Posted on 05/31/2015 7:49:46 AM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
“Sent another to the lumber store for a sky hook.”
If only Kareem Abdul Jabbar worked at your place!
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.
My favorite on board ship was sending someone to get bulbs for the smoking lamp.
My favorite on board ship was sending someone to get bulbs for the smoking lamp.
In the Boy Scouts it was a Left-Handed Smoke Shifter.
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.
As Battalion S-4, I used the "bucket of steam" as a judge of character. If the young soldier laughed it off, I knew he'd be a good soldier. If one showed a pi$$ed off attitude, the soldier was likely to be substandard.
On a limited sample size of about 10, it was a pretty accurate test.
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.
It never hurts to have a sense of humor, whether one is handing it out or on the receiving end.
New power plant mechanics are told to get a calibrated left-hand metric crescent wrench from the tool room ....
...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!”
Such jokes are a betrayal of trust. The person so duped may never believe the joker again. Nor can anyone else trust that person.
You never served! It’s an initiation where you pay your dues!
A “seabat” is a non-existant creature that is put into a large box on deck with a slit in the side so you can see the animal. when the newbie would bend over to look through the slit, someone would whack him on the a*s with a broomstick. (Only one newbie at a time was allowed to look in the box. kept the joke going for a few of them).
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.
Were there ever any problems with gauges?
You need to get the bottles of Lucas factory smoke for the wiring — the wires tend to leak
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!”
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