I thought crossing the equator the first time called for some sort of ceremony involving a fat man and lots of jelly? Something I read in Spy magazine long ago…
When I worked the auto parts counter many moons ago, I always asked the noobs to get me a quart of blinker fluid, amber for the front, not the red for the rear.
I was also kind enough to ask them for a muffler bearing. Or a Kennuder valve, primary, not secondary for a 1983 Corvette.
I also did the radiator cap for the VW bug thing too…
Correct, this would be the Shellback ceremony, if I recall correctly.
There are similiar ceremonies for crossing other significant lines, such as the arctic line, and others.
source: my navy semi-retired co-worker.
In the days of mainframe computers, newbs would be sent into the machine room to clean the bit bucket. (The old, used bits really piled up.)
Oddly, there were actual bit buckets of sorts around. Punch cards and paper tape machines would have bins of “bits” that would need cleaning out from time to time.
I once called out a Master Sergeant for messing with my new Lieutenants like this. I argued that it wasn’t unfunny because it’s mean, but because “keys to a dropzone” could conceivably be a real thing. I figured it’s possible that there is a fenced-in part of a parachuting practice area somewhere that would be locked. It’d be like saying “Keys to range 4”, when you really mean “the keys to the outer door of the control tower of range 4”.
I told the MSG it was like sending someone to get your notebook that you left on your rack, and then going “Hah! I got you stupid idiots so good! There is no notebook! I made it all up! Hahahah!”
Anyway, my point is, if you’re going to do these tricks, you have to pick the ones that no experienced person could possibly believe would exist, such as a yard of flight line or a quart of blinker fluid or a gallon of prop wash.
…or ordered to the tool crib/expediter for tool ID-10-T.
Working as a volunteer at Southeastern Railway Museum, we used to send the new guys to the shop for the rail stretcher.
I always enjoyed going to the tool department at Sears and asking the clerk for a metric Crescent wrench. Sometimes they got immediately hostile, most times they laughed. And once in awhile they’d start down towards aisle 4 or whereever & then it’d dawn on them.
In the airline biz back in the days of yore we’d inaugurate new flight attendants by handing them a plastic trash bag and telling them we needed a cabin air sample for the cabin air quality monitoring program. Yep, go back to the middle of coach, open this bag up big, wave it around to fill it with air then tie it off like a balloon. Then bring it back to the cockpit so we can turn it in at the destination. It worked just often enough to be hilarious.
That the new hire FAs were generally not technically inclined helped a bunch.
We used to fly a whole month with the same cabin team. Now it’s rarely more than 1/2 a workday together before we swap out. Add in the armored door we avoid opening unless really necessary and the schism between the two groups is almost hermetic now.
We used to tell new guys to do a kufi count. Go to the mess hall or yard and count how many prisoners were wearing a kufi. Then call the warden and give him the total.
I’ll bite. What the hell is a kufi, real or mythical?
No combination of speed and intonation of ‘kufi count’ results in something I recognize as boob bait.
If you pulled that on me, I’d bring back a flaming rope.
We tell them to get the India Delta 10-Tango (ID 10-T) form.
I did something like this once by accident, when a friend asked me what music I was listening to in IRC and I answered the Cooling Fan by Personal Computer and described it as “ambient”. The next day he told me he had looked all over the internets for that song and he just couldn’t find it. He got pretty mad at me when I started laughing at him.
A good friend of mine claims he was sent on a snipe hunt by his scout troop once - whereupon he (knowing the joke) went up to the cabin roof and took a nap, then read a book. Eventually, the troop leaders got worried about him being gone when it was getting dark, so they sent out all the boys. Once they all left, he climbed down and went inside.
The troop leaders took a look and said nothing, nothing whatsoever. 
Of course, my story isn’t so funny. I got sent on a very elaborate snipe hunt. I was mortified, grew to hate myself, and for the first time knew I was a worthless human being, and began fantasizing about suicide. The fact that my humiliation ocurred in front of my mother probably did not help.
In the theatre, “gel” refers to a colored plastic sheet that you put in front of a lighting fixture to color the light. In the old days, though, it was actually a gelatinous substance, pretty firm but still a little jelly-like. You’d carefully dirty it with a little oil or grease, then instruct a newbie to take it to the sink and wash it off, whereupon it would dissolve right out of his hands, leaving him holding nothing at all. That sort of gel is hard to get a hold of nowadays, so we just tell a guy to focus a fixture with a beam that stops after twenty feet, so it lights the actors but not the back wall.
Yes! Thanks.
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Sweet. 
Off topic, but this reminds me of the time I took my grandfather and uncle to the airport at the end of their visit. Both of these guys knew more about mechanical stuff than I ever will, but when I opened the front hood of my '71 Super Beetle and tossed their suitcases in, they had this shocked “where the fuck is the engine?” look on their faces. And I didn’t imagine it - on the drive, they asked that very question, though I think they omitted the ‘fuck.’ It was in the thought balloon, though.
About age 16, a popular thing was to tell some kid whose parents owned VWs or Corvairs “it’s supposed to freeze tonight. Better remind your dad to check the antifreeze in the Corvair”. Kid would go home, remind Dad, and be embarrassed.
When I taught high school, we’d send annoying kids all over the building to retrieve board stretchers, left-handed post hole diggers, and metric Phillips screwdrivers from some other teacher. There were about six of us involved and we’d send the kid to at least four rooms before we’d send him back to the instigating teacher. Good times.
That is TOO good. I am definitely going to use that if someone ever asks me what music I have playing.
Assuming I knew it was BS, I’d probably go with something like:
“Sir, yes sir, one gallon of prop wash. Sir, did you want the the regular, the low-evaporation formula, or the strawberry flavored, sir?”
Of course, I have no idea how advisable that would be in practice.