Posted on 05/31/2015 7:49:46 AM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
What’s a mail buoy?
It’s an, ahem, watch duty assigned to young sailors on their first tour at sea. They are told that mail cannot be delivered directly to the ship, so a helicopter will drop the bag of mail into the water somewhere in the vicinity of the ship. Its location will be marked by a flag affixed to the top of the buoy that keeps the mail bag from sinking. The young sailor’s job is to go up somewhere high on the deck and watch for the mail buoy.
He is usually assigned to this duty for a few hours before someone lets him in on the joke.
I do not know if this prank is still played; I was in the Navy in the early 1980s when I heard about it.
Well, I was the Battalion Commanders gunner on a Brad fr a while, and he did not know that there indeed was a can of dry air for purging the thermal integrated sight unit- PFC Achayan ad I had fun with the LTC for a bit- he had a good sense of humor- later, years later after we both had retired from the Army, I had the pleasure of working with him on a research project- he was a Northrup Grumman guy and I was a university research scientist. He had made full Colonel ( a West Pointer) and I had made Major (from PVT).
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.
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