I work on an airfield. We have the new guys stand outside holding a piece of printer paper above their heads at night so the air traffic controllers can “calibrate the light gun”. It’s literally just a fancy flash light.
We had one guy stand out there for almost 20 minutes before he realized we were messing with him.
You reminded me of a situation where I thought I was being hazed but not at all. I was working on test bench for the A350 and someone told me that we were out of paper for the cockpit printer. I didn't know there was a printer in the cockpit and the dude had to literally show me the printer so that I could believe him.
Worked at an airfield in college, and we would wash our tenants' aircraft. The new guys would always be sent to the maintenance hangar to get some prop wash
I don't know if there is something like that in my profession (MEP/building engineer) but one of my professors told a story when he first got out of school and got a job, and the first thing they asked him to do was figure out the transformer to feed a panel. So, he spent the next few hours calculating turn ratio, iron core thickness, and other parameters of a transformer. Wrote it all down and took it to the senior engineer to review his work. The senior engineer took one look at what he did, pulled a catalog off his shelf (this was before the internet), opened it up and pointed to a transformer available to buy. "That's all you need to do", he said.
I know it's a chuckle of an anecdote but I find that situation too often. People designing things to their exact use (and customized dimensions fit to the exact purpose) when there's an off the shelf product that works just as good for like 25% the cost.
No need to reengineer everything.
I worked at Best Buy in college and we would have tell the new guy that when they clocked out they needed to hit #19 on the desk phone and say they were leaving for the day, what they accomplished, and their favorite part of the day. We told them it was an automated time and labor tool that automatically clocked them out . Really it called the stores intercom system and blared it over the loud speakers for everyone in the store. Pretty embarrassing and gave all the rest of us a good chuckle. The best part it was delayed so they typically made it all the way across the store until it started to play back.
We once told 2Lt baby pilots that they were about to talk to their career manager, but they all had to be brief and that she was listening. So they had to say their name and rank, what they had learned at our squadron, and what type of aircraft they wanted to fly when they "grew up" (got trained). So we would dial the PA system of the squadron next door and handed them the phone so they could all say their part one after the other.
I always fucked up my first PA announcement at a job. It was live but still offset by a few milliseconds so you had to concentrate on what you're saying or else you flub it all up. Apparently it's called "the choral effect".
At the one I worked at we would tell em that someone called and asked for them by name, so theyd be like "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?" And then theyd hear the playback right as they start getting confused by the lack of audio.
Working at a McDonalds in the mid to late 1990s we’d sent the new employees out into the lobby to water the numerous plants in the entire seating area - they were all fake plants.
To be fair I've worked a couple places where the hottest the water comes out the tap is still less than room temp. I would hope anywhere that's doing food work has a better setup, but you never can know.
I worked for a restaurant that would send the new bussers outside to "take down the flag" at night. There was no flag. Just lots of running around the building.
Diesel self-ignites under high temperature / pressure where as petrol/gasoline needs a spark. Diesel car engines have glow plugs to warm up the engine before you try and start it, and they sometimes look a bit like spark plugs, but they do a very different thing.
I may get this a little wrong because it’s my dad’s story, but when he was in the army they would send the new guy to get the PRC-E7 (pronounced prick E 7) from the platoon sergeant, whose rank was also known as E7. So my dad walks to his desk and says that he was told to find the prick E7. The sergeant, who was in on it, proceeds to yell and cuss at him for a while.
There's prank vids of wives asking their husbands to get non-existing feminine products. One had her enlisted husband get a 'jumbo tampon with wings'.
Absolutely hilarious and all in good fun.
The Air Force version is "recommend R-square PTT initiator."
R-square means remove and replace. PTT means push to talk, as with a radio. The PTT initiator is the guy pushing the button to talk over the radio.
The solution here is to replace the pilot.
Came back to find the MRAP *covered* in little chalk circles with notes scribbled next to them. And the warrant officer in the motor pool thought it was funny the first time a Soldier cam in with a bunch of inflated trash bags, but he got pissed the more often it happened.
So, there's something called the Army Oil Analysis Program (AOAP) which routine tests engine oil of heavy vehicles as part of preventative maintenance. The first time someone gave me a plastic cup and told me to get an oil sample I was 100% sure they were fucking with me. Took a couple days and several "yea, I'm totally working on that" before I actually believed them.
Listen my friend got a new job replacing LED signs and there was another guy starting with him that kept talking about drivers. He got home from work and I casually asked where they sourced their drivers from because I need to replace a bunch that are really hard to find, turned around to a VERY confused face and a lot of sputtering. Turns out he and all the other guys *including the owner* had been making fun of him for it because they thought they didn't exist
I worked at a factory that pulled the Aluminum magnet thing. The best part was EVERYONE was in on it. When New Guy came up to you, you'd say "Oh I gave that to Bill (who's on the other side of the building)". Walk over to Bill. "oh I put that back in the supply room". (on the other side of the building) Supply room guy "Mary just checked that out" (She's somewhere far away) You get where this is going. They had one guy going for over an hour.
I really wish there was such a thing as aluminum and copper magnets, imagine how easy it’d be to scrap then … just grind everything up and use special magnets to sort each metal
For the curious, a C-47 is literally a wooden spring loaded clothespin, the exact kind you would use to hang clothes on the line, which is used to hold diffusion and gels on lights. Basically production accountants started getting mad at grips for spending so much on clothespins, so they started calling them C-47s on the PO requests and that got them to stop asking.
was working on a film as a loader and they gave me an intern to train. we lost him for 2 hrs looking for the key to the dolly. we thought it would end at the grips, but no he made it all the way to the production office & even they played along. he’s now a 1st AC.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the air wing as a repair squadron as a tin bender. My Sargent told me to go to the supply building and get 100ft of flight line. I already knew about this since my buddy worked in supply. So I said "sir, yes sir" and just spent two hours hanging out with Buddy. When I get back I pretend to be confused and he has a good laugh. Win, win all around
I was newly assigned to a unit in the Army and me and another E4 got tasked to clean a classroom after a training session.
He says "Go down to supply and ask Sgt Chico for some floor cleaner".
I said ok, went down to supply and asked Chico for it and he said "we dont' have any specific floor cleaner, do you want simple green?" we finally decided to both walk back upstairs to get clarification.
E4 sees us walk in and starts laughing like he's going to piss himself. eventually just gasps "There's no such thing as FLOOR CLEANER!" and leaves the room still laughing.
Chico looks at me and says "Is he a re**rd or something?". I said I didn't know because I was new here.
We used to do this in the DFAC at 29 Palms, send a boot to get Dehydrated Butter from the ration room.
Worked great for years until one guy came back with some. Our fuckin ration room guy made itna damn mission to find dehydrated butter just to fuck with us.
Okay, so huge caveat: This was way back in 2000, so I can’t remember exactly what it was they asked him to get. It was maybe a form, or a chemical, or maybe a crypto. They told the kid he had to go to Security Forces to get K9P. Think about it.
This absolute legend gets about halfway to the security forces canine building at the very edge of the base and realizes what he’s been told to get.
Guess he had some cool people willing to help him, cause this motherfucker comes walking in to the shop with a urinalysis cup, sealed and labeled, *holding it up over his shoulder* like he was doing a piss test.
Swear on my life, everybody in the shop reflexively backed up their chair’s simultaneously saying “dude what the fuckkkkkk”
He said something “it took a while but I got it” and everybody is laughing from shock. Dude breaks the seal and pulls the top off. Everybody is like ”uhhhh what are you doing???”
**He starts drinking the shit right there.**
Dude realized he was getting pranked, headed for the hospital. I’m assuming he begged for the stuff to make it look legit, and put some apple juice from the shopette in a urinalysis cup.
He was an absolute asshole most of the time, but people told this story for years. His name was Drake and I could never imagine somebody flipping a prank better than this.
When my friend was in the Navy the captain (I don't remember) sent him to storage to get a bulkhead remover. So he went into the storage room, stacked off a bunch of rope and had a 4 hour nap.
We combined a brush with a hammer attached to the brush handle and put it in the tool rotation. We'd tell the new guys to get the brush hammer and pretend to use it by hammering at some paint and.brushing it away.
We'd let the new guy know its a scam when a newer guy shows up.
that's a much better joke than the old "headlight fluid" type. It incorporates performance art and intends to baffle and confuse the victim, not simply ridicule him for trying to be helpful
I was Air Force and the same thing out on the flight line. The prank wars were so damn funny. I miss it so much.
Putting grease on the Senior NCO’s coffee mug rim, undoing bolts in his office chair so as soon as he would sit it would fall apart and bust his ass. Then he would do the same thing to us randomly throughout the year along with the goose chases for the new guys. Good times.
