Once sent the new guy to the lumberyard to get a 50# box of toenails. He was gone for 4 hours and apparently hit every lumberyard/hardware store in town.
Bossman was pissed.
You are especially evil DMM!
We used to get the fng’s asking the Coy clerk for their M1 papers!
Navy is infamous with this… I was sent for a BT punch then there’s the sound powered phone battery, the sea bat, mail buoy watch, etc.
When I reported to my first duty station after ET and Crypto school, the 1st Class in charge of the ET shop tried to send me to the stores room for a Fallopian tube. Being new and not wanting to piss him off because I didn’t know him, I just told him there was no such thing. Turned out he was an OK guy.
Hey, time spent on these errands all counts toward the twenty years.
I also wanted to put him on notice that I wasn’t a run of the mill dumbass. I had other things to consume my 3 years and four+ months on duty.
Nemo: so, you didn’t change into yer civvies and go into town looking for a 2 1/2 inch red and white short circuit? Don’t let ’em fool you with an inferior green one.
Full disclosure: as the NFG, I phoned my DS shop only to be told I had reached the forward torpedo room. I apologized and hung up. On an aircraft carrier. Two seconds later, I got it. Good times. Sigh.
Oh yeah, finding that ‘blinker fluid’ and ‘left handed screwdriver’ was rather hard to do. We laughed and laughed when it was all revealed.
Ah, yes, the left-handed Crescent wrench…
We would send the new guy off with a couple of 5-gallon buckets looking for ‘prop-wash’. Most would play along until some spoil-sport would explain what ‘prop-wash’ was to the newbie.
HeeHaw! Bring me a bottle of radio squelch. Pickup a roll of flightline while you at it! Good times.
On a tile job I sent a new employee to get the left hand tile stretcher. He deserved it since he had worked summers for his uncle and knew everything.
After about twenty minutes he comes huffing and puffing up stairs. These?, he asks. I sez, they looked like that but with green plastic handles.
He was gone for another 25 minutes. He came back emptied handed and with a puppy dog face fearing he had let me down.
Bobby, you who know everything, think about it..
I work in manufacturing we would send newbe to get heavy oil.. A two gallon bucket of steel shot with a layer of 30 weight over the top run them all over the plant to different machines. Operator would get a nyquil sized cup of it . Send them all over the plant. Funny shit..When I hired 34 years ago one of the “old guys “took me under his wing warned me of all the nonsense . I never really got the crap most of the new hires got. He retired 10 years ago , still get together and coffee it up as he calls it.
We would send out the newbies who “knew everything about the phone industry” out to get a can of dial tone.
We were pretty ruthless in those days…
Oh f*ck me!
Working offshore on an oil rig, in Alaska in the wintertime.
Over the P.A. “Elmo roustabout, to the welding shack. Bring the V Door Key to the drillfloor.”
Every last sumbitch on the platform was waiting, when I arrived with the eighty pound “key.”
Which one? The sky hooks or the angle stretchers?
Sending the new kid to the lumber yard to get a bag of knotholes, or to the hardware store to get a board stretcher.
My new boss sent me to the construction shack on a high rise job to get a skyhook. It was one of the coldest days of that year. So I got myself a cup of coffee sat down and warmed up for about an hour. The site super asked me what I was doing there when I explained it to him, he had a good laugh and joined me. Went back to the job site told my boss the sky crane would there in a week and they needed a 20,000 dollar deposit by Tuesday. He turned white as a sheet.
In air traffic we use UTC (formerly ZULU time), and on a midnight shift going into daylight savings time, we convinced a new tech that the clocks in the facility needed to be changed. When he was just about finished (42 sector clocks) we finally let him in on the prank so he had to start all over putting the clocks back to the correct UTC.
In a maintenance shop, I stuck one end of an old cord from a coffee urn in the hollow handle of a torque wrench, wrapped the cord around the handle, and put it in the tool room. Newbies were told to go get the electric torque wrench, and they better know how to use it!
The old Air Force ruse would be to send kids right out of tech school down to the Motor Pool for a sky hook or the Hospital for a box of fallopian tubes. Of course, you would always have a contact at each location to get the poor kid really spun up.
A friend of mine with a beautifully restored 1957 Chevy was describing it at a cruise night to a couple of rude kids who were making gun of his paint choice (coral). He glowingly described the “Chrome Muffler Bearings” and “spun-aluminum carburetors” the car had. The kids lapped it up.
