I was 15 and working at my very first job. I was a waitress at a barbecue restaurant. It was probably my second or third day working and the manager came up to me (He was around 20 years old) and told me that I needed to rotate the ice. Puzzled…I looked at him and said, “Rotate the ice?” He said in a serious and convincing voice that before I could leave I would have to rotate the ice…get all the older ice from the bottom of the huge ice machine and put it on top. So we could use the old ice first.
Well… I did want to do a good job and if the manager told me to do something then…
I laid out 8 huge bus tubs and started scooping…
Thirty minutes into this time consuming job the owner of the restaurant walks in and looks at all the ice and says, “What the hell are you doing?”
In junior high, we had to take “Metals.” This is, of course, shop class from hell. I was surrounded on all sides by sharp things that could take off a finger and heavy things that can crush your hand and hot things that could give you third degree burns (or first degree–which is worse?) and things that throw sparks and I was an eleven-year-old girl, for God’s sake.
The teacher informed me that I made a mistake in scratching out a pattern for the little tin box thing we were making, and one of the pieces I’d marked out was too short. I didn’t see an easy way to correct it (since the pieces in the pattern was tightly packed together), and asked what I should do. He told me to go next door and ask the wood shop teacher for the metal stretcher.
Okay, I was dumb to fall for it. But I was freakin’ eleven and I had your basic eleven-year-old’s encyclopedic knowledge of metal-working.
So I go over and ask the wood shop teacher for a metal stretcher. He looks at me funny, but got up, rummaged around in a back room, and came out with this huge, rusty metal thing, covered in dirt and cobwebs. So apparently I wasn’t the first victim of this gag.
I dragged the thing over, but by then it was already time for clean-up. So the NEXT day I had to come in and ask where the “metal stretcher” was. That’s when the teacher, none too gently, let me in on the joke, and told me to get another piece of tin and start over.
The worst thing was that next year I had to take WOOD SHOP. I don’t know if the teacher remembered me, but I was just as handy in woodshop as I was in metals, let me assure you.
When I was a bagboy at a local market, each new employee was messed with in that manner. Some were sent to neighboring businesses to borrow the “bag stretcher”; some were sent to check the price on “dehydrated water”; some were sent to find the “sky hook.” Others just had to go to the neighboring liquor store and borrow a carton of “Regency Light 100s Menthol Slim Cigarettes,” because the market was out of them.
Want to do a Dopefest, South Central Florida Style sometime>?
I would love to get you, Golf Widow, Bear Nenno with my fiance and I, plus any more that wish to attend together. Maybe we can meet at the Four Green Fields, the only thatch roofed pub in America. It is in Tampa, and should be mid-way between us all… except for Michi and Bear, since they live in Tampa proper…
When I was in the Air Farce, I was a medic stationed in the Air Force’s largest hospital at Lackland Air Force Base. When a new person would get stationed there, we would send them down to sterile supply to get a set of “sterile Phalopian (sp?) tubes”. The look on their faces when they came back was priceless.
Me, on the other hand, when I got stationed there, I didn’t fall for it because I had been around the block a couple times. :D:D
I’m sure my namesake would have handled the shop teacher better. I’m picturing a sharp kick in the shin. Or maybe she would have sicced Clark on him. No, on second thought, no one deserves that fate.
When I was a newbie in the Air Force, one of my supervisors asked me to go to supply and get 100 feet of flight line. I asked him if we were running low on left-handed monkey wrenches, too. When I was growing up in Sacra-tomato, California, many of my childhood buddies were Air Force brats, so I’d heard most of the jokes before I came in.
One time I was stationed at Mather AFB (before they closed it down). I was at the flightline supply issue point when a new airman came in and asked for 5 gallons of jetwash. The guy behind the counter didn’t even blink. He just reached down and pulled out a gallon jug of blue fluid. “Sorry, Airman. We only issue jet wash in one-gallon increments. Have your supervisor call me if he needs more.”
As a Customer Service rep. in a packed casino, I was once asked to page that name. I told him to stuff it. Sheesh, I saw the movie Porky’s, not gonna fall for THAT one.
He then said, ‘Sorry about that. Just kidding. The real name is Amanda Leywith.’ Whom I DID page. Several times.
I am a dork, but only when sleep deprived.
While working my 2nd job (hostess) I did both of these on the same day:
(back to hostess stand, talking with my manager)
Manager: (interupts me mid-sentace) “Say, ‘Hi’.”
Me: (confused but playing along) “Hi!”
Manager: “No, you have customers-- turn around and say, ‘Hi.’”
later that same day…
Me: “I have a party of five that says they are too crowded and want to split into two parties of two.”
Manager: “You mean a three and two?”
Me: “No, two parties of two.”
Manager: “Uh, they can’t do that.”
Me: (still oblivious) Okay, I’ll tell them.
Manager: No, they can’t do that.
Me: (finally realizing that 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 5) “Ahh… right… yeah… nevermind.” ::
When I was in the Navy I used to love being asked to get stupid stuff - talk about extended smoke breaks!
“Sure, Chief, I’d be more than happy to sit outside this entire fine Florida evening and watch for the satellite to fly over so you can set up the timing light on the station time clock!” :rolleyes:
At least they weren’t stupid enough to send me out on mail bouy watch at my land-locked comm station.
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