being in the military, I know of a few things done to newbies, like getting a box of grid squares, a gallon of prop wash, a leignth of flight line. how about some spark plug fluid? I was able to get a Leutenet to go looking for chem light bateries, a supply SGT looking for some BA-110-ons (balloons)(the stock number for bateries startes with BA-)
anyone out there have some good stories along this line?
I know I’ve posted this somewhere else, but I’m too lazy to go searching for where it was, so here goes:
The was this kid named John Mahoney in my squadron who earned himself the nick-name ‘The Boy in the Bubble.’ He suffered from the worst case of common sense deficit disorder I’d ever seen. In my squadron pranked every newbie fresh from tech school, and it was my turn to prank John. I used a prescription bottle leftover from having my wisdom teeth pulled (all 4 at once! goddamn military dentists!) and filled it with yellow Skittles. The next day at work I made sure John saw me popping my pills. When he asked about them, I explained it was to treat my narcolepsy. ON and off in the day, I would pretend to fall asleep mid-sentence. Everyone in my flight knew what I was up to, so no one acted surprised when I would slump forward and start snoring. Then I just kept doing it to see how far we could string the kid along.
Two months later, John and I were in the office while everyone else was at lunch and I was pretending to sleep so I wouldn’t have to talk to him. The CO walks in and Mahoney doesn’t call attention like you’re supposed to whenever an officer enters the room. So there I am, pretending to be asleep, when I hear the captain’s voice say, “Airman Mahoney, why is Airman Jones asleep?”
While I’m deciding if I should ‘wake up’ and explain or try to keep the joke going, Mahoney says, “Didn’t you know? He’s narcoleptic.” Mahoney then goes on to explain that as long as I take my medication I’m all right. The captain tells me to sit up and wants to see my medication. When he sees it, he smiles and starts to eat my Skittles. He asks how long I’ve been doing this and when I say 2 months the captain smiles even bigger and quickly leaves.
Mahoney was pissed at me for about 3 weeks after that. At least he didn’t try to talk to me to much.
When I worked at a warehouse, which was a huge sprawling one story building, with no basement, we’d get every new guy to ask the supervisor for keys to the elevator.
We had a guy in our BT flight named Cherake. He was a total clue. Any of you out there familiar with the AF will know that a AF Form 341 is a discrepancy report that instructors use during basic training and tech school to denote demerits, infractions, what-have-you, but I felt I needed to explain that to the civies out there.
To any extent, when asked by our TI where his reporting statement was, Cherake mistook him to mean his 341’s to which he replied, “I think I left it in my security drawer.” He still had yet to give a repoting statement. (“Sir/Ma’am, <rank> <name> reports as ordered.”) Needless to say we were all hard-pressed not to bust out laughing at Cherake’s idiocy. Poor kid. The TI told him to go get it, at which point he put the rest of us at ease so that we could laugh.
Cherake couldn’t march to save his life either. Left. Right. It’s not hard.
Friends who worked in the traveling carnival circuit would send new hires looking :
[ul]
[li]light bulb grease (supposedly the only way to get non-working 10-watt bulbs out of the ride scenery)[/li][li]non-threaded screws (more commonly known as nails)[/li][li]tub wash (individual ride cars are known as “tubs” - just needed plain old liquid detergent)[/li][li]a left-handed monkey wrench[/li][li]the Key to the Midway - the carousel (it’s always at the front of the midway).[/li][/ul]
In the graphic arts world, there used to be many mythical objects for which new fish would be sent looking, though many have been made obsolete by technological advances. One that’s still used, AFAIK, is the “paper stretcher” (used to adjust the size of a sheet of paper.
I once convinced a new, very earnest but typographically naive guy that he’d used italic instead of roman periods throughout a 48-page catalog that was overdue. He got so despondent that I had to call that one off myself after practically no time at all.
On a slight tangent, when typographically ignorant customers gave us jobs with impossible or extremely inconvenient deadlines, we’d tell them that we’d run out of e’s and t’s in that font and wouldn’t get more in for a day or two (this was, of course, well into the days of electronic typesetting). It never seemed to prevent them from sending more work our way, so I have to assume that they never figured out what was up.
I worked on military flight simulators – we had ton’s (literally) of unusual electronic’s parts. One of these was an 11,000 Ohm, 1000 Watt resistor. Resistors are inert devices, completely harmless when out of a circuit. It looked like a huge battery, but was basically just a lump of carbon with two big lugs on it. We sometimes used it as a doorstop.
We would ask naive new Naval Aviators to slide it over to us. They would usually be a little gun-shy from all the pranks they’d had pulled on them already, so would ask us “What is it?” before actually touching it. We’d answer, truthfully, “Just 11,000 Ohms, nothing to worry about.” They’d practically fall over trying to get away from it! Great fun.
[hijack] Good true military story.
I worked flightline on F-4’s for com/nav systems. We once had a Captain pilot on the discrepancy log write
“Radio does not work in the official position”
Well, a senior, savvy Com Tech asked him “what official position.”
The pilot responded with “you know the Official position, OFF.”
[/hijack]
Actually, if the ride is near salt water, the bulbs -are- greased, otherwise the corrosion would fuse the works. (I actually worked at a place with greased bulb sockets)
Had a trainmaster call and ask for some L.P. gas for a caboose. Wanted to know if we could put some in a five gallon bucket and bring it to him.
Not being in the military, I know how to spell “Lieutenant.”
