On The Clock Humor

Any of you ever pull a fast one (in good taste) on a co worker at the shop? Now is your chance to tell about your “prank” on the clock. A bit of humor after the work week.

An example

Several years ago a co-worker and myself were in the office and he was doing paperwork for a repair he recently completed. The customer was at the counter and she was talking with my co-worker, both were having a good conversation. I took a piece of paper and wrote on it, folded it once and slid it in front of him and casually walked out into the shop. About five minutes later he busted through the door, ran up to me and said in a very excited manner “Don’t ever do that again, I nearly burst out laughing in front of my customer, that would have been bad!” By now he is laughing his head off. We had a good laugh and that was that. Before I reveal what was written on the paper keep in mind that this had nothing to do with his customer, I just saw an opportunity.

When he opened the note it simply said “K-Mart called, your lobotomy is ready”

Or maybe ask the customer how he spells “BMW” or “RX-7”. That gets the strangest looks.

Your turn

We would usually wait until someone was in the restroom before pranking them. The shop had two restrooms, one for techs and one for customers. The tech restroom shared a common wall with the shop. If someone went in there, we would wait a couple minutes, grab a sledgehammer, and give that common wall a good whack to help them out with their BM. Other restroom pranks involved throwing fireworks (usually firecrackers or bottle rockets) under the door while someone was trying to do their business and, on one occasion, hosing down the assistant manager with a garden hose while he was seated on the porcelain throne.

I also had a manager who liked to try to get the parts vendors to laugh when he called to order parts. One conversation started off like this: “How are you? That’s good. I’m just sitting here at my desk…naked. What are you wearing?” You could actually hear the guy on the other end laughing on that one. He would also test the knowledge of the person if he got somebody he had never dealt with over the phone by ordering things like a radiator for a '74 Super Beetle or spark plugs for a Duramax.

This isn’t car related, but it fits the spirit of the thread.

A few years ago, I was taking a class with someone who was a big Cleveland Cavaliers fan. This was back before Lebron became Ledramaqueen. So anyway, the Cavaliers were playing the Orlando Magic {the local team, also the one I root for} for the Eastern Confrence championship. The Magic ended up beating the Cavaliers, so to rub it in, I printed a Cavaliers logo on a sheet of paper and glued it to a piece of toast, then put it on his desk.

I’ve pulled a few pranks but they were of the very tame variety. Things like hiding the rotor out of a distributor, etc.
I like that K-Mart lobotomy note. That’s pretty funny!

I used to work for a Subaru dealer in a small city and they had a young guy who did detail work and ran errands. We got along very good and I liked him a lot. He was also a prankster and pulled a few on me. One day I decided to get even.

The shop was long and narrow and the company had installed evaporative water coolers along one wall. (Very nice in brutally hot OK and we could work in cool comfort with the overhead doors down.)
At the end where I worked there was a walk through door with a break room.

One afternoon while he was on break I went to the cooler where I worked and aimed the vents toward the door; a distance of about 30 feet or so.
I stood off to the side and with a can of aerosol gasket remover sprayed a healthy shot into the airstream where it instantly became an invisible mist. I then stuck my head back under the hood of a car and waited for the inevitable.

Those who have used aerosol gasket remover know that it’s some nasty stuff on bare skin. It burns and itches to no end.
About 5 minutes later I could see my victim lightly rub one of his forearms. A minute later he scratches the other. As the next few minutes rolled by the scratching became more frequent and much harder and he then started clawing a bit at his neck and cheeks. Finally he jumped up cursing and came running out through the shop while headed to the restroom with tears in his eyes.
As he darted by I held the aerosol can up and shook it hard. When he heard the rattle and saw the can he knew for sure what had happened.

(He did get me back by shoving some super glue into the lock on my top tool box and this turned out to be a real aggravation to free up. Of course, he paid for that one too.)

