July 3, 2001

3:01 PM

Left-handed smoke shifterand other objects to send a novice out to find. Notably missing is the spaghetti straightener. My grandfather told a story when he worked in the label printing division of the Continental Can Company. He sent a guy to the stock room for a bucket of halftone dots. The sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hemployee got bounced from department to department trying to find who got the last bucket...
posted by plinth (16 comments total)

Lark hunting.
posted by stbalbach at 3:19 PM on July 3, 2001

Over here it's snipe hunting. You go out at about midnight with burlap sacks, then sing the Star Spangled Banner to lure in the snipes.

There's one done at the beach too, but I can't think of it right now.
posted by frykitty at 3:37 PM on July 3, 2001

Can someone help me find a bucket of checkered paint?
posted by Dark Messiah at 3:46 PM on July 3, 2001

submarine races?
posted by fooljay at 3:48 PM on July 3, 2001

When I was an altar boy we would were supposed to teach the new altar boys how and when to do certain things during the Catholic mass.

My favorite trick was to tell them to ring the chimes during the consecration of the Host until the priest told them to stop. If you're familiar with that part of the mass you're just supposed to give it a little ring at the moment of consecration, and then put them down.

So this one Sunday mass this kid grabbed ahold of the chimes and start shaking them at the elbow like an ice cream vendor. Father Dillon was about 86 years old and couldn't hear a thing so the kid kept ringing and ringing and nobody was telling him to stop. Ching ching ching...

That was great. Sure, I got smacked on the back of my hand with a stick, but it was fun. Also we once had an altar boy go out wearing a nun's habit.
posted by perplexed at 4:02 PM on July 3, 2001

For two weeks every summer, my scouting troop would go to Scout camp (Onteora, in upstate NY). We stayed in military-style tents there, sleeping on cots inside the tents. If it was a nice night out, we would drag the cots out around the campfire, and sleep under the stars. Two of the older boys would stay up, and wait for all the others (patiularly the new kids) to fall asleep. At some point in the night, they (well, we, as I was usually involved) would, as quiety and softly as possible, try to move their cots a few hundred yars away into the woods.

Needless to say, some of the kids got pretty freaked out, waking up in the middle of the woods, seemingly alone, not knowing where they were.
posted by skwm at 4:03 PM on July 3, 2001

Go get me a bucket of steam..

(yeah it worked, one guy was sent to 5 departments)
posted by thirdball at 5:41 PM on July 3, 2001

we have snipe hunting, too, and hunting for the elusive jackalope.

(someone tried to get me to mop a freezer once; i didn't fall for it.)
posted by sugarfish at 6:35 PM on July 3, 2001

My middle school had a heated pool on the third floor.

In a two story building...
posted by owillis at 8:43 PM on July 3, 2001

When I worked in fast food, they used to make the newbies go mop the walk-in freezer. What happens is your wet mop sticks to the ice-cold floor and you have to scrape if off. Takes like an hour.

Me and my brother made up some new tricks. We'd send other employees to the basement (which didn't exist) to find the pickle slicer (said pickles came pre-sliced in five-gallon buckets). Even old-timers would fall for those. Then we'd tell the frontline girls to keep an eye out for ice cream maggots, and see if they couldn't find us some long-handled forks.

Oh, the fun we had...

Mark Twain wrote about having to look for type lice among all the bins of movable type. So in the computer age we translated this to keyboard lice (or mites). We'd tell people that all those times they got a double letter on the screen when they were certain they'd only hit the key once, well, that was the keyboard lice.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:55 PM on July 3, 2001

How about the key to the batter's box? Yes, it's one of those legendary baseball pranks.

Here's more imaginary objects from camp.
posted by Electric Elf at 9:51 PM on July 3, 2001

Overseas in the military, "the new guy" was sent around to all of the various work sections for the EMHO report. Early Morning Hard On. How silly. But the reports were great..
posted by fnirt at 10:28 PM on July 3, 2001

Our boss put a stop to sending the new guys out for "20 metres of fallopian tubing".
posted by fullerine at 2:23 AM on July 4, 2001

One of the places I worked (web team) sent an intern in search of some data packets.
posted by phichens at 3:52 AM on July 4, 2001

when i was in high school, my first job was at a pizza parlor chain. we used to send new guys out to the other stores with the story that we were low on medium pans, and instructions to bring back 50 small pans and the pan stretcher...
posted by quonsar at 11:45 AM on July 4, 2001

At the restaurant I worked in throughout high school, we sent many dishwashers in search of left-handed spatulas and martini dryers.
posted by SlappyPeterson at 6:07 PM on July 4, 2001