SATICHE - 0695

Pranks To Pull On New Employees

Sending new copy shop employees for double-sided transparencies.
In the army, we sent new cooks for a can of dehydrated water. This actually worked cause new privates are conditioned to do what you say and everything in an army kitchen is dehydrated.
I heard that someone was sent out to get striped paint. On arriving at the shop, he was sent back to ask if the stripes should be horizontal or vertical.
Send the new apprentice to the boilerhouse for a bucket of steam.
In the phone company, new employees are sent after sky hooks...
Tell a friend that the gas station is hiring someone to change spark plugs in diesel engines for 8$/hour. See if he gets a job.
I am reminded of the story, held to be true, about the new employee that had never worked with a desktop computer before. One of the office workers loaded a small program that made sounds like water running out of a drain. He then told this naive little thing that you needed to drain the water out of the computer every day before beginning the daily tasks. Faithfully, every day, she ran the program that drained the water from the computer. Weeks went by, and she was moved to another area of the office, to a different computer, that didn't have the drain program on it. She couldn't understand that she had been HAD and complained that she could not do her work without being able to drain the water from her computer. Her supervisor had the fellow who installed the previous "water drainer" install it on her new PC. She was then able to function.
Working in electronic instrumentation, we'd get a student engineer and ask them to help us find spurs from a source by getting a "spur sniffer." And if he was a computer science major, we'd really lose him for awhile if he was dumb enough to go searching all the analog data books looking for a "precision zero volt reference." "We'd like at least 3 digit accuracy!"
"That's the third time this week this scaffolding plank has broken. Run down to the welder's shed and get 5 or 6 #4 wood rods."
"Run down to the supply shed and get me 20 feet of shoreline."
From the office ranks: "Go ask Doris to bring us some coffee."
I used to work in a restaurant and we would send new employees to go mop the walk-in freezer. Then we would send them to chip the ice off the floor.
I also work in a restaurant. We sometimes tell the newbies to fetch the grill enlarger when there is a rush hour. When they have been looking for it for half an hour, they learn to ask when they are not sure of what to do. Once we told a newbie to measure all of the french fries we wasted.
I worked for a construction company one summer and, in my second week, was sent for a new bubble for the spirit level to the stores. Knowing I was being had, but wanting a morning off work, I went to the stores and explained the wind up to the storekeeper. He said "wait a minute", went away and came back with a jar about 95% full of water. He told me to take it back to my foreman and explain that this was the only sized bubble that the stores had and that if they needed a smaller one they would have to wait until the order came in next week.
When my mother was a nursing student in England, they had a number of standard jokes. One that I remember went something like this: Nurse: "Go and ask the Ward Sister if I can borrow her fallopian tubes." (Sometimes, my mother relates, the answer would come back "Sorry, they're in use at the moment.")
During my summers, I work for a construction company and they have a great prank to play on a new guy. As you approach the time to lay cement, tell him to go to a store and look for a hydraulic cement bender and tell them to charge it to their account. It has never failed them, I know personally!
My cousin and I were in two different shops in Trade School, he in the appliance repair and me in the heavy equipment shop. When 'newbies' got in the way, he'd send them down to me for the "short stand", I'd send them back after a few minutes with the message "can't find the short stand, is the long stand any good?", and he'd promptly send them for the long stand. I'd send guys for left-handed screwdrivers, buckets of steam, and once in a while, for a long stand. Although I used to dish it out, I was caught when I was a Newbie, I was told to get the chain stretcher from the welding shop, I learned VERY quickly!
Get a pair of intercoms. Stick one in an empty drive bay of the new guys' machine. At the other end, in another room, someone talks into it with a robot voice. Tells him it's an AI with speech synth and voice recognition. We played this on an extremely nerdy software intern. He actually bought it at first. Then the AI started getting abusive...
Ask the new employee to go get: sky hooks, left-handed wrench/hammer/razor, Agent Orange (paint colour). Or shoot elastics at them while they are carrying boxes. Or press the intercom button on the phone and tell them the phone is for them. You hear the poor shmuck going "Hello? Hellooo?" over the whole store.
This is a common one in the framing business. No, not framing pictures, but framing houses. When most of the framing crew is all working together to set a particularly big and heavy beam (it gets fairly intense, especially when you don't have a crane), suddenly start yelling about the beam being too short and yell at the new laborer to get the board stretcher. They usually run off as fast as they can, search through vans and trucks while everyone is screaming for them to hurry up, because the beam is *REALLY* getting heavy.
In the Navy: sending a new recruit down to the sail shop for a Boatswain's Punch. Obedient little dweeb marches in and asks the old salt on duty for the request item. Sailor chuckles and then wallops the recruit in the arm. You'd be surprised how many don't get it right off and say something like "Can I have the boatswain's punch now, pleeeez" and get nailed again!
We ask any new purchaser to find us toner for the fax machine.
"Go get me 10 feet of shoreline."
"Go get me a 9 inch raping tool."
We once had a summer technician, a young pretty one, about a year out of RPI, in our hardware engineering lab. There was a problem with a board and one of the engineers said that the resistors were in backwards (for the non-hardware-techie-types, resistors don't care which way they're in). He was expecting a laugh back, 'cuz after all she was an RPI (good engineering school) student. About an hour later, she said she changed the resistors and the board was still broken. I guess it's more of a story than a prank.
This is a true story. A friend of mine was undergoing his vacation training with a major electronic firm. One day, after examining a piece of equipment to be disassembled, his supervisor said to him, " Could you please get the Allen key for me?" My friend promptly said yes and went about it. He came back shortly and told his supervisor, "There is nobody by the name of Allan Kee."