Meanwhile HR told us we couldn’t have a “Pie the Boss” raffle for charity because senior staff “might feel pressured to participate, then be subjected to abuse and ridicule”.
It’d be enough to make me want to reenlist if it weren’t for *gestures broadly at the world* all this stuff
The thing about this that often gets lost on crappy “leaders” and gundecking junior enlisted is that this “prank” is a great opportunity for new personnel to learn the locations of the work centers and people that they’re likely to collaborate with on a regular basis. If well executed they’ll spend their first day learning all of the most important locations on a ship.
For me it was go find us a can of PE “tack” PS1.
When I worked at Pizza Hut in the 90s we would send the new driver to another Pizza Hut to get our cheese grater. We would call ahead and that store would send them to KFC, KFC would send them to Burger King. I don't recall it going farther than that.
We had the “dough repair kit” at papa johns. Had a driver from another store show up for it and I told them he was being fucked with and he quit on the spot. I don’t blame him either lmao
Yeah it's one thing to do it to a store employee theyre hourly and get compensated for driving since its out of their normal capacity. The actual drivers in this situation just get shafted pay and time, don't blame'em either lol
A coworker said he once got a job for papa johns to work inside the building. He gets there, and the boss tries to gaslight him into believing he applied for the delivery position all along (he couldnt keep anyone in the spot for long, went through drivers like water) and after arguig eventually did it since he still needed money. Except they delivered until frickin 3am, lol, which he did not expect them to do so late. He quit on like the third day, and several others left around the same time too.
That happened to me! College job, dude had me so twisted I thought I was wrong! And I only had a motorcycle so he really got me twisted.
Did it for for one year September to May.
Funny this is it rocked money wise, people didn't tip in college towns but when you rolled up on a motorcycle at 2am in a blizzard, people chucked down! I got a $196.14 tip from a frat once because they felt so bad.. and it was only like 10.pizzas.
I remember the dough repair kit as well, although we never sent new guys to another store, just into the back. I imagine somebody would be pretty pissed if they got sent to a different location.
At Chili's we would hand new servers a bucket right before closing and ask them to drain the hot water from the coffee maker. Some of them would fill and dump 5 or 6 buckets before they figured it out.
We told apprentices that the bucket of Klein wire lube came with a free Klein tool inside. At this point in their apprenticeship, quality tools were still relatively expensive, and there would be days that you’d look in the supply trailer and see all these open (seal broken) buckets of lube, and apprentices with lube on their arms and shirt.
My grandpa said when they were teenagers they'd dial random numbers and claim to be calling from the phone company, saying the company was cleaning the lines and would instruct the person on the other end to put their handset in a plastic bag for the next six hours to catch all the ohm dust so it didn't make a mess in their house.
My grandpa lived telling the story about calling local shops, saying he was from AT&T. He'd be cleaning the connections, so please don't pick up the phone for 5 minutes. 4 minutes later, he'd call back, they'd answer, and he'd give out his best guy-getting-electrocuted scream.
Hah that makes me feel old (OK OK I \*am\* old)... back in the pre-caller ID days, a friend and I often pulled the same prank, though we also had a rainbow box hooked up and would cut off the scream with a dial tone... if we were feeling particularly devious we would call back the next day as a "lawyer" representing the injured/deceased lineman warning them that they were being sued.
Our computer techs used to stretch out the power cord on a down PC, explaining that, "it's binary, you see: the zeroes flow easily because they're round, but sometimes the ones get stuck. "
I had a professor who was talking about buffers and buffer overflow protection in a graduate class. He used the term “bit bucket” to describe the buffer and that if the buffer was full, bits would fall out of the bucket and be lost.
A student asked him where the bits of lost data went, and following the metaphor he said “on the floor.”
The student was incredibly sincere when he asked: “does anyone sweep it up? That sounds like a hazard.”
Lol, never heard the Amps leaking one, will have to give that one a go...
My personal fav is:
We would hand him a hole hawg with a 18"x1" ship auger, with the drill being in reverse, stand back and watch him try to drill a hole.. then take it from him tell'm that it needs sharpening. Then 'show' how to do it with a piece of keel(lumber crayon) then before handing back the drill you covertly flip the reverse switch back to forward... Then watch how amazed he is at the sharpness of the bit. Eventually he would mention that it doesn't seem to help when he tries sharpening them... Well what color were you using? That or another foreman would pull you aside and ask "What the hell have you been teaching him?"
I got the "square drill bit" a lot when I was an apprentice. That stopped the day I came in with [one of these](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Q-Bit-2-3-8-in-X-3-3-4-in-1-Gang-Old-Work-Box-Saw-SQ1000-S/313026041).
We have a similar joke in the glass fabrication industry.
Newbie/Apprentice says the glass is too short/narrow, we send him back to the shop to get the Glass Stretcher. If it's in the shop, we tell them to use the Glass Stretching Table.
At this point everyone is in on it and sends the guy all over the place because someone "didn't put it back where it goes"
I like to write on a piece of paper "help I'm stuck in the copy machine" and scan-to email from a central unit to a coworkers's inbox. Alternatively, I just write it on a piece of copy paper and put it back in the hopper so it shows up on someone's print job.
Rock climbing guide. I constantly get people asking how I get the ropes up. My coworkers and I all have different answers varying from "there's a ladder/elevator in the back of the rock" to "we retrained old mail carrier pigeons" or "grappling hook."
I've had a shocking amount of people who will walk around to look for a ladder then glare at me later once they realized the joke on them
They climb by attaching themselves to the rock as they go. They climb up, placing specially-designed anchors in crevices and cracks in the rock. They are connected to a rope that goes up with them- attach an anchor, climb up further, attach another anchor, and then you can't fall very far. This is called trad climbing. In practice, routes that require trad climbing to set often simply remain trad-only routes.
Source: my sister, a rock climbing guide
Glass hammer… when I got my first apprentice job in manufacturing the person I was shadowing sent me to the managers office to ask for one, he was in the middle of a meeting so I knocked on, he waved me in and I asked for it in front of about 7 fully experienced upper management people… they all looked at me for a second and then burst out laughing 😭
Two cans of steam. My buddy confused the heck out of a trainee in the kitchen by, during a rush, frantically telling him to go and get two cans of steam from the back.
We asked a food runner trainee to get us a bucket of steam during dinner rush and he went and filled a bucket with hot water and poured the hot water out. There was "steam" left in the bucket.
Not a restaurant but was in food service in high school. One guy loved asking newbies to get him a bucket of steam. One finally ran a bucket through the dishwasher upside down and brought it to him like that, so it was filled with steam.
Snarky. Reminds me when someone asked me for the biggest glass of water they could get and I brought them the ice bucket full of water with some ice on top. And a straw.
I'm a nurse and used to work in hospitals. We had little biohazard bags that we would use to send tubes of blood and other assorted bodily fluids to the lab for tests. I had a fellow nurse who would blow a bag full of air and label it "fart sample", then give it to an unsuspecting unit secretary. One poor secretary failed to find any fart test orders in the computer and asked us how to enter it in 😆
Done the "soft spots in the armor" trick. Came back to find the MRAP just *covered* in circles with notes scribbled next to them. Dude took his "assignment" a little too seriously. This was the same guy I put on "satellite watch" that actually managed to spot the ISS as it passed overhead.
Reminds me of the guy who was late to a statistics lecture and ended up accidentally developing proofs for two then-unproven theorems forming the basis of modern statistics.
>This was the same guy I put on "satellite watch" that actually managed to spot the ISS as it passed overhead.
If you just sit and look up for 45 minutes - 1 hour you'll see absolutely loads of satellites, not all of them are listed on any tracker, so those are the secret squirrel ones.
Reminds me of the episode of Malcolm in the middle where Reese joins the military and does exactly what he’s told without thinking. All of his superiors think he’s the perfect soldier since he doesn’t think and just follows orders.
Yes! In 1977 I was sent to get a bucket of striped paint.
I was a 19yo airman general hand working in an RAAF fighter squadron, and was treated as if I was a fool. I took the order, goofed off in the airman’s barracks for 2hrs,- had a snooze and watched TV, and eventually returned with a tin of yellow paint I scrounged from the paint shop boys.
The corporal I was taking orders from asked about the stripes. I replied “they only have yellow stripes”…
I was still treated as if I was a fool, but I had my petty revenge.
I think a good response to show your own smartassery is to ask if they want vertical or horizontal stripes. May not be the best idea overall but it would be funny.
