One of the things we'd do to newbies on their recruit or apprentice coursess a military variation of "send the fool further". You'd send a private off to the QM to pick up some silly non-existent item. I remember some of the ones we used to send them for:

- sky hooks: when there was no overhang to hang your cam net or land line, etc.;

- cans of elbow grease;

- a box of short circuits;

- a tube of propeller glue. I used this one myself. When the private looked dubious, I said, "What, you never heard of propeller glue? It's only sticky in one direction, but lets the propeller spin freely. How did you think they kept the propellers on a plane? If you used screws, they'd either fall off or screw themselves tight." I said it with a straight face -- I was so proud of myself! That convinced him to go off; but he came back empty-handed (and with a rather worried expression), saying, "Sgt H--- says you can't have any propeller glue until you bring back the spool of shore line." Well, we all lost it at that point, enlightenment came upon our poor Grasshopper, and he was mighty choked over it.

Better still -- there's a item in our kits that is more properly called a female-to-female cable connector; in Sigs parlance it's a "lesbian connector" (I kid you not). So when we actually needed one, and tried to send the private to go fetch us a lesbian connector, he refused to go. Came quite close to being insubordinate.

Anyone else use a similar "item"? Or, anyone able to make up a few new cool ones for cruel tyrant-sergeants to put in their arsenals to make privates cry?

J

You'll find plenty of those here. Checkout mine on the "cannon report".

when i worked for a construction company i would send the summer working high schoolers to get me a board stretcher because i cut the board too short!

i would also send them after the left handed hammer.

We used to send em out to get a box of toe-nails and some level bubbles.

A friend of mine told me of the one time he got E-5 (my friend was a E-3 at the time who was in charge of the shop he was in) who just on post to go change the summer air out for winter air on tires made of solid rubber!!! He also got newbies to go get a can of frequency grease. His 1st Sgt. had gotten so frustrated over the number of people he kept duping that he finally made my friend show him how to correctly apply frequency grease. My friend (who had a background and hobby in electronics and a roommate who was a radio repairmen) applied it to a circuit board in areas where it wouldn't harm the operation of anything. Needless to say his 1st Sgt. was upset that my friend had outsmarted him. Something that we've done on the flight line was put aircraft brake dust on the mouth pieces of headsets so the next person using it would have black rings around their ears and mouths, making it look like that they have goatees. I have also heard of people using super glue on the headsets, so the rubber pieces get glues to the face of the next victim.

i'm not in the military, yet, but in the Boy scouts, we make the new scouts go around to other camps looking for a left handed smoke shifter. we tell them thats how we have to get a fire started, because we(or mostly, we'll say they forgot) forgot the matches.


They fall for it every time



(granted, they're like 12 when we do this to them)

we just hang people's cranials (helmet looking things for a flightline) on the skycrane's or stick them in freezers if they leave them somewhere

You guys are cruel!

Heck I would do that to all the noobs in njrotc just to piss them off lol.

but isnt rotc made up of noobs?