What are the Urban Legends in your profession?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

[QUOTE=Pygmy Rugger]
Bear_Nenno, can you (or somebody else familiar) educate me on this specific point about the GC? I, while not being in the armed forces, have also heard about the GC designating weapons that could be used against infantry, and weapons that were designed to disable equipment, and you couldn’t use certain weapons solely to kill humans. Turns out I was misinformed, but can you elaborate on the Straignt Dope?
[/QUOTE]

Generally speaking, the Geneva Conventions had nothing to do with ammunition or weapons. It had to do with things like treatment of POWs and wounded, civilians on the battlefield, Combatants vs noncombatants, Red Crosses and engagement of medical personnel, and I think stuff about religious personnel as well. Basically it was who can you shoot, and when. It wasn’t what can you shoot them with.

The Hague conventions, much much earlier did deal with ammunition and munitions. But it still did not mention large bullets or machine guns. I always here the “Can’t use an M60 or M240B on a person” or the “Cant use a .50 cal on a person, only the equipment. But you can shoot the equipment the person is wearing and it will go right through and the person is only collateral damage” :rolleyes:

But the Hague convention doesn’t say anything even close. It made illegal the use of expanding hollowpoint and other bullets that are designed to flatten and the practice of dropping bombs from balloons. Nothing at all about the size of the bullet.

62

Chino losing his gun, leaving Maria without a prop for the key “how many people can I kill and still have one bullet left for me?” speech at the end of “West Side Story”. Everyone swears they’ve been involved in a production where it’s happened, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has somewhere along the line.

My personal favorite is an actor (I’ve usually heard it as Ralph Richardson or John Gielgud) playing Richard III and refusing to die during the final swordfight between he and Richmond, leaving the latter actor to force the star offstage and into the arms of restraining stagehands before he can come on and give the line, “The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead!”.

Often told with the whispered exchange between the two actors after things go awry:

RICHMOND: “Die!”
RICHARD III: “You die!”

63

[QUOTE=Beware of Doug]
Weight of the books sinking the building? Or does that originate with patrons, not staff?
[/QUOTE]

This one is always listed as being an urban legend but I went to undergrad at Tulane (New Orleans). The library really is sinking (actually the whole city is sinking but the weight of the books doesn’t help anything). This one always gets listed as false although I am pretty sure it is not in all cases.

64

Why is this banned but dropping them from heavier-than-air craft and missiles are permissible?

65

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Why is this banned but dropping them from heavier-than-air craft and missiles are permissible?
[/QUOTE]

Looking over the dates for The Hague conventions, 1899 and 1907, I suspect it’s because prior to the middle of the second decade in the twentieth century heavier than air craft couldn’t carry a payload large enough to make it a concern.

What I’m not certain about, looking at these, is whether The Hague conventions are still in force, or not. On the one hand, gas artillery shells were pretty clearly banned, by the conventions, but still used in WWI. On the other hand, the Geneva protocol of 1925 to the Hague convention is where the modern banning of chemical seems to reside, and it would seem odd to amend a dead convention. (On a quick read-through, it appears that there were no teeth to The Hague conventions declaration about ‘debilitating gasses’ - they were only banned in conflicts between signatories, and the moment a conflict spread to include non-signatories or any side in the conflict used such, all sides were released from the obligations to avoid the things.)

Looking at the 1899 conventions, it really reads (to me) as a reaction to anything that brought the risks of war to the upper class officers, vice the lowly scum in the front lines.

66

[QUOTE=StarvingButStrong]
Well, the latter ‘legend’ is at least partially true, some colleges require swim tests. Here’s a story from the Boston Globe last year, complete with names and a picture.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe rules have changed since I went to Columbia, but the swim test is not, strictly speaking, a requirement for graduation. Or, at least, there’s nobody at Columbia who has met all requirements for graduation except for passing a swim test.

The requirement is, you have to take 2 semesters of Phys Ed. But before you can enroll in an elective Phys Ed class, you have to take a swim test. If you can swim 3 laps in an Olympic size pool, you can go take tennis, bowling, karate, weightlifting, whatever. But if you flunk, you have to take 2 semesters of swimming lessons.