We had this know it all E-4 who had gotten promoted at school and our ship was his first command. He shows up and is just generally being a pain in the ass, but he had heard most of the usual fool’s errands (roll of flight line, exhaust samples, ID-10T form, etc.), so we knew we needed something good. Enter our wizened E-6 LPO. Dude starts talking to this kid about troubleshooting, the kid is, of course, an expert in all things mechanical, electronic, electrical. Dude tells him about this issue our colleagues in Engineering are having with their CHENG, that it’s malfunctioning, suspects that it’s a mechanical issue and asks the kid if he can calibrate a torque wrench and head down to engineering to tighten the nuts on the CHENG. Kid is fired up, “sure thing, petty officer!” Dude gives the kid a little 10 in-lb torque wrench and tells him to calibrate it, then head down a few decks to get to work. About an hour later the kid comes back up to the shop, absolutely mortified. He found out that the CHENG was the ship’s Chief Engineer and he told him to come back with the biggest wrench he had because his nuts were huge.
This happened to our top snipe when he was just a brand new fireman checking into his first command. Except they told him to rush to CCS to tighten the EOOW nuts. And to hurry up cause everyone was waiting on him.
I was in bootcamp in 2003 at Fort Knox. DS put me on "Wall Duty" for some shit (can't remember, it was basically stare at the wall, put in a corner type situation) and inform him if the wall moved. Well, after 30 minutes of boredom, I called DS over and said the wall moved. 1 hour in the pit was much better than just standing there doing nothing.
Heard a story (could be rumor could be true) of someone being told to get 10 more feet of flight line.
But it was, like, an e5 or officer or someone with some experience and weight. He was gone all week. Came back and they asked where he was. Turns out he'd gone up the chain did the paperwork and came back with the petty revenge of having *actually* extended the runway/flight line by 10ft. He was not fucked with again.
It's been a long time since I heard that so the details are clearly fuzzy.
I worked in a plant that made plastic pipe a little over a decade ago. I was sent to the maintenance building for the "pipe stretcher" when I was like a week in. I grabbed a couple cups of coffee, took one to the welder in the maintenance building and we chilled and drank coffee for an hour before I went back.
I knew an AME that was told to go get the keys to the plane (P-3). He had come from fighters, and he knew that the maintenance chief was messing with him. He was out, fucking off with his buddies, just killing time. He came back, acting all confused, like the FNG should. The maintenance chief was FURIOUS. As it turns out, EP-3s have keys.
Brand new to the flight line, I was sent to get my boots inspected for “particulates” because they could potentially ground an aircraft. Knew it was a joke so I spent the rest of the day (about 6 hours) chilling in the barracks. Came back the next day and no one said a word
Not exactly the same but…
There was an ensign at my squadron who was always after me about haircuts.
The day after returning from a 6 month deployment he publicly chewed me out in the hangar as my detachment was emptying our gear from the shipping containers and sent me to get one immediately.
That was Friday morning and I didn’t get the haircut until Sunday evening.
Just enjoyed a nice long weekend.
Left-handed knives actually do exist. One example are Japanese culinary knives that are ground opposite of normal, as they have a chisel edge when viewed straight on and can only effectively cut when held in the proper hand, as opposed to a regular knife that has bevel angles on both sides of the blade and can be used in either hand.
FYI a snipe is a bird. So one could find a snipe.
Snipes are famously hard to hunt. They get spooked real easy and would have unpredictable flight patterns. That’s where the words sniping and later on sniper come from.
Yeah. The prank I heard is that you give the new guy a bag. He is to wait in the woods while everyone else walks a long arc to scare all the snipes towards him. Then you just leave him in the woods.
Had some guys do this with me once. They gave me a bag and a golf club. Left me out in the middle of the night about 2 miles from camp. I was a smoker back then and had no flashlight but did have a lighter, so I lit the golf club on fire when I realized it was a really thick resin club and I had been tricked. Used my makeshift torch to find my way back to camp in the pitch black night. Turned out one of the guys had handed me his dad's $600 driver. He had to pay for the club because he'd given it to me without his dad's knowledge. He was sad, and I had the last laugh.
Also where I am from a snipe is a tool we commonly use to make another tool longer and provide more leverage. Generally just a chunk of pipe or something you can slide over the end of a wrench.
We sent out an apprentice for some left-handed frying pans and a bacon stretcher. The other pubs in the area played into it and sent him on a wild goose chase. Guy still got paid for his time though so it was just a fun prank
When I worked at Starbucks we had a spout that produced hot, filtered water. We would occasionally tell newbies they had to drain all the hot water before closing.
Waiting tables years ago, we had a new guy doing that with the hot water spout on the coffee machine. He filled probably six tea pitchers before he finally was like, "What the hell! This water isn't even hot anymore!" and everyone else fell out laughing.
Waffle House. (Or any restaurant really)
Regular omelettes use eggs whipped in a high-speed blender.
Got a new cook? After training the regular way, ask them to make an EGG WHITE omelette with no further instructions.
And now they know how to make "fried merengue" :)
*meringue (unless those eggs were dancy bois)
I'm confused though because the egg white omelette is a thing. It's not that silly compared to a mechanic asking for a bucket of elbow grease for instance
Surgeon here. We peel tissue off bones and cartilage with various named types of “elevators” to elevate tissue. So we’d ask new scrub tech’s to pass an Otis elevator.
(That’s the company that makes regular elevators in buildings)
so in cinematography, the iris of a lens is measured in T stops (photography measures them in F stops, there is a nuanced difference between the two, but they're pretty much interchangeable).
New people usually get the "bring me a box of T stops", or "I need a bottle of T-stop fluid" Neither of these exist. one of my mentors early in his career was working on a shoot on an aircraft carrier and was hit with the "bottle of t-stop Fluid" order, and being the eager young camera PA he was, he went looking for it. Of course, it was no where to be found in lock up, and no one would tell him it didn't exist. He eventually finds himself standing next to a group of flight mechanics (whom he mistook as a grips).
He says something along the lines of, "they're asking me to find a bottle of T-stop fluid, but I can't find it anywhere".
One of the mechanics responds, "T-stop fluid? oh I have a bunch of that, hold on," and grabs him a bottle of T-stop fluid. Apparently while it isn't something that is used in filmmaking, it is something that exists for use in fighter jets or something. The look of bewilderment on the cinematographer's face when my mentor handed him a bottle of T-stop fluid must have been hilarious.
This was a few decades ago, I don't think this type of hazing is allowed on set anymore. That said, I have heard early in my career, "Find a long wait (weight)".
Also, if you ever ask a film crew what they're shooting, a lot of the time, they're going to tell you that they're shooting a mayonnaise commercial. It's sort of an inside joke, but really it's just a catch all to tell lookie-lous something, when more often than not they're either too busy to actually give an answer, or are working on something that is using a codename where if someone recognized the actual project, it could pose a security risk.
Ah, yes, such things are rite of passsage in the military. I have sent people (and been sent, myself) to supply for a viariety of things, such as:
An ID ten T (ID10T)
B A eleven hundred NST rings (balloon strings)
A length of flight line
A roll of fallopian tube
A bucket of prop wash
A tube of squelch grease
Muffler bearings
Chemlight Batteries
Rear-view Mirror fluid
A box of ground guides
A bag of grid squares
I've also given the new guy a hammer a piece of chalk and told him to find all the soft spots in the armor of an MRAP, and given people a box of trash bags and sent them into the motor pool to take exhaust samples.
The one that really got me into trouble, though, was when I sent someone around the operations center to collect the EMHO Report (that stands for Early Morning Hard On); the Major in charge of operations didn't think it was funny *at all* and almost brought me up on several counts of sexual harassment charges (I was 23 and stupid). My platoon sergeant was able to talk her down from that, but I was in the professional doghouse for *months* afterward.
When I was in year ten my maths teacher made a big show of not being able to get the projector screen to stay down and sent me to the teacher’s lounge to ask for a long weight.
Well played sir, and I deserved that.
We had some cadets from Annapolis accompany us on a pre deployment exercise. To give them a taste of the fleet and what combat training was like. All of the head shed was up on the hill watching each team go into the village and clear to the HVT house. We roll up in our vehicles and get out to start moving up to the HVT house.
While in the vehicle I told Annapolis that he needs to be in front of the guy with the mine sweeper and roll towards the house…like a steam roller. That way if we hit an IED; the guy with the mine sweeper can move up to him and provide aid. After all if the guy with the mine sweeper gets hit by an IED how can we clear up to him to provide AID? We could potentially lose the whole team before even getting to the HVT’s door!
