Ranger Jeff, are you familiar with Skippy’s List? The guy who compiled most of the list has a website and occasionally posts stories not entirely unlike yours from folks who follow his website. 
At the very least, I think you’d get a lot of entertainment value from the List.
Oh, I forgot to mention this point about the sentence. The BW was ordered confined to the ship for the next 2 weeks. The ship wasn’t due back in ANY port for at least 3 weeks after that. 
I must not have the same sense of humor as most people. At my first job (fast food), I was instructed to retrieve something from the basement. Sounded logical as many buildings in central Ohio have one. Of course there wasn’t one. I pretty much lost all respect for the person sending me on a non-existent errand designed to waste my time and make me look stupid.
It often depends on which side of the prank you’re on.
All right, I’m dense. I’m not getting about half of these.
Flight line?
Prop wash?
tool ID-10-T?
mmm
“Flight line” sounds like it could be referring to a type of rope or cable, or even hose, but is actually an area of an airfield where planes are parked. Similarly, “prop wash” sounds like it might be a cleaning fluid for propellers, but it actually refers to the mass of agitated air produced by the propeller. They’re real things, but not what the clueless newbie might think they are.
Take the dashes out of “ID-10-T” and you have “ID10T”–you’ve sent the newbie to ask for an idiot tool/form/whatever.
First day of military school, I remember being told to go to the boatdocks and get 50 feet of shoreline. Even at 14, I wasn’t that stupid and I just laughed. Having sussed that one, I was able to smoke a few others that I might otherwise have fallen for. Maybe it helps that I grew up on a lake.
My suspicion is even in the (real) service, laughing and saying “Good one” is generally the appropriate response. Taking a smoke break is the brilliant response!
You dodged a bullet by never being in the military, or a number of other professions where taking potshots at newbs is half the fun. 
Right, but you don’t ever need a metric adjustable wrench. At most you need one that’s over a certain size. Why refuse a liter bottle when you have a quart of liquid to carry?
As a joke, it works. At least, it’s not any worse than most of the rest of these pranks.
Because a litre bottle will only hold seven-eighths of a quart.
/Brit
Well, that’s what you get for using those overgrown imperial quarts instead of our good old right-sized American ones. 
I think there is an excellent business opportunity here, packaging “Prop Wash” and “Fallopian Tubes” and all the rest, in nicely made up packages with flashy labels and plausible (if not downright hilarious) “products” inside. The web site selling these things would have a big guide to things you may be asked to fetch, organized by profession. We might even arrange things to come springing out of the package when it’s opened, to startle the person who was trying to mess with our customer.
Don’t forget “Round Toowits”. Maybe some square ones also.
Then you admit that your British litres are inferior to our American quarts? 
:: psst - American quarts are smaller than a litre. ::
Yup. Over here, a quart is forty ounces - what you rebellious colonials choose to call a quart is your own affair.
Meanwhile, that Sea Bat story was f’in epic.
I said “inferior”, not “larger”.