67

There are several that came to mind.

Somebody was testing a gyro-stabilized laser range finder in the parking lot. It was mounted on a surveyor’s tripod. Some doofus accidentally knocks one of the legs out from under the tripod, which makes the gyro, spinning at 500,000 RPM, very unhappy. It proceeds to bust out of its sturdy metal enclosure, and rips through several nearby trucks, ending up embedded in the engine block of a truck. I’ve heard several variants on this story that detail the death and destruction caused when the bearings fail on an old magnetic drum memory unit.

Whenever I’ve worked around high-pressure hydraulic and/or gas lines, someone always tells a story about some guy who was cut clean in half by a failing line. I’ve heard similar stories about leaks in high-pressure steam pipes. Then there are the stories about people accidentally knocking the valves off of gas cylinders, resulting in the world’s biggest bottle rockets.

I’d tell you some electrician stories, but they’re all true.

68

[QUOTE=mks57]
<snip>
Whenever I’ve worked around high-pressure hydraulic and/or gas lines, someone always tells a story about some guy who was cut clean in half by a failing line. I’ve heard similar stories about leaks in high-pressure steam pipes. Then there are the stories about people accidentally knocking the valves off of gas cylinders, resulting in the world’s biggest bottle rockets…
[/QUOTE]

Wow, I’ve heard both of these, too, and always assumed them to be true! Consider my ignorance fought!

Bear_Nenno: Thanks.

69

[QUOTE=mks57]
Then there are the stories about people accidentally knocking the valves off of gas cylinders, resulting in the world’s biggest bottle rockets.

[/QUOTE]

I used to work at a plant that refilled compressed gas cylinders and the rumor was that the employees at the local steel mill would set the cylinders up on saw horses and use a sledge to knock the valves off, shooting them into the Chesapeake Bay.

70

*Mythbusters * decapitated a few cylinders recently on one of their progams, and the results (with plain ol’ compressed air) were fairly spectacular, with cylinders easily punching holes in brick walls.

As for the high-pressure lines and their abilities to slice people, it certainly is plausible, especially since “pure” (as opposed to abrasive-charged) waterjet cutters use nothing but very high-pressure water to do the cutting. Granted, these are very specialized machines working with ultra-high pressures (in the range of 30,000 - 60,000 psi) but the point is that liquid can cut things.

71

[QUOTE=krisolov]
I used to work at a plant that refilled compressed gas cylinders and the rumor was that the employees at the local steel mill would set the cylinders up on saw horses and use a sledge to knock the valves off, shooting them into the Chesapeake Bay.
[/QUOTE]

One summer job I had was demolishing a Wendy’s restaurant that had somewhat burned down.

We took turns openning up the CO² cylinders and watching them spin madly all over the parking lot. Once you openned the valve all the way and gave them a kick… whoosh-zooom!

Fun times.

72

[QUOTE=Bear_Nenno]
Generally speaking, the Geneva Conventions had nothing to do with ammunition or weapons. It had to do with things like treatment of POWs and wounded, civilians on the battlefield, Combatants vs noncombatants, Red Crosses and engagement of medical personnel, and I think stuff about religious personnel as well. Basically it was who can you shoot, and when. It wasn’t what can you shoot them with.
[/QUOTE]

I recall reading (about twenty years ago, in a comic book) that shotguns were banned from the battlefield for some reason or another. Total bullshit, or what?

(The comic was The 'Nam, and was supposed to be a fairly realistic depiction of the Vietnam war. I was twelve when I read it, so I’m not really in a position to know how accurate that claim was.)

73

[QUOTE=Miller]
I recall reading (about twenty years ago, in a comic book) that shotguns were banned from the battlefield for some reason or another. Total bullshit, or what?

(The comic was The 'Nam, and was supposed to be a fairly realistic depiction of the Vietnam war. I was twelve when I read it, so I’m not really in a position to know how accurate that claim was.)
[/QUOTE]

From my perspective, at least currently they are not as some US troops carry the shotgun as their primary weapon.