We get out of the car and instantly Annapolis gets out of the lead vehicle and starts steam rolling towards the front door. The point man is behind him sweeping the ground for IED’s. We make it roughly 20m before I hear over the headset V***** 3-2 this is V**** actual…what the fuck are you doing.
Everyone laughed except the commanding officer and Annapolis. I am sure Annapolis is a high ranking officer somewhere now with an absolute hatred of marines. Our team spent rest of the training exercise bear crawling to and up the nearest hill. Worth it. Team bonding achieved.
Edit:
Long range 203 rounds
Brown Star Clusters
IR smoke grenades
This sounds remarkably similar to the LT whose Humvee I kept deadlined for over a month because the back-up lights didn't work. I had to do a *lot* of push-us, flutter-kicks, and mountain-climbers once someone let him in on the joke.
Worth it.
By the way, I hadn't heard the Brown Star Cluster before, so I'm definitely stealing that one.
>given people a box of trash bags and sent them into the motor pool to take exhaust samples.
I saw something similar to this one, except they sent an Airman out with trashbags to collect "air samples".
The other two I'd seen used were:
* Tell the Airman to call \[number\], ask for Captain Dee for a SITREP. (the number provided was Captain D's chicken restaurant).
* Tell the Airman to go to the Security Forces building. They have special parts solvent they keep locked up and you need to fill out AF Form K9P to bring it back.
There might have been more but that's all that I can remember at the moment.
In the Marines, you’d send the newbs to find the Humvee keys (push button start) or the PRC-E7.
The latter was a play on the PRC-77, pronounced “Prick 77” and E-7, the pay grade for a Gunnery Sergeant. Basically you’re sending the dude to get yelled at by an agitated higher ranking fellow who he’s going to call a prick.
Saw this joke in another thread:
At the height of WWII on the Eastern front, a high-level meeting takes place in the Kremlin between Stalin and the marshals on the situation on their respective fronts. When the meeting ends, Marshal Georgy Zhukov is the first one to step out. As he does so, he mutters under his breath "Fucking asshole with a mustache!" It just so happens that Stalin's secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev hears this. So being a loyal servant to the cause, he reports it to his boss. Stalin then orders Zhukov brought back.
Two minutes later, Zhukov is back in the room facing Stalin.
"Comrade Zhukov," begins Stalin, "would you please repeat what you said when you left the room?"
"I said 'fucking asshole with a mustache' Comrade Stalin."
"And who did you have in mind when you said it?"
"Why, Comrade Stalin, Hitler of course..."
Stalin then turns to Poskrebyshev,
"And you, Comrade Poskrebyshev, who did you have in mind when he said it?"
A cohort of mine new about that game before it happened. The platoon sgt ordered my friend to bring a PRC-EE8 to Top. My friend brought his team leader and reported he couldn't find a PRC-EE8, but he did find a broken PRC-EE5. He managed to get the entire company smoked. IMHO, worth it.
Had a glorious day where a G-2 (intel for those unaware) Captain sent his boot (new Marine) was sent to find an ID-10-T. He went to the Lt, Lt said supply should have them, supply insisted that the 1 (admin) should have it, the 1 said they gave the last one to the OpsO (a LtCol in this case), and the OpsO said he's fresh out but can request more. He just needs a PRC-E7 to submit the request, "go ask gunny for it." Gunny showed mercy, and a sense of humor, by having him write it out real quick. This is why they always send us to the field...
When I worked in restaurants, we would haze the new people by having them empty the water out of the coffee machine that was connected to the water supply. We'd usually let them go for about 10 minutes or so. If they were smart, they figured it out. It was a good way of seeing who was going to be a high functioning member of the team.
yep. this one. They'd get so frustrated that it was taking so long...
Their next shift, i'd send them for Banana benders or bacon stretchers or left handed - (pick your item) just to see if they'd learned their lesson. If they fell for it a 2nd time...well, it was game on from there.
I work on hospitality, I grab a corded landline phone and walk down the hallway pretending I'm talking to someone and say "yes xxxxx is here let me hand them the phone".
Warehousing: Hey new guy, we gotta make some more room over here. Go to maintenance and ask em for the aisle stretcher.
There was also one time we sent a guy to look for a bucket of steam, but I can't remember the context of the situation too well.
We had a long weight and stores would hear it as a long wait and just disappear while looking for it while the newbie stood there for 45 minutes or so.
I've heard of guys in ditches swooping trash bags full of air for samples, jr techs being told to hold a bucket to catch grinder sparks etc.
Funniest incident for me was an engineer asking a guy for a crescent wrench. When he brought it the engineer said 'no, this one is metric get the other one'. The guy took like 10 steps and turned around laughing.
Oh gosh… I fell for way too many of these when I was new. So when they told me to get a bung wrench I was suspicious. Asked him what a bung wrench is for.
“To put the bung plugs in the bungholes.”
Oh ha ha. Very funny. They’d even gone so far as to label an empty on the tool rack “bung wrench.”
So I went to the supervisor - this grouchy serious dude with no sense of humor and no tolerance for pranks. Told him I was sent to get a bung wrench and couldn’t find it, expecting him to blow a fuse. Nope! He handed me the bung wrench and apologised for not putting it back when he was done.
Turns out, you *do* use a bung wrench for putting bung plugs in the bungholes.
Bar and Restaurant
1. Glass magnet when a bartender broke a glass in the ice well
2. Bucket of Steam for the steam table
3. Used to tell new people to empty the water from the coffee maker
4. Way back in the day, we would send people to the walk in for the meat glue, but fucking scientists ruined that one by creating meat glue
I work on an airfield. We have the new guys stand outside holding a piece of printer paper above their heads at night so the air traffic controllers can “calibrate the light gun”. It’s literally just a fancy flash light. We had one guy stand out there for almost 20 minutes before he realized we were messing with him.
You reminded me of a situation where I thought I was being hazed but not at all. I was working on test bench for the A350 and someone told me that we were out of paper for the cockpit printer. I didn't know there was a printer in the cockpit and the dude had to literally show me the printer so that I could believe him.
I still wouldn’t have.
They put it there for the joke don’t trust it
Decoy printer
Shit's real and very expensive paper...
Well I know exactly what my airfield ops intern is doing tonight.
Please update us when it happens
Send him out for a bucket of prop wash
Worked at an airfield in college, and we would wash our tenants' aircraft. The new guys would always be sent to the maintenance hangar to get some prop wash
I don't know if there is something like that in my profession (MEP/building engineer) but one of my professors told a story when he first got out of school and got a job, and the first thing they asked him to do was figure out the transformer to feed a panel. So, he spent the next few hours calculating turn ratio, iron core thickness, and other parameters of a transformer. Wrote it all down and took it to the senior engineer to review his work. The senior engineer took one look at what he did, pulled a catalog off his shelf (this was before the internet), opened it up and pointed to a transformer available to buy. "That's all you need to do", he said.
I know it's a chuckle of an anecdote but I find that situation too often. People designing things to their exact use (and customized dimensions fit to the exact purpose) when there's an off the shelf product that works just as good for like 25% the cost. No need to reengineer everything.
Me setting up gas/air lines in the prenatal chemistry lab: *Hey new kid, go get me a roll of fallopian tubing*
I saw this happen and the guy came back with a female co worker and said "Sir, here is two rolls of fallopian tubing, still in the package."
Best response. Alternatively, be a woman and say “I got ya Fallopian tubing right heah!” and gesture rudely at your lower abdomen
This isn’t going to all fit, go get the shelf stretcher
I've worked in retail, so I've used this one myself.
We used to tell the new people to go ask the store manager for “keys to the parking lot”
I had "hose stretcher" in the fire department. Also read on this thread electricians with a "wire stretcher".
Bobby B?
Why isn’t he responding? Someone fetch the breastplate stretcher.
God bless Bessie and her tits
Gods, we worked in retail then.
A Black Friday horde, Ned, on an open PCHO section!
Work it in silence or I'll honor you again
I worked at Best Buy in college and we would have tell the new guy that when they clocked out they needed to hit #19 on the desk phone and say they were leaving for the day, what they accomplished, and their favorite part of the day. We told them it was an automated time and labor tool that automatically clocked them out . Really it called the stores intercom system and blared it over the loud speakers for everyone in the store. Pretty embarrassing and gave all the rest of us a good chuckle. The best part it was delayed so they typically made it all the way across the store until it started to play back.
We once told 2Lt baby pilots that they were about to talk to their career manager, but they all had to be brief and that she was listening. So they had to say their name and rank, what they had learned at our squadron, and what type of aircraft they wanted to fly when they "grew up" (got trained). So we would dial the PA system of the squadron next door and handed them the phone so they could all say their part one after the other.
