Somewhere, I have an odd knife. I don’t remember which one it is, but it might have been a frontier-style skinning knife. Or maybe not. Anyway, someone asked me what it was for.
I said, ‘It’s a fog knife.’
‘A fog knife?’
‘Yeah, you know how people say that “the fog was so thick, you could cut it with a knife”? That’s what it’s for. Say you’re out in your boat and it’re really foggy. You use the fog knife to cut chunks out of the fog so you can find your way back to port.’
I have a tendency to say things like that with a straight face, so it took a second before she was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’
What are your ‘special purpose tools/objects/devices’, in the style of my ‘fog knife’?
When I was in high school I worked in a supermarket as a bagboy, cashier, stock boy and produce helper. There was one particular customer, older guy, who liked to tease us by asking us to find for him, at various times, a shelf stretcher, some snipe oil and some chicken fat. Only after spending a fair amount of time searching we would eventually ask the manager where such-and-such was and he would point out that we had been had by that old guy.
In the Navy, we had hundreds of these, depending on where you worked. You could be asked to get 100 yards of Flight Line, a five gallon drum of Prop Wash, or a stack of “India Delta Ten Tango”(ID10T) forms.
Yeah, we’ve had threads on those before. The posts so far are funny, but they’re not quite what I was getting at in the OP.
The other threads, and the posts so far, are sending people off to find things that don’t exist. What I was trying to get at was something more like [url=“Liar's Club - Wikipedia”]Liar’s Club, where you have an actual, physical object and you make up an outrageous explanation for what it is. For example, I had a knife and I told someone its purpose was to cut fog. Or you might have a humbucker pickup, and explain that in the 1940s and 1950s, laboratory mice had to be euthanised after the experiments were done. Euthanasia back then was done by electrocution, and this small electrical device was an electrocution platform for the purpose of killing the mice. It fit into the bottom of a small plexiglass box, with the wires coming out the bottom into the base. The laboratory mouse would be put into the box, onto the platform, and a switch on the base was thrown to dispatch the poor thing.
Only, the lab mouse electrocution platform is something I’ve just made up as a hypothetical. What I’m looking for is real-life examples that posters have done, like the fog knife.
I worked in a radiator shop years ago. We would give a new guy a broken tool of some kind (it didn’t matter what it was) and tell him it was a brass magnet and to use it to clean the scrap brass out of the test tanks.
I have an absurd item / fog story does that count?
Motorcycles in the AMA superbike series race in the rain (unlike NASCAR cowards.) Race day has about a half dozen races of various classes and abilities. In the early 90’s when my friend was racing the circut the lowest level was called Pro Thunder. It’s a lot of guys with one bike, a few tires and digging for loose change to afford gas to drive across country with, as opposed to the factory race teams with millions of dollars of equipment and well paid riders.
One year at Louden NH, it was drizziling and foggy and generally icky out there. The organizers threw the schedule out the window and put the Pro Thunder guys out there first as guniea pigs to see if they could race at speed in the fog before they let the big boys out.
Needless to say the Pro Thunder guys were not amused. One guy was walking through the pits hollering at the top of his lungs if anybody had a spare set of fog tires for sale.
I guess a sky hook fits the category. Aside from the Sikorsky Skyhook helicopter, it’s a fictional tool. However…
In high school, I was in the school band’s lighting and production crew. The band had a knock-down set of risers to temporarily hold up the band on the gym’s stage. We’d put them up for every home basketball game.
It was made of big sections of heavy plywood, awkwardly carried by two guys. I went to a hardware store, where I used a vise to bend a 3-foot piece of steel rod, making a hook at one end and a handle at the other.
I tried it out, and I showed the band director that one guy, with this tool, could handle a section vertically by himself. He paid me a few bucks to make one for each crew guy.
It didn’t take long for the guys to start calling them sky hooks.
An old friend of mine told of the time when he owned a bakery. It developed into a long, pun-filled story of his search for a way to slice several loaves of bread at once. It came down to buying a scimitar, a four-loaf cleaver.
A Spyderco endura in zdp 189 (blade harder than a file) sharpened 10 degrees either side, able to split a hair strand twice (into three.) Trouble is, it chips easily. I opened a few tinned goods during an outing and ruined the edge.
Some knife buffs claim their blades are so sharp they can split atoms. You can’t split atoms with a knife! At least my Spyderco knives can shave off outer electrons.
I used to have a hula -hoop in my cubicle. I had acquired it from a co-worker who had gotten it from . . . I don’t remember. So, when people asked me about the thing, I just told them that it was the hoop I had to jump through.
Don’t specify the first go round; then whichever one they bring you is the wrong hand. Hopefully, by they time they return with the ‘correct’ one you’re done repairing whatever you were working on.
um… I own one. They’re great. Also have an SAE version.
Instead of a thumb wheel they’re indexed for either metric or SAE. Once set they stay in position unlike a standard adjustable that tends to wander. I also have a locking adjustable.