We used to have a pair of wired hanging on our door with a sign that said, “Danger, 20,000 Ohms” on it. Laughs all around. Freaked out the stupid people by sticking the wires in our mouth.
The funniest/cruelest one I ever saw:
A long time ago, in another life, I was working on a drilling rig in northern British Columbia. Drilling was finished and we were getting ready to “log” the well. (Logging is the running of a variety of electronic tools the length of the well bore to see what’s down there.) It was a cold and rainy night and I was up in the dog house on the rig with some of the roughnecks. The toolpusher (sort of the manager) came up and asked where one of the labourers was. The missing guy was a kid about sixteen years old - I don’t think he even shaved yet - and this was his first job. One of the roughnecks looked kind of sheepish and said “he’s out in the bush”. “What’s he doing?” “Uh…logging.”
It appears that the kid asked what logging was so they gave him an axe and sent him out in the forest alone on a rainy cold night to cut some logs for logging.
I used to work in technical theater and we had tons of standard ruses for newbies. The classic was to send someone looking for the “cable stretchers”. It worked all the time at our high school auditorium because we only had one or two extension cables. If somebody asked what they looked like we’d supply them with all sorts of improbable descriptions in the Rube Goldberg style. Once, a friend of mine who was new to tech theater was sent on such a mission and he returned after abot half an hour of rummaging through the basement with some old forgotten contraption that actually roughly fit our description. It consisted of a long board with an electric winch at one end and what looked like a crude clamp at the other. Nearly shit myself when I saw him carrying this thing onto the stage saying “I found it!” Nobody can figure out what its original purpose could have been…
Sadly, I cannot take credit for this, but I once watched as a daft young man was convinced of the existence of a machine called the Lunasec which was the oposite of a light–it projected a beam of dark. They had him going for hours, e.g. “You know, the police use Lunasecs in hostage situations. Keeps it dark inside so the hostages have a better chance to escape…” They kept saying more and more patently ludicrous stuff and the dumb bastard never caught on. Man, that was fun.
I had a friend sent to look for “relative bearing grease”.
Since he was one up on that gag, he took the rest of the day off and showed up about a half hour before the end of the shift. When asked, he told everyone he spent all day checking every ship in the harbor, but couldn’t find any.
They also sent the new guy after “water hammers” and “finishing screws.”
Back in my missile maintenance days, we had a new second lieutenant that managed to prank himself. Well, sort of, we did help a bit.
After a week or so of smugly showing off his intimate knowledge of our system, he demanded that we run an unnecessary maintenance inspection on a non-functional guidance package, “for the training value.” We unenthusiastically walked through the regular maintenance steps, calling out each item, and replying in turn as we ran each check. We were all much impressed when he ignored the anomalous readings which had caused the package to be deadlined in the first place, but the real thrill came later.
There is a gyroscope involved in this thing. It has to point in a particular direction (azimuth) when you fire it off, so it will be able to keep track of such niceties as “up” and “north” and such. The position is reported as a positive value between 0, and 360, and in the case of each physical location possible in the particular facility, must be preset. This position is the “Azimuth of the Gyro” which is usually abbreviated as A G. (There are actually two of them, but only one needs to be preset, since “down” is relatively easy to figure out while you are standing still.)
So we are told to “Verify A. G.” We dutifully read the position of the gyro in this object which has been sitting on a shelf for six months, and has been unceremoniously dumped on the table for the “training.” To no ones surprise, it is incorrect. Turns out it is a lower number than it should be. We could turn the whole thing around, if we wanted, and get a better number, but hey, Lt. Dumbass didn’t say anything up until this. “A. G. is low.” Says the surly corporal with the book.
Ok, now comes the fun. Lt. Doofus says: “Well how much do you need?” Not a microsecond of delay, and Corporal Smartguy says, “Bout a quart.” “Put some in.” advises our fearless, not to mention clueless leader. “We would have to requisition it.” Says our maintenance sergeant.
The entire story went on for hours, since we involved the supply sergeant, company clerk, and eventually our actual commanding officer in the exercise of requisition a “Quart of A. G.” for the Missile. Turn out it was classified Secret, so everyone had to draw weapons from the Unit Arms Locker, too. The man became a legend.
Sleep well tonight, your country’s army is on the job.
Tris
I work, albeit not proudly, at Abercrombie & Fitch, which is a retail clothing store nowadays (for the uninformed). We have a fake moosehead hanging behind the cash register in every store. It gets dusty, and we dust it with a rag. But on my second day of work, I was sent to get the “moose brush” out of the supply room.
Apparently they pull that one all the time.
I work in the construction business. Whenever some newbie labourer shows up, we like to send him off looking for a wood-stretcher. The little punk will look forever. I always get a kick out of seeing their faces when they go up to some grizzled old-timer “Do you know where the wood-stretcher is?” It’s an oldie but a goodie.
Excuse me … could you pass the hammer? No, no, the metric one.
I used to work at a fast-food place, the new guys always had to count the straws (individually, not the boxes).
Well, rackensack stole “paper stretcher” from me. But we also had left-handed screwdrivers – and I know at least one poor slob was sent all over the plant looking for a box of commas.
I’m back.
After I had joined the Army, a mechanic sent me to get a pair of pliers. when I brought them back, he said that he wanted the left hand ones. so I put them in my left hand and handed them to him. he didn’t expect that one from a newbie.
anyone go out and check the tire pressure on a set of road wheels on a track? ya know, them steel disks that the tracks run on.