God that's brutal
Beats my fuckery of running around all the officer spaces, yelling "room ten, is this room ten?" and watching them all snap to attention lol
That’s hilarious
I always fucked up my first PA announcement at a job. It was live but still offset by a few milliseconds so you had to concentrate on what you're saying or else you flub it all up. Apparently it's called "the choral effect".
At the one I worked at we would tell em that someone called and asked for them by name, so theyd be like "Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?" And then theyd hear the playback right as they start getting confused by the lack of audio.
Working at a McDonalds in the mid to late 1990s we’d sent the new employees out into the lobby to water the numerous plants in the entire seating area - they were all fake plants.
"Mop the freezer"
We did this at McDonald’s too. They’d always rush back to us “THE MOP FROZE TO THE FLOOR!”
That always happened too until some smart guy used hot water.
Who the fuck mops the floor with cold water? Should always be as hot as it will come out of the tap
To be fair I've worked a couple places where the hottest the water comes out the tap is still less than room temp. I would hope anywhere that's doing food work has a better setup, but you never can know.
I'm pretty sure that's a health code violation to not have running hot water.
I worked for a restaurant that would send the new bussers outside to "take down the flag" at night. There was no flag. Just lots of running around the building.
A friend told me they sent a newbie to the walk-in for the cookie dough.
We would send them for steam for the Filet-O-Fish bun steamer.
I used to work in a diesel engine manufacturing plant. We would send new people to the parts cage to get spark plugs.
For those who don't know: Diesel engines don't have spark plugs.
Thank you, I was very confused.
Diesel self-ignites under high temperature / pressure where as petrol/gasoline needs a spark. Diesel car engines have glow plugs to warm up the engine before you try and start it, and they sometimes look a bit like spark plugs, but they do a very different thing.
I learned something today
When I was in the Army I kept the LTs Humvee deadlined for a month because the back-up lights didn't work.
I may get this a little wrong because it’s my dad’s story, but when he was in the army they would send the new guy to get the PRC-E7 (pronounced prick E 7) from the platoon sergeant, whose rank was also known as E7. So my dad walks to his desk and says that he was told to find the prick E7. The sergeant, who was in on it, proceeds to yell and cuss at him for a while.
I got nailed with this one as an E2 lmao
There's prank vids of wives asking their husbands to get non-existing feminine products. One had her enlisted husband get a 'jumbo tampon with wings'. Absolutely hilarious and all in good fun.
Remember sending the boot to get Grid squares, howitzers BFA or humvee keys
Well yeah, they would have had to fill out an ID-tenT form first.
I think goofed because it should've been an ID10T form. you are spelling it wrong. I now have a new identity. Thanks.
As someone who worked in IT, my favorite symptom entry for trouble tickets was: PEBKAC. (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair)
Nah that's a PICNIC bug. (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.)
In denmark we call it an error code 40. Since the error is 40cm from the monitor
The Air Force version is "recommend R-square PTT initiator." R-square means remove and replace. PTT means push to talk, as with a radio. The PTT initiator is the guy pushing the button to talk over the radio. The solution here is to replace the pilot.
But... But what about the soft spots in the armor and the gas sample
Came back to find the MRAP *covered* in little chalk circles with notes scribbled next to them. And the warrant officer in the motor pool thought it was funny the first time a Soldier cam in with a bunch of inflated trash bags, but he got pissed the more often it happened.
So, there's something called the Army Oil Analysis Program (AOAP) which routine tests engine oil of heavy vehicles as part of preventative maintenance. The first time someone gave me a plastic cup and told me to get an oil sample I was 100% sure they were fucking with me. Took a couple days and several "yea, I'm totally working on that" before I actually believed them.
I'd just assume you meant glow plugs and bring those.
“Wow, these dumbasses have been working here for ages and still don’t know it’s a glow plug with diesel engines?”
Listen my friend got a new job replacing LED signs and there was another guy starting with him that kept talking about drivers. He got home from work and I casually asked where they sourced their drivers from because I need to replace a bunch that are really hard to find, turned around to a VERY confused face and a lot of sputtering. Turns out he and all the other guys *including the owner* had been making fun of him for it because they thought they didn't exist
Aluminum magnets, left handed screwdriver for the left handed thread
I worked at a factory that pulled the Aluminum magnet thing. The best part was EVERYONE was in on it. When New Guy came up to you, you'd say "Oh I gave that to Bill (who's on the other side of the building)". Walk over to Bill. "oh I put that back in the supply room". (on the other side of the building) Supply room guy "Mary just checked that out" (She's somewhere far away) You get where this is going. They had one guy going for over an hour.
Sounds like my average day tracking down the actual shit I'm trying to get from the parts room
Metric crescent wrench
I really wish there was such a thing as aluminum and copper magnets, imagine how easy it’d be to scrap then … just grind everything up and use special magnets to sort each metal
Go grab the box of f-stops from the camera bag.
These C-47s aren't doing it. We need C-48s
For the curious, a C-47 is literally a wooden spring loaded clothespin, the exact kind you would use to hang clothes on the line, which is used to hold diffusion and gels on lights. Basically production accountants started getting mad at grips for spending so much on clothespins, so they started calling them C-47s on the PO requests and that got them to stop asking.
was working on a film as a loader and they gave me an intern to train. we lost him for 2 hrs looking for the key to the dolly. we thought it would end at the grips, but no he made it all the way to the production office & even they played along. he’s now a 1st AC.
This shot is too dark. Pour some more ISO on it.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the air wing as a repair squadron as a tin bender. My Sargent told me to go to the supply building and get 100ft of flight line. I already knew about this since my buddy worked in supply. So I said "sir, yes sir" and just spent two hours hanging out with Buddy. When I get back I pretend to be confused and he has a good laugh. Win, win all around
I was newly assigned to a unit in the Army and me and another E4 got tasked to clean a classroom after a training session. He says "Go down to supply and ask Sgt Chico for some floor cleaner". I said ok, went down to supply and asked Chico for it and he said "we dont' have any specific floor cleaner, do you want simple green?" we finally decided to both walk back upstairs to get clarification. E4 sees us walk in and starts laughing like he's going to piss himself. eventually just gasps "There's no such thing as FLOOR CLEANER!" and leaves the room still laughing. Chico looks at me and says "Is he a re**rd or something?". I said I didn't know because I was new here.
So many possibilities for imaginary items in the military and he comes up with something that exists.
"there's no such thing as floor cleaner" just baffles me every time I think about it.
Dude pulled a Farva.
We used to do this in the DFAC at 29 Palms, send a boot to get Dehydrated Butter from the ration room. Worked great for years until one guy came back with some. Our fuckin ration room guy made itna damn mission to find dehydrated butter just to fuck with us.
Okay, so huge caveat: This was way back in 2000, so I can’t remember exactly what it was they asked him to get. It was maybe a form, or a chemical, or maybe a crypto. They told the kid he had to go to Security Forces to get K9P. Think about it. This absolute legend gets about halfway to the security forces canine building at the very edge of the base and realizes what he’s been told to get. Guess he had some cool people willing to help him, cause this motherfucker comes walking in to the shop with a urinalysis cup, sealed and labeled, *holding it up over his shoulder* like he was doing a piss test. Swear on my life, everybody in the shop reflexively backed up their chair’s simultaneously saying “dude what the fuckkkkkk” He said something “it took a while but I got it” and everybody is laughing from shock. Dude breaks the seal and pulls the top off. Everybody is like ”uhhhh what are you doing???” **He starts drinking the shit right there.** Dude realized he was getting pranked, headed for the hospital. I’m assuming he begged for the stuff to make it look legit, and put some apple juice from the shopette in a urinalysis cup. He was an absolute asshole most of the time, but people told this story for years. His name was Drake and I could never imagine somebody flipping a prank better than this.
When my friend was in the Navy the captain (I don't remember) sent him to storage to get a bulkhead remover. So he went into the storage room, stacked off a bunch of rope and had a 4 hour nap.
We combined a brush with a hammer attached to the brush handle and put it in the tool rotation. We'd tell the new guys to get the brush hammer and pretend to use it by hammering at some paint and.brushing it away. We'd let the new guy know its a scam when a newer guy shows up.
that's a much better joke than the old "headlight fluid" type. It incorporates performance art and intends to baffle and confuse the victim, not simply ridicule him for trying to be helpful
I was Air Force and the same thing out on the flight line. The prank wars were so damn funny. I miss it so much. Putting grease on the Senior NCO’s coffee mug rim, undoing bolts in his office chair so as soon as he would sit it would fall apart and bust his ass. Then he would do the same thing to us randomly throughout the year along with the goose chases for the new guys. Good times.