Yeah, that’s right.
Once sent the new guy to the lumberyard to get a 50# box of toenails. He was gone for 4 hours and apparently hit every lumberyard/hardware store in town.
Bossman was pissed.
You are especially evil DMM!
We used to get the fng’s asking the Coy clerk for their M1 papers!
Navy is infamous with this… I was sent for a BT punch then there’s the sound powered phone battery, the sea bat, mail buoy watch, etc.
When I reported to my first duty station after ET and Crypto school, the 1st Class in charge of the ET shop tried to send me to the stores room for a Fallopian tube. Being new and not wanting to piss him off because I didn’t know him, I just told him there was no such thing. Turned out he was an OK guy.
Hey, time spent on these errands all counts toward the twenty years.
I also wanted to put him on notice that I wasn’t a run of the mill dumbass. I had other things to consume my 3 years and four+ months on duty.
Nemo: so, you didn’t change into yer civvies and go into town looking for a 2 1/2 inch red and white short circuit? Don’t let ’em fool you with an inferior green one.
Full disclosure: as the NFG, I phoned my DS shop only to be told I had reached the forward torpedo room. I apologized and hung up. On an aircraft carrier. Two seconds later, I got it. Good times. Sigh.
Oh yeah, finding that ‘blinker fluid’ and ‘left handed screwdriver’ was rather hard to do. We laughed and laughed when it was all revealed.
Ah, yes, the left-handed Crescent wrench…
We would send the new guy off with a couple of 5-gallon buckets looking for ‘prop-wash’. Most would play along until some spoil-sport would explain what ‘prop-wash’ was to the newbie.
HeeHaw! Bring me a bottle of radio squelch. Pickup a roll of flightline while you at it! Good times.
On a tile job I sent a new employee to get the left hand tile stretcher. He deserved it since he had worked summers for his uncle and knew everything.
After about twenty minutes he comes huffing and puffing up stairs. These?, he asks. I sez, they looked like that but with green plastic handles.
He was gone for another 25 minutes. He came back emptied handed and with a puppy dog face fearing he had let me down.
Bobby, you who know everything, think about it..
I work in manufacturing we would send newbe to get heavy oil.. A two gallon bucket of steel shot with a layer of 30 weight over the top run them all over the plant to different machines. Operator would get a nyquil sized cup of it . Send them all over the plant. Funny shit..When I hired 34 years ago one of the “old guys “took me under his wing warned me of all the nonsense . I never really got the crap most of the new hires got. He retired 10 years ago , still get together and coffee it up as he calls it.
We would send out the newbies who “knew everything about the phone industry” out to get a can of dial tone.
We were pretty ruthless in those days…
Oh f*ck me!
Working offshore on an oil rig, in Alaska in the wintertime.
Over the P.A. “Elmo roustabout, to the welding shack. Bring the V Door Key to the drillfloor.”
Every last sumbitch on the platform was waiting, when I arrived with the eighty pound “key.”
Which one? The sky hooks or the angle stretchers?
Sending the new kid to the lumber yard to get a bag of knotholes, or to the hardware store to get a board stretcher.
My new boss sent me to the construction shack on a high rise job to get a skyhook. It was one of the coldest days of that year. So I got myself a cup of coffee sat down and warmed up for about an hour. The site super asked me what I was doing there when I explained it to him, he had a good laugh and joined me. Went back to the job site told my boss the sky crane would there in a week and they needed a 20,000 dollar deposit by Tuesday. He turned white as a sheet.
In air traffic we use UTC (formerly ZULU time), and on a midnight shift going into daylight savings time, we convinced a new tech that the clocks in the facility needed to be changed. When he was just about finished (42 sector clocks) we finally let him in on the prank so he had to start all over putting the clocks back to the correct UTC.
In a maintenance shop, I stuck one end of an old cord from a coffee urn in the hollow handle of a torque wrench, wrapped the cord around the handle, and put it in the tool room. Newbies were told to go get the electric torque wrench, and they better know how to use it!
The old Air Force ruse would be to send kids right out of tech school down to the Motor Pool for a sky hook or the Hospital for a box of fallopian tubes. Of course, you would always have a contact at each location to get the poor kid really spun up.
A friend of mine with a beautifully restored 1957 Chevy was describing it at a cruise night to a couple of rude kids who were making gun of his paint choice (coral). He glowingly described the “Chrome Muffler Bearings” and “spun-aluminum carburetors” the car had. The kids lapped it up.