got a whole lot of fireworks for the ending here, this is just kinda where the story ends.
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