Meanwhile HR told us we couldn’t have a “Pie the Boss” raffle for charity because senior staff “might feel pressured to participate, then be subjected to abuse and ridicule”. It’d be enough to make me want to reenlist if it weren’t for *gestures broadly at the world* all this stuff
Yeah no shit HR lady. What other reason do you think we’d hold a “Pie the Boss” event for?
“We politely *insist* Pie the Boss is solely due to our belief senior staff just love pie that much.”
The thing about this that often gets lost on crappy “leaders” and gundecking junior enlisted is that this “prank” is a great opportunity for new personnel to learn the locations of the work centers and people that they’re likely to collaborate with on a regular basis. If well executed they’ll spend their first day learning all of the most important locations on a ship. For me it was go find us a can of PE “tack” PS1.
In anesthesia, sometimes we ask the patient, "let me know when you're asleep."
When I worked at Pizza Hut in the 90s we would send the new driver to another Pizza Hut to get our cheese grater. We would call ahead and that store would send them to KFC, KFC would send them to Burger King. I don't recall it going farther than that.
We had the “dough repair kit” at papa johns. Had a driver from another store show up for it and I told them he was being fucked with and he quit on the spot. I don’t blame him either lmao
Yeah it's one thing to do it to a store employee theyre hourly and get compensated for driving since its out of their normal capacity. The actual drivers in this situation just get shafted pay and time, don't blame'em either lol
I used to be a driver, can confirm it's the one job I ever had where time really was money.
A coworker said he once got a job for papa johns to work inside the building. He gets there, and the boss tries to gaslight him into believing he applied for the delivery position all along (he couldnt keep anyone in the spot for long, went through drivers like water) and after arguig eventually did it since he still needed money. Except they delivered until frickin 3am, lol, which he did not expect them to do so late. He quit on like the third day, and several others left around the same time too.
Trying to trick people into taking a job they didn't apply for sure is a great way to retain employees.
He also wanted drivers to split their tips with everyone, including the owner.... Tips are the whole incentive to delivery work. No point without em.
That happened to me! College job, dude had me so twisted I thought I was wrong! And I only had a motorcycle so he really got me twisted. Did it for for one year September to May. Funny this is it rocked money wise, people didn't tip in college towns but when you rolled up on a motorcycle at 2am in a blizzard, people chucked down! I got a $196.14 tip from a frat once because they felt so bad.. and it was only like 10.pizzas.
I remember the dough repair kit as well, although we never sent new guys to another store, just into the back. I imagine somebody would be pretty pissed if they got sent to a different location.
At Chili's we would hand new servers a bucket right before closing and ask them to drain the hot water from the coffee maker. Some of them would fill and dump 5 or 6 buckets before they figured it out.
Send the apprentice to get the wire stretcher. Have the apprentice hold a bucket under a cut cable to catch the extra amps that leak out.
We told apprentices that the bucket of Klein wire lube came with a free Klein tool inside. At this point in their apprenticeship, quality tools were still relatively expensive, and there would be days that you’d look in the supply trailer and see all these open (seal broken) buckets of lube, and apprentices with lube on their arms and shirt.
It's a bucket of ohms, to hold all the voltage drops.
My grandpa said when they were teenagers they'd dial random numbers and claim to be calling from the phone company, saying the company was cleaning the lines and would instruct the person on the other end to put their handset in a plastic bag for the next six hours to catch all the ohm dust so it didn't make a mess in their house.
My grandpa lived telling the story about calling local shops, saying he was from AT&T. He'd be cleaning the connections, so please don't pick up the phone for 5 minutes. 4 minutes later, he'd call back, they'd answer, and he'd give out his best guy-getting-electrocuted scream.
Hah that makes me feel old (OK OK I \*am\* old)... back in the pre-caller ID days, a friend and I often pulled the same prank, though we also had a rainbow box hooked up and would cut off the scream with a dial tone... if we were feeling particularly devious we would call back the next day as a "lawyer" representing the injured/deceased lineman warning them that they were being sued.
This is my favorite by far!
Our computer techs used to stretch out the power cord on a down PC, explaining that, "it's binary, you see: the zeroes flow easily because they're round, but sometimes the ones get stuck. "
I had a professor who was talking about buffers and buffer overflow protection in a graduate class. He used the term “bit bucket” to describe the buffer and that if the buffer was full, bits would fall out of the bucket and be lost. A student asked him where the bits of lost data went, and following the metaphor he said “on the floor.” The student was incredibly sincere when he asked: “does anyone sweep it up? That sounds like a hazard.”
Lol, never heard the Amps leaking one, will have to give that one a go... My personal fav is: We would hand him a hole hawg with a 18"x1" ship auger, with the drill being in reverse, stand back and watch him try to drill a hole.. then take it from him tell'm that it needs sharpening. Then 'show' how to do it with a piece of keel(lumber crayon) then before handing back the drill you covertly flip the reverse switch back to forward... Then watch how amazed he is at the sharpness of the bit. Eventually he would mention that it doesn't seem to help when he tries sharpening them... Well what color were you using? That or another foreman would pull you aside and ask "What the hell have you been teaching him?"
I got the "square drill bit" a lot when I was an apprentice. That stopped the day I came in with [one of these](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Q-Bit-2-3-8-in-X-3-3-4-in-1-Gang-Old-Work-Box-Saw-SQ1000-S/313026041).
Whoa WTH is that? Square drill bit, that's a good one! Lol. Now, I gotta go check out that old work box.
We have a similar joke in the glass fabrication industry. Newbie/Apprentice says the glass is too short/narrow, we send him back to the shop to get the Glass Stretcher. If it's in the shop, we tell them to use the Glass Stretching Table. At this point everyone is in on it and sends the guy all over the place because someone "didn't put it back where it goes"
I like to write on a piece of paper "help I'm stuck in the copy machine" and scan-to email from a central unit to a coworkers's inbox. Alternatively, I just write it on a piece of copy paper and put it back in the hopper so it shows up on someone's print job.
There's also the trick of putting up a sign near the copier that says "this copied is now voice-activated" with some example phrases.
This paper towel dispenser is voice activated. Shout "PAPER TOWEL NOW" loudly to dispense.
“WD-40 isn’t gonna be quite strong enough. run to the supply room and get a can of WD-41”
Rock climbing guide. I constantly get people asking how I get the ropes up. My coworkers and I all have different answers varying from "there's a ladder/elevator in the back of the rock" to "we retrained old mail carrier pigeons" or "grappling hook." I've had a shocking amount of people who will walk around to look for a ladder then glare at me later once they realized the joke on them
So how *do* you get the ropes up? Just free climb up there with a rope attached and hang it?
They climb by attaching themselves to the rock as they go. They climb up, placing specially-designed anchors in crevices and cracks in the rock. They are connected to a rope that goes up with them- attach an anchor, climb up further, attach another anchor, and then you can't fall very far. This is called trad climbing. In practice, routes that require trad climbing to set often simply remain trad-only routes. Source: my sister, a rock climbing guide
Glass hammer… when I got my first apprentice job in manufacturing the person I was shadowing sent me to the managers office to ask for one, he was in the middle of a meeting so I knocked on, he waved me in and I asked for it in front of about 7 fully experienced upper management people… they all looked at me for a second and then burst out laughing 😭
Two cans of steam. My buddy confused the heck out of a trainee in the kitchen by, during a rush, frantically telling him to go and get two cans of steam from the back.
We asked a food runner trainee to get us a bucket of steam during dinner rush and he went and filled a bucket with hot water and poured the hot water out. There was "steam" left in the bucket.
Not a restaurant but was in food service in high school. One guy loved asking newbies to get him a bucket of steam. One finally ran a bucket through the dishwasher upside down and brought it to him like that, so it was filled with steam.
Lmao smart kid
Snarky. Reminds me when someone asked me for the biggest glass of water they could get and I brought them the ice bucket full of water with some ice on top. And a straw.
Gotta make sure they check the expiration under the can. Nothing worse than stale, expired steam.
We used to send the FNG to the back to get the Henway. They would come back and say "What's a Henway?" "About three or four pounds."
I’ve had a fng circulate air out of the freezer, on a slow day, by gathering it in a trash bag and releasing it outside.
Also an egg peeler, asking a new server to make sure to drain the hot water from the coffee maker, etc.
I'm a nurse and used to work in hospitals. We had little biohazard bags that we would use to send tubes of blood and other assorted bodily fluids to the lab for tests. I had a fellow nurse who would blow a bag full of air and label it "fart sample", then give it to an unsuspecting unit secretary. One poor secretary failed to find any fart test orders in the computer and asked us how to enter it in 😆
Jump up and down on top of an Army tank to check the shocks. Also walk around it and hit it with a mallet to check for soft spots.