Sgt Schwartz

74

That there is a vast (right wing/left wing) media conspiracy.

Oh, sure, your major media networks are probably very right wing or left wing, and your individual papers? Yes. But hooking them all up together? Some smaller local papers barely have the Internet.

Mostly, whoever is writing and then editing the individual stories is who is to blame. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s human nature. My newsroom is roughly half and half, conservative versus liberal. We’ll pretty much run any Letter to the Editor that comes in if it isn’t an e-mail forward, full of slander or swearing, and that I can read enough to type up (hint to those who like to write Letters: you’ll get it published faster if you e-mail it - then the clerk doesn’t have to squint at your tiny cursive handwriting).

Oh, and the “Stop the Presses!” thing - that NEVER happens, unless something totally catastrophic happens. Press time is press time. We’d either issue a mid-day edition with the update or just post it online until the next day.

~Tasha

75

[QUOTE=Maureen]
There is an entire subsection of porn dedicated to nursing.

We don’t perform those types of procedures on patients. Really.
[/QUOTE]

And from what I’ve seen when visiting a hospital, you no longer wear those silly little hats, either! (I mean, what the hell is up with every porn “nurse” wearing that weird hat with a red cross on the front?)

Anyway, I have one from the restaurant business that may or may not be an urban legend:

In many restaurants have these little bowls, about as big around as a soup cup, but very shallow, that are called “monkey dishes”. They’re just the right size to hold two poached eggs, or a small portion of vegetables or applesauce, or whatever.

One chain restaurant I cooked for stipulated that we were to call this bowl a “vegetable dish” instead of “monkey dish”. Why?

Apparently, a customer (an older woman, perhaps non-white) asked her server for a “small bowl”, and the server turned around and loudly asked the cook for a “monkey dish”. On hearing this, the customer assumed that the server had just called her a monkey (I guess she thought that if you give a “doggy dish” to a dog, you’d give a “monkey dish” to a monkey) and was so offended that she sued the restaurant chain. And won. As a result, this restaurant thereafter elected to say “vegetable dish” instead of “monkey dish”.

The reason I doubt the veracity of this story is that it shouldn’t have been difficult to prove in court that “monkey dish” is the commonly accepted terminology for the dish in question, and that the server was not insulting the customer. Simply bring in restaurant employees from a variety of different restaurants, one at a time, hold up the dish and ask, “What do you call this?”

76

As a soccer fan, I never really understood this until a Doper who had worked for the BBC said he got equal amounts of hate mail from Manchester United and Manchester City fans claiming the network was biased against their favorite team. (To whoever that was: thank you!)

77

[QUOTE=Beware of Doug]
Weight of the books sinking the building? Or does that originate with patrons, not staff?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know where this story originates, but when I toured Northwestern as a prospective student in 1977, the university tour guide told us this story as fact.

78

[QUOTE=Phase42]
…
In many restaurants have these little bowls, about as big around as a soup cup, but very shallow, that are called “monkey dishes”. They’re just the right size to hold two poached eggs, or a small portion of vegetables or applesauce, or whatever…
[/QUOTE]

Eat out of this dish and wear a monkey mask to fool those people. :smiley:

Another restaurant myth of sorts, apparently all my friends believe that every single time you make any comment or criticism about the establishment, the cook will spit in your food.

I know it’s happened, but I’ve met people that seem to think it’s ubiquitous.

79

[QUOTE=Miller]
I recall reading (about twenty years ago, in a comic book) that shotguns were banned from the battlefield for some reason or another. Total bullshit, or what?

(The comic was The 'Nam, and was supposed to be a fairly realistic depiction of the Vietnam war. I was twelve when I read it, so I’m not really in a position to know how accurate that claim was.)
[/QUOTE]

Total BS. Shotguns are issued weapons. Mainly for breaching doors, but there’s no rule against shooting a person with one.

80

I guess this one is economics/ biology/ political science.

The UL is that in the famous Prisoners Dilemma tournament run by Axelrod the most complicated but worst performing programme was submitted anonymously - but it was really Henry Kissinger.