Not automotive, but years ago when I managed a pizzeria, we used to send green new hires to another store to pick up a “dough patch kit” One of the locations we sent a kid to played along and put a hotdog with a bandaid on it in the box and sent it back with him.

Another prank was filling a coworker’s car with broken-down cardboard boxes if they were careless enough to leave it unlocked. One poor guy was almost in tears when he worked a 12-hour shift (which didn’t go well for him anyway), then came out to his car bone tired to find his car just crammed with boxes. (I didn’t realize this had been done until after the fact, or I wouldn’t have let them pick on this guy, based on the day he was having) Another popular one was to take a wad of fresh dough and put in in someone’s car ashtray on a hot day. As the dough heated up and the yeast did its thing, it would expand to at least 5x its original size, forcing the ashtray open, and oozing out of every seam, making an ungodly mess and stinking up the car.

I was a lot younger then, but I pretty much have always hated practical jokes. I would let my workers do what they wanted within reason, but would draw the line if and when it started to generate animosity between them.

I worked at a McDonald’s restaurant as a teenager. The soft serve ice cream machine had to be disassembled, cleaned, and lubricated weekly. The food grade lubricant used to assemble this machine had a consistency like petroleum jelly, and was clear. We used to sneak out the back door and load up the door handles of our victims with this substance. One guy got me with it, so I got him back a week later. He only found it in his driver’s door handle that night, but I also loaded up his passenger door handle, fuel filler door, tailgate handle, and the slot in his grill where the hood release was. The best part of all was that his dad found the stuff in the passenger door handle a couple days later and was, from what I heard, not pleased, and rubbed the stuff all over his face.

We also used to turn off the lights in the walk-in refrigerator when someone went in there, and sometimes would hold the door shut on them, or slide a padlock in the latch of the door to prevent them from getting out of the cold dark room. This stopped when someone locked a 300+pounder in there who was not only afraid of the dark, but claustrophobic. He kicked the door off its hinges, and somebody had to explain what happened to the general manager.

I’d have probably kicked the door off the hinges too. Claustrophobia is something I flat can’t handle at all. About 15 years ago I had to go through a closed MRI and figured I could tough it out. The feet went in first and about the time my chin hit the opening there was a white flash and I was out cold for a brief interval. They had me out just as quickly and after asking for 10 minutes to settle down I tried it again with a towel over my face. About 45 minutes later when it was over they had to pick me up off of the table and walk me out. It was kind of embarassing.

That guy I mentioned about using the gasket remover on? One Fri. evening me and a friend went to a local tavern for a few cold beers, some pool, and the great food they have there. As we left that night I saw the kid go by in his older Subaru (very slick car with bumpers). I stopped behind him at the traffic light and decided to screw with him a bit.
I edged closer and closer to his car with mine (also had bumpers) and could see him in the rear view getting antsy about someone getting so close. He kept edging forward and so did I. At this point he had no idea who was behind him.
Finally he was out of street and since there was no traffic I mated the bumpers up, let the clutch out, and shoved him into the intersection.

He took off in a panic with me behind him and I chased him for about a mile before he had had enough. He slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, and started cursing and threatening to whip someone’s tail until it soaked in that it was me.

He got me the following Monday by letting the air out of 2 of the tires on my car right before lunch.

Around 1962, I worked around a pipe fitter. He told me his first day on the job as an apprentice, the foreman sent him back to the shop for a left-handed pipe wrench. He left and didn’t come back. In the afternoon, the foreman found him in a bar downtown, nursing a beer. He cussed him out and asked him what he was doing there. He replied, “it’s the only place I know to find a left-handed monkey wrench. I think one more beer and I’ll have it.”

The foreman didn’t dare report him, but he pulled no more dirty tricks on him.

I worked in high school for a company that sent out 25lb boxes of training manuals for Technical publishing inc. Our favorite game was in loading the 25 lb boxes. We would toss the 25 lb box to a guy on the old International Harvester pick up truck to stack in preparation for going to the Post Office. We would tape up an empty box, and throw it into the mix. It is a really weird experience expecting to catch a 25 lb box, and getting a half pound box instead. Happened to me, and happened to others!