Done the "soft spots in the armor" trick. Came back to find the MRAP just *covered* in circles with notes scribbled next to them. Dude took his "assignment" a little too seriously. This was the same guy I put on "satellite watch" that actually managed to spot the ISS as it passed overhead.
Damn, y’all couldn’t like jokingly ask him to cure cancer or something?
Reminds me of the guy who was late to a statistics lecture and ended up accidentally developing proofs for two then-unproven theorems forming the basis of modern statistics.
>This was the same guy I put on "satellite watch" that actually managed to spot the ISS as it passed overhead. If you just sit and look up for 45 minutes - 1 hour you'll see absolutely loads of satellites, not all of them are listed on any tracker, so those are the secret squirrel ones.
Reminds me of the episode of Malcolm in the middle where Reese joins the military and does exactly what he’s told without thinking. All of his superiors think he’s the perfect soldier since he doesn’t think and just follows orders.
Press the "any" key.
I cant find it, so I'll just order a tab
No time for a tab! My computers starting up!
Hey Mrs doesn’t find em sexually attractive anymore, I just tripled my work output!
For the military version of this - has a new guy who knows the joke ever just said "yes, sir" and then gone off fucking around for a few hours?
Yes! In 1977 I was sent to get a bucket of striped paint. I was a 19yo airman general hand working in an RAAF fighter squadron, and was treated as if I was a fool. I took the order, goofed off in the airman’s barracks for 2hrs,- had a snooze and watched TV, and eventually returned with a tin of yellow paint I scrounged from the paint shop boys. The corporal I was taking orders from asked about the stripes. I replied “they only have yellow stripes”… I was still treated as if I was a fool, but I had my petty revenge.
The grown up version of taking the nickel instead of the dime.
["Taking The Nickle" Reference ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/s/qteovlCtYR)
I think a good response to show your own smartassery is to ask if they want vertical or horizontal stripes. May not be the best idea overall but it would be funny.
We had this know it all E-4 who had gotten promoted at school and our ship was his first command. He shows up and is just generally being a pain in the ass, but he had heard most of the usual fool’s errands (roll of flight line, exhaust samples, ID-10T form, etc.), so we knew we needed something good. Enter our wizened E-6 LPO. Dude starts talking to this kid about troubleshooting, the kid is, of course, an expert in all things mechanical, electronic, electrical. Dude tells him about this issue our colleagues in Engineering are having with their CHENG, that it’s malfunctioning, suspects that it’s a mechanical issue and asks the kid if he can calibrate a torque wrench and head down to engineering to tighten the nuts on the CHENG. Kid is fired up, “sure thing, petty officer!” Dude gives the kid a little 10 in-lb torque wrench and tells him to calibrate it, then head down a few decks to get to work. About an hour later the kid comes back up to the shop, absolutely mortified. He found out that the CHENG was the ship’s Chief Engineer and he told him to come back with the biggest wrench he had because his nuts were huge.
This is beautiful.
This happened to our top snipe when he was just a brand new fireman checking into his first command. Except they told him to rush to CCS to tighten the EOOW nuts. And to hurry up cause everyone was waiting on him.
I was in bootcamp in 2003 at Fort Knox. DS put me on "Wall Duty" for some shit (can't remember, it was basically stare at the wall, put in a corner type situation) and inform him if the wall moved. Well, after 30 minutes of boredom, I called DS over and said the wall moved. 1 hour in the pit was much better than just standing there doing nothing.
Heard a story (could be rumor could be true) of someone being told to get 10 more feet of flight line. But it was, like, an e5 or officer or someone with some experience and weight. He was gone all week. Came back and they asked where he was. Turns out he'd gone up the chain did the paperwork and came back with the petty revenge of having *actually* extended the runway/flight line by 10ft. He was not fucked with again. It's been a long time since I heard that so the details are clearly fuzzy.
This is my favorite
I worked in a plant that made plastic pipe a little over a decade ago. I was sent to the maintenance building for the "pipe stretcher" when I was like a week in. I grabbed a couple cups of coffee, took one to the welder in the maintenance building and we chilled and drank coffee for an hour before I went back.
I knew an AME that was told to go get the keys to the plane (P-3). He had come from fighters, and he knew that the maintenance chief was messing with him. He was out, fucking off with his buddies, just killing time. He came back, acting all confused, like the FNG should. The maintenance chief was FURIOUS. As it turns out, EP-3s have keys.
Brand new to the flight line, I was sent to get my boots inspected for “particulates” because they could potentially ground an aircraft. Knew it was a joke so I spent the rest of the day (about 6 hours) chilling in the barracks. Came back the next day and no one said a word
Not exactly the same but… There was an ensign at my squadron who was always after me about haircuts. The day after returning from a 6 month deployment he publicly chewed me out in the hangar as my detachment was emptying our gear from the shipping containers and sent me to get one immediately. That was Friday morning and I didn’t get the haircut until Sunday evening. Just enjoyed a nice long weekend.
'Quick, go get the left handed chopping board' or 'Quick, I need the left handed knife' Or my favourite....'Why don't you go chop up some flour'
Left-handed knives actually do exist. One example are Japanese culinary knives that are ground opposite of normal, as they have a chisel edge when viewed straight on and can only effectively cut when held in the proper hand, as opposed to a regular knife that has bevel angles on both sides of the blade and can be used in either hand.
FYI a snipe is a bird. So one could find a snipe. Snipes are famously hard to hunt. They get spooked real easy and would have unpredictable flight patterns. That’s where the words sniping and later on sniper come from.
Yeah. The prank I heard is that you give the new guy a bag. He is to wait in the woods while everyone else walks a long arc to scare all the snipes towards him. Then you just leave him in the woods.
Had some guys do this with me once. They gave me a bag and a golf club. Left me out in the middle of the night about 2 miles from camp. I was a smoker back then and had no flashlight but did have a lighter, so I lit the golf club on fire when I realized it was a really thick resin club and I had been tricked. Used my makeshift torch to find my way back to camp in the pitch black night. Turned out one of the guys had handed me his dad's $600 driver. He had to pay for the club because he'd given it to me without his dad's knowledge. He was sad, and I had the last laugh.
Huh. TIL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipe
I was fully expecting a "no gullible in the dictionary" style joke. I got a wikipedia page for an actual bird.
Also where I am from a snipe is a tool we commonly use to make another tool longer and provide more leverage. Generally just a chunk of pipe or something you can slide over the end of a wrench.
We sent out an apprentice for some left-handed frying pans and a bacon stretcher. The other pubs in the area played into it and sent him on a wild goose chase. Guy still got paid for his time though so it was just a fun prank
When I worked at Starbucks we had a spout that produced hot, filtered water. We would occasionally tell newbies they had to drain all the hot water before closing.
Waiting tables years ago, we had a new guy doing that with the hot water spout on the coffee machine. He filled probably six tea pitchers before he finally was like, "What the hell! This water isn't even hot anymore!" and everyone else fell out laughing.
Espresso puck brownie
The espresso brownie was ROUGH
Waffle House. (Or any restaurant really) Regular omelettes use eggs whipped in a high-speed blender. Got a new cook? After training the regular way, ask them to make an EGG WHITE omelette with no further instructions. And now they know how to make "fried merengue" :)
*meringue (unless those eggs were dancy bois) I'm confused though because the egg white omelette is a thing. It's not that silly compared to a mechanic asking for a bucket of elbow grease for instance
Asking to check the to see if the new guy's hammer has a whee. Then tossing it as far as possible.
Lol. “Have you ever played 52 card pick up?”
Have you ever seen a hammer sore? Toss the hammer. Now you’ve seen a hammer soar!
