Here, take these 2 large black garbage bags and run out to the flightline and collect exhaust samples for testing. Hurry back!
I’ve been sent for 100 feet of shoreline. We’ve also had noobs decked out in aluminum foil so that they can be sent to the focsle to calibrate the radar.
Betrayal of trust? Maybe. Our chief used it to emphasize that knowledge is power, and you’d better have your noses in your PQS. Nothing more useless on a ship than a passenger in uniform. Especially when everyone else is counting on you.
Critical thinking skills, the ability to use your resources to figure out what to do when orders aren’t forthcoming, development of trained initiative - all part of the process.
Most of it stopped when the females arrived. Now we just send two people to do one person jobs.
A buddy of mine referred to being sent below for a BT punch. The boiler technicians were all too happy to comply.
Find the box of grid squares. (Solution: a box of graph paper.)
Find the squelch grease. (Solution: a relabeled tube of neosporin.)
Find the lightbulb fluid. (Solution: can of Ronsonol, or the hideous mogas crap.)
I remember the left handed smoke shifter when I was in the boy scouts mid 70’s.
I had a Motor Sergeant send a new LT (an Aggie, of course)to ask the Battalion’s Maintenance Chief (a grizzled CW4) for a can of muzzle break.
He later asked the LT when he wanted to schedule the platoon’s M113s in for changing the winter air out of the roadwheels...
Someone has to get the mail buoy. And for God’s sake, don’t mix the summer air with the winter air in the tires. That’s how they go flat.
She was NOT happy when she came back in.
In the C-130 world a newbie would be shown a puddle under the aircraft and asked if it was from a hydraulic leak. Newbie would say he didn’t know so was told to dip his finger in the puddle and smell it or taste it. Those puddles would invariably be under the urinal drain tubes.
The lower level mechanics did regular maint items like check cables, basic inspections... etc. The story is they had an aircraft in doing regular preventive maint stuff and this kid was in the cockpit checking and changing bulbs. someone asked him if the indicator worked for the engine extinguishers and when he argued there wasn't one, they convinced him you had to pull the charge handle to light it up. Guess what he did? dumped an engine extinguisher into a perfectly good engine.
I know there was some pretty serious ramifications (aside from a complete engine swap) but I don't remember the details.. I'll have to ask him again next time I see him.
On my first quarterdeck watch as messenger, I was ordered to go to the main machine shop and ask for a can of red running light oil. Main machine shop sent me to engineering; engineering sent me to repair, repair sent me to the electrical shop, electrical sent me to the print shop; they had me running all over the ship. Ended up back at the quarterdeck for a good laugh. Good way for a new kid to learn his way around.
Sounds like we need some ba-1100-ns, where’s the noob lets send him right. One of the best jokes was in an F/A-18 squadron... On the tip of the nose of the jet was a #2 Phillips screw so we would tell noobies to go to the back of the airplanes and put a torque tip between the engine exhaust nozzles so we could tighten the radar tip screw.
...50 feet of “flight-line.”
One young man with friends in Civil Engineering drove up in a dump truck filled with broken up concrete.
“I got your flight-line for you!”
There was one we Navy ET’s used to pull. It involves a capacitor and a piece of test equipment called a megger. You charge the capacitor using the megger, then hold it by tit’s body (not touching the leads). When somebody comes in, you throw it to him and say “Catch.”
50 feet of flightline
50 gallons of jetwash
The keys to the airplane (we had a young Lt go all the way up to the Wing King at Whiteman AFB, looking for a set of B-2 keys)
10 gallons of compound K9-P...always ended up at the military working dog section...
At the Lackland AFB bomb dump (in the Medina Training Annex) they sent n00bs to unlock bunker 572...NOTE: 572 used to exist, but went ka-boom in 1963.
When I was in the Navy, we used rolls of carbon paper sandwiched between regular paper. When we got a new sailor, someone ripped the layer of regular paper off the outside of the roll so the outside layer was the carbon paper. He told her that the roll was defective and that to fix it, she would need to unroll all the paper and reroll it with the layer of carbon paper in between the regular paper layers.
The whole time she was unrolling the paper, she kept muttering, “It’s a mail buoy trick. I just know it.”
Finally, the prankster took the roll, ripped off the 20 or so feet she had unrolled, then tore off the outer layers of paper so that the roll was once more layered in the paper-carbon-paper configuration. At that point, the new sailor yelled, “I KNEW it was a mail buoy!”
FOOLS ERRANDS
A “Fools Errand” is the practical joke of sending a person to fetch some non-existent but plausible sounding item. The joke is usually played at work on a new employee or apprentice and its effectiveness depends on the naivete of the victim. Here are some of the more common Fools Errands. There are hundreds of such errands; many are specific to particular occupations. Many of the objects are non-existent items. Others really do exist, but not in the context of the occupation where they are set as a fool’s errand e.g. fallopian tubing makes sense to a doctor, but not to a plumber. Many errands rely on an apprentice being overwhelmed by technical jargon; as long as the errand or object sounds plausible, he assumes it to be yet more jargon.
Big list of fools errand items at link.
http://messybeast.com/dragonqueen/fools-errands.htm
Don’t forget the the cleaner kept out at the kennels. It’s called K9P.
And then there was the new guy that was so dense that he went to get a pap smear.