One of the things I would to my painter, was switch his paint gun. Say he would be painting blue car. I would switch it with one that had a white paint in it.

This is a real good one. Get a wire coat hanger. Go to the rear divers side of the car just in front of the rear wheel. Find a hole in the body rail closer the tire the better. Put the wire thru the hole. Twist it good and tight. Pull it down to the ground so it drags. This will turn the car into a record player. Makes one bad sound and hid behind the tire it’s hard to find.

Speaking of claustrophobia, where I used to work, there were a couple guys, that, if you were in the trunk, doing whatever you were doing, would close the trunk lid on you. You couldn’t get mad & curse them, cause that was just what they wanted. You had to plead & holler for someone to open the trunk & then they’d finally let you out.

At another place I worked a guy told me he was in the trunk of a car, might have been a first generation Chrysler LH, removing the fuel pump, since there’s an access port under the carpet there to R&I the fuel pump module & you don’t have to drop the tank from underneath. Well, some joker nonchalantly walked by & slammed closed the trunk lid. My friend said he almost was overcome by gasoline fumes by the time somebody reopened the trunk. Gotta be careful with practical jokes!

and that’s one reason to be glad you can open the back seats from the trunk in today’s cars

I’m not a prankster. Too many I’ve seen are mean and others dangerous. Others are humiliating.

Then there’s this one:
Many years ago when I was a repairing the avionics systems on a B-52 bomber, I got called to a “redball”, a plane on the flightline preparing to take off that had a major systems warning light illuminate. As was our practice in this case, I had the truck rush in to meet me and grabbed a replacement part from the “operational systems mockup” to get the plane off on its mission. We always kept the mockup working for exactly this uprpose. We raced to the plane, I put the “box” in, and…no function! I called for a new unit from depot supply and we raced in to get it. We had a nuclear armed B-52H with all 8 engines cranked up waiting on the flightline. After I completed the repair with the new depot unit, I returned to the shop to troubleshoot the boxes. Whereupon, an other tech walked in the room and announced “well, did anyone find it year?” As a prank he had injected a defective “box” into the mockup.

I could go on with other “pranks” he pulled…for which he probably should have been court-marshalled…but I think you can understand why I hate pranks.

My brother thinks himself a prankster. His pranks often consisted of things that embarassed and humiliated others. I was too often the butt of his cranks, many of which were mean-spirited.

About the extent of my office pranking is to engage in inter-office warfare with these little babies:

Mountainbike, I’m surprised that guy would have a job more than the next few minutes.
I wonder what it cost to keep that B-52 running out there while this little escapade went on; not to mention the scenario if it had been the real deal instead of a training mission.

As a young person around the early teens I was raised near Columbus AFB and a nuclear armed B-52 went down there, killing all 7 I believe it was, crew members.
The AF, being tight lipped of course, never said much about it other than the plane went down after takeoff and cleared out about a 1/4 mile of trees.
(This was back when Columbus was a SAC base instead of an AETC facility.)

The military aircraft business is dangerous enough even in peacetime without someone
tweaking parts.

Yeah, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer for certain. Military readiness is nothing to play games with.

Crashes like that are a great tragedy. In December 1972 during Operation Linebacker (the bombing of Hanoi) we lost 15 Buffs (our pet name for them), some D models and some G models. Each and every one is a huge loss.

shadow:
Be glad you don’t have buddies like this:

How about the old greasing the earpiece of the phone and then telling your buddy it’s for him.

A piece of tape over the laser in an optical mouse?

Neither are any fun if you’re not in the area to watch.

One they did at my current job is someone popped the keys off the front desk security guard’s keyboard and transposed the M and N keys. We got a complaint that the keyboard was defective. It took a few minutes to figure out what had happened.