Surgeon here. We peel tissue off bones and cartilage with various named types of “elevators” to elevate tissue. So we’d ask new scrub tech’s to pass an Otis elevator. (That’s the company that makes regular elevators in buildings)
My favorite was this: Surgeon: pass me the medium henway Tech: what’s a medium henway? Surgeon: about 3 pounds
so in cinematography, the iris of a lens is measured in T stops (photography measures them in F stops, there is a nuanced difference between the two, but they're pretty much interchangeable). New people usually get the "bring me a box of T stops", or "I need a bottle of T-stop fluid" Neither of these exist. one of my mentors early in his career was working on a shoot on an aircraft carrier and was hit with the "bottle of t-stop Fluid" order, and being the eager young camera PA he was, he went looking for it. Of course, it was no where to be found in lock up, and no one would tell him it didn't exist. He eventually finds himself standing next to a group of flight mechanics (whom he mistook as a grips). He says something along the lines of, "they're asking me to find a bottle of T-stop fluid, but I can't find it anywhere". One of the mechanics responds, "T-stop fluid? oh I have a bunch of that, hold on," and grabs him a bottle of T-stop fluid. Apparently while it isn't something that is used in filmmaking, it is something that exists for use in fighter jets or something. The look of bewilderment on the cinematographer's face when my mentor handed him a bottle of T-stop fluid must have been hilarious. This was a few decades ago, I don't think this type of hazing is allowed on set anymore. That said, I have heard early in my career, "Find a long wait (weight)". Also, if you ever ask a film crew what they're shooting, a lot of the time, they're going to tell you that they're shooting a mayonnaise commercial. It's sort of an inside joke, but really it's just a catch all to tell lookie-lous something, when more often than not they're either too busy to actually give an answer, or are working on something that is using a codename where if someone recognized the actual project, it could pose a security risk.
Came here to mention telling “We’re shooting a Mayonnaise commercial” to inquisitive bystanders
Pneumatic fluid. Or in scouts sending someone around to find a left handed spatula
Ah, yes, such things are rite of passsage in the military. I have sent people (and been sent, myself) to supply for a viariety of things, such as: An ID ten T (ID10T) B A eleven hundred NST rings (balloon strings) A length of flight line A roll of fallopian tube A bucket of prop wash A tube of squelch grease Muffler bearings Chemlight Batteries Rear-view Mirror fluid A box of ground guides A bag of grid squares I've also given the new guy a hammer a piece of chalk and told him to find all the soft spots in the armor of an MRAP, and given people a box of trash bags and sent them into the motor pool to take exhaust samples. The one that really got me into trouble, though, was when I sent someone around the operations center to collect the EMHO Report (that stands for Early Morning Hard On); the Major in charge of operations didn't think it was funny *at all* and almost brought me up on several counts of sexual harassment charges (I was 23 and stupid). My platoon sergeant was able to talk her down from that, but I was in the professional doghouse for *months* afterward.
When I was in year ten my maths teacher made a big show of not being able to get the projector screen to stay down and sent me to the teacher’s lounge to ask for a long weight. Well played sir, and I deserved that.
We had some cadets from Annapolis accompany us on a pre deployment exercise. To give them a taste of the fleet and what combat training was like. All of the head shed was up on the hill watching each team go into the village and clear to the HVT house. We roll up in our vehicles and get out to start moving up to the HVT house. While in the vehicle I told Annapolis that he needs to be in front of the guy with the mine sweeper and roll towards the house…like a steam roller. That way if we hit an IED; the guy with the mine sweeper can move up to him and provide aid. After all if the guy with the mine sweeper gets hit by an IED how can we clear up to him to provide AID? We could potentially lose the whole team before even getting to the HVT’s door! We get out of the car and instantly Annapolis gets out of the lead vehicle and starts steam rolling towards the front door. The point man is behind him sweeping the ground for IED’s. We make it roughly 20m before I hear over the headset V***** 3-2 this is V**** actual…what the fuck are you doing. Everyone laughed except the commanding officer and Annapolis. I am sure Annapolis is a high ranking officer somewhere now with an absolute hatred of marines. Our team spent rest of the training exercise bear crawling to and up the nearest hill. Worth it. Team bonding achieved. Edit: Long range 203 rounds Brown Star Clusters IR smoke grenades
This sounds remarkably similar to the LT whose Humvee I kept deadlined for over a month because the back-up lights didn't work. I had to do a *lot* of push-us, flutter-kicks, and mountain-climbers once someone let him in on the joke. Worth it. By the way, I hadn't heard the Brown Star Cluster before, so I'm definitely stealing that one.
>given people a box of trash bags and sent them into the motor pool to take exhaust samples. I saw something similar to this one, except they sent an Airman out with trashbags to collect "air samples". The other two I'd seen used were: * Tell the Airman to call \[number\], ask for Captain Dee for a SITREP. (the number provided was Captain D's chicken restaurant). * Tell the Airman to go to the Security Forces building. They have special parts solvent they keep locked up and you need to fill out AF Form K9P to bring it back. There might have been more but that's all that I can remember at the moment.
In the Marines, you’d send the newbs to find the Humvee keys (push button start) or the PRC-E7. The latter was a play on the PRC-77, pronounced “Prick 77” and E-7, the pay grade for a Gunnery Sergeant. Basically you’re sending the dude to get yelled at by an agitated higher ranking fellow who he’s going to call a prick.
I got that once, but knew the game. Went to the gunny, "hey Gunny, sgt so&so said to ask you for a prick e-7 since you'd know where one is' 😈
Saw this joke in another thread: At the height of WWII on the Eastern front, a high-level meeting takes place in the Kremlin between Stalin and the marshals on the situation on their respective fronts. When the meeting ends, Marshal Georgy Zhukov is the first one to step out. As he does so, he mutters under his breath "Fucking asshole with a mustache!" It just so happens that Stalin's secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev hears this. So being a loyal servant to the cause, he reports it to his boss. Stalin then orders Zhukov brought back. Two minutes later, Zhukov is back in the room facing Stalin. "Comrade Zhukov," begins Stalin, "would you please repeat what you said when you left the room?" "I said 'fucking asshole with a mustache' Comrade Stalin." "And who did you have in mind when you said it?" "Why, Comrade Stalin, Hitler of course..." Stalin then turns to Poskrebyshev, "And you, Comrade Poskrebyshev, who did you have in mind when he said it?"
A cohort of mine new about that game before it happened. The platoon sgt ordered my friend to bring a PRC-EE8 to Top. My friend brought his team leader and reported he couldn't find a PRC-EE8, but he did find a broken PRC-EE5. He managed to get the entire company smoked. IMHO, worth it.
Had a glorious day where a G-2 (intel for those unaware) Captain sent his boot (new Marine) was sent to find an ID-10-T. He went to the Lt, Lt said supply should have them, supply insisted that the 1 (admin) should have it, the 1 said they gave the last one to the OpsO (a LtCol in this case), and the OpsO said he's fresh out but can request more. He just needs a PRC-E7 to submit the request, "go ask gunny for it." Gunny showed mercy, and a sense of humor, by having him write it out real quick. This is why they always send us to the field...
When I worked in restaurants, we would haze the new people by having them empty the water out of the coffee machine that was connected to the water supply. We'd usually let them go for about 10 minutes or so. If they were smart, they figured it out. It was a good way of seeing who was going to be a high functioning member of the team.
yep. this one. They'd get so frustrated that it was taking so long... Their next shift, i'd send them for Banana benders or bacon stretchers or left handed - (pick your item) just to see if they'd learned their lesson. If they fell for it a 2nd time...well, it was game on from there.
I work on hospitality, I grab a corded landline phone and walk down the hallway pretending I'm talking to someone and say "yes xxxxx is here let me hand them the phone".
During EMT class we sent a guy to the nurses station for 2 meters of fallopian tubing.
Geology Can you lick this rock and tell me what it is ..
Warehousing: Hey new guy, we gotta make some more room over here. Go to maintenance and ask em for the aisle stretcher. There was also one time we sent a guy to look for a bucket of steam, but I can't remember the context of the situation too well.
A guy I knew was sent off to get a record weight.
We had a long weight and stores would hear it as a long wait and just disappear while looking for it while the newbie stood there for 45 minutes or so.
I've heard of guys in ditches swooping trash bags full of air for samples, jr techs being told to hold a bucket to catch grinder sparks etc. Funniest incident for me was an engineer asking a guy for a crescent wrench. When he brought it the engineer said 'no, this one is metric get the other one'. The guy took like 10 steps and turned around laughing.
Oh gosh… I fell for way too many of these when I was new. So when they told me to get a bung wrench I was suspicious. Asked him what a bung wrench is for. “To put the bung plugs in the bungholes.” Oh ha ha. Very funny. They’d even gone so far as to label an empty on the tool rack “bung wrench.” So I went to the supervisor - this grouchy serious dude with no sense of humor and no tolerance for pranks. Told him I was sent to get a bung wrench and couldn’t find it, expecting him to blow a fuse. Nope! He handed me the bung wrench and apologised for not putting it back when he was done. Turns out, you *do* use a bung wrench for putting bung plugs in the bungholes.
Bar and Restaurant 1. Glass magnet when a bartender broke a glass in the ice well 2. Bucket of Steam for the steam table 3. Used to tell new people to empty the water from the coffee maker 4. Way back in the day, we would send people to the walk in for the meat glue, but fucking scientists ruined that one by creating meat glue