My father was in the Navy for 22 years and said they had loads of fun sending the new seamen out to find some Prop Wash (which is the air flow off the propeller as it turns, incidentally). He'd always chuckle at some poor kid who'd be gone for hours sent from shop to shop to shop.
I work in a restauraunt and we got a new dishwasher to do this. We told him that the drinking water spout had to be manually filled and got him a bucket. He spent almost 20 minutes getting 5 gallon buckets full of water, then pouring it straight down the drain! Haha!
"Get me a bubble for the spirit level."
"Get me some blue sparks for the generator."
And my favourite: get the new employee to "get a long stand"...send them to a friend who tells them, "You want a long stand? I'll get one. Wait here." ...and leave them.
This reminds me of a time when I used to work part time in a popular fast food (restaurant?). It was customary that new employees were given a tour around the work area and, being in the fast food industry, it was emphasised by the guide that they had to wash their hands thoroughly before commencing a shift. They were then taken to the sink, where they were to wash their hands. First, the guide would show them. The walls were tiled and the guide would say, "You press this tile and the water will come out of the tap." There was actually a pedal on the ground that we would press by foot. It was pretty cruel, we would change the tile that they were pressing and tell them "No, no it's this one." or "No, you're not pressing hard enough."
When I worked at Domino's Pizza, we would send newbie's out for a "dough repair kit". The guy making the pizzas would "accidentally" tear a hole in the dough and would send the new guy to a neighboring store for a dough repair kit. A couple of guys actually bought it!
I work at McDonalds's and the in-joke to play on new employees is to ask them to plug in the bun cabinet (it has no plug). Or go ask them to water the plants in the lobby (they are fake).
I used to be a manager for a movie theatre. One thing they used to do to new employees all the time: When the new scrub was making the nacho trays, they were told that they had to have exactly 47 nacho chips per tray or management would get pissed that the yields were too low. They'd happily count out 47 chips and arrange them, all nice and neat. :)
In high school, I used to work for a catalog showroom similar to Service Merchandise called Dolgins. There was a position in the warehouse that basically called for keeping the warehouse clean as well as bringing shopping carts back in out of the parking lot. One winter evening, it started to snow and we told this new guy that he needed to put snow tires on all of the shopping carts. About a half hour later, we checked on him, and he had all 200 or so shopping carts turned upside down and was in the process of taking the third wheel off of the first one. It quit snowing soon after, so we told him that we didn't need to do it tonight and he put the 3 wheels back on and turned the rest of the carts back over. I don't know if he ever figured out that we were pulling his chain.
While working in a mobile radio station with the military, we would have to drive a steel stake into the ground and attach it to the vehicle. This would act as a ground connection should the truck be struck by lightening. Many a private was sent to get a 'lightening bolt' to attached the wire between the truck and stake. On one occasion, a private returned to say that the supply sargeant refused to give us a lightening bolt until we returned the 'short circuits' and 'sky hooks' which he claimed we had in our possession!
I used to work at Burger Chef as a teen in Indiana. I was training a new employee on clean up detail (cleaning utensils, work tables, etc.) and when we were all done with the work, she asked if there was anything else. I explained to her that her next duty was to dig through all the trash bags from the customer area and retrieve any of the styrofoam containers used to hold sandwiches, that these had to be washed so we could reuse them the next day. She got through two bags of trash before we let her in on the joke.
While driving in the truck (6 of us), I would ask the new one to grab the "matterbabe" for me, as I couldn't reach it. After being flustered for finding nothing, the employee would say, "What's the matterbabe?" We all replied, "Nothing honey"
My boss was cooking some ribs and she scraped all the coagulated white grease off. She thought it might be funny to pack it all together and scoop it with an ice cream scoop onto dessert plates and tell the servers it was leftover lemon sorbetto. Only a couple fell for it.
When I was in the Army, we used to send new recruits after a 'box of grid squares' (military maps are sectioned into 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer squares which are referred to as 'grid squares'). This was always good for a few laughs as the recruit went from office to office trying to find who maintained the supply of grid squares. It did backfire once however, when one of the recruits went and got a map and cut it up into little pieces and returned it in a box. We got our 'box of grid squares' and a lecture on not destroying government equipment to boot.
Two other jokes for the filling station newbie were: 1) Have a co-worker call the station and ask how much it cost to have muffler bearings replaced; 2) Tell the newbie to replace the winter air in a car's tires.
In the Navy, we had similar types of fun with newbies. 1) Sent nub for 50 feet of chow line. 2) We'd also send them to Supply for 100 feet of green chow line (telling them it was *very* important) whereupon the Supply clerk would say we've only got red chow line will that do? When they came back, we'd say red is okay, but we need 200 feet of red. The newbie would run back to the supply clerk, who would tell them that he only had 150 feet of red but he might have enough yellow. Would yellow do? We would tell the newbie that yellow would work, how much did they have? The newbie would run to the supply shack who would say we've got over 400 feet, is that enough? We would tell the newbie that we need 600 feet because yellow chow line isn't as strong as green or even red and we'd need to triple tie it. When the newbie would run back to the supply shack, the clerk would say, I've only got a little more than 400 feet, that's what I told you last time, you idiot newbie etc. etc. Usually, at this point, the newbie either figured it out or was dead tired by the time he had finished running all over the boat. What was funny was that in our submarine, there were very few straight paths from the engine room to supply, so the newbie had to run like crazy; after all, it was very important! 3) Electricians sent newbies to Machinist's Mates for a Machinist's Punch; usually ended up in some form of painful physical contact between MM and newbie... 4) When I was qualifying for one of my watchstations (answering questions to show I knew what was going on), the person I had gone to for the check-out asked me how old I was. I replied 23. He said good, that's how many look-ups I was going to have. (A look-up is when you don't know the answer and you have to go look it up and tell the person giving you the check-out)