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Thread: Factory pranks

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    Default Factory pranks

    I bet all of us at some stage have had a prank pulled on you in the factory, or else where.

    How many apprentices have been sent down the street for a tin of stripped paint, or a left handed hammer, long weight etc or told to ring Mr Lion only to find the phone number is the zoo.

    Of course you can't get away with pranks today, it could be called harassment and might evoke a visit from OH&S.

    When I worked for the SEC, we always pulled pranks on one of the lift drivers, Harold, who was a few kangaroos short in the top paddock. Brown paper soaked in water can be moulded into the most realistic dog sh*t and was frequently dropped in his lift.

    I could go on but I'd like to hear about the pranks you pulled.

    Ken

  2. #2
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    Sep 2008
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    texas, queensland
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    old bloke at work back in the 70s always had a snooze at luch time with his feet up on his welding bench , me being a you pr**k undone his boot alces very very carfully then tied one to the other and welded a strap across the knot of the laces then stayed well out of the way for the rest of the day .
    same old fella used to cart half a chemist shop of tablets that he lived on in his lunch port which was an old gladstone bag some of you will know what they are . anyway late arvo he would have hos gladstone bag ready on the end of his bench ready for a quick getaway at knock off time grab the bag and run for his fc holden in an attempt to miss some of the traffic rush . he made the mistake of going to the dunny one day so i tacked the corners of his gladstone bag to the bench , he charged through the workshop and grabbed his bag on the way through and all he got was the handle he ripped it clean off.
    it was all revenge though for the stuff he did to me and another young bloke .
    there was another fella that worked there as a welder he had polio as a kid and had those metal strap things down both sides of one leg s o of course he got welded to the bench when ever he nodded off at lunch .

    johno
    'If the enemy is in range, so are you.'

  3. #3
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    I seem to remember acetylene bombs were always an attention grabber

  4. #4
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    That was a real bugger, welding on pipes and some clown would set the oxy acetylene down the pipe till it got to where you were welding, scare the bejesus out of you and bring the dust down from the rafters and trusses. The other trick was to put paper between the welding lenses so you couldn't see, or carbon soot inside the cutting goggles, you ended up with a dirty mark where the goggles sat. Measuring to a long length or squaring and they held the tape over or under so what you thought was the correct length wasn't or wasn't square.
    Kryn

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
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    Not really a prank but:

    My first job was in a metal fab factory in York St Subiaco. The factory used to be a house many eons ago so it had the obligatory outside dunny down the back. Behind the dunny about 20’ away was the spray booth and paint locker. Also behind the dunny, about a foot away was a 44 gallon drum used as an incinerator. Great place for an incinerator, no OH&S in the 60s.

    Every morning the incinerator had to be lit and the previous days rubbish burnt off, a job normally given to the left handed hammer and long weight fetcher - me. Standard method was to chuck in a liberal amount of thinners, stand back and chuck in a match. One morning I dutifully chucked in the thinners, realized I didn’t have any matches so went off in search of some.

    Not too long after that Fred the painter came down, saw I hadn’t burnt off yet so he also chucked some thinners in the incinerator (probably called me a few names) and as he wasn’t a smoker went off to find some matches also. Whilst Fred and I were rummaging around, inside looking for matches blissfully unaware of each other, the foreman came down, saw the incinerator wasn’t lit yet (probably called me a few names also) and he also threw in a liberal amount of thinners (that’s three lots now), the foreman was a smoker and he did have matches, sooo ???

    As luck would have it (good or bad, depending on your viewpoint) Jeff, one of the welders was in the dunny for his morning constitutional when the foreman chucked his match in. Jeff and his father lived above a cool room, dad picked up bodies for a living and Jeff helped him after hours for extra cash (another story). Not sure what dad looked like, but Jeff was a tall skinny fellow who always wore gray overalls and looked remarkably like an undertaker, although he was possessed with a sense of humour and was always laughing at something.- not this morning however.

    The resulting explosion knocked a few bricks loose from around the cross shaped vent at the back of the dunny (remember those) and they went tumbling down inside the dunny, much to Jeff’s dismay I’m sure, a couple of them glancing against his shoulders and head and knocking a bit of bark off, The foreman, standing a little too close, didn’t enjoy the resulting fireball a great deal either, but he did get a free singe for his hair and mustache.

    Fred and myself heard the almighty bang and raced outside just in time to see Jeff crawling out of the dunny on all fours, overalls around his ankles, an unseemly looking undertaker

    The boss, a Czech with a very heavy accent (couldn’t say ‘lamington’ so every lunchtime when I asked what he wanted for lunch he would ask for a ‘freckly black ni22er cake’, but he’s another story) and a strange sense of humour was killing himself laughing, leaning one hand against the wall sputtering ‘you Australians so funny’ .

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
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    Healesville
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    I was doing a factory extension at Mornington a few years ago and a drinking buddy of mine was doing some brickwork there, his name was Chris,
    I knocked off this day and went to open the car door, an XE Falcon, and there hiding under the handle was a cleverly placed large amount of
    graphite grease, I looked over at the brickies and none were looking my way but judging by their body movements there was an immense amount
    of chuckling going on, I laughed and quietly swore as I was wondering what to do with these gooey black fingers.
    I was sitting watching the idiot box later that night pondering the come back...... and there it was, divine intervention you could say.
    A huntsman bigger than my hand wandered out from behind the squawk box, this bricky mate of mine was huge rough and tough... but he was
    very very scared of spiders, even idy biddy little ones. hehe.
    I caught him and put him in a tupperware container and went off and found a Doctor Pat tobacco tin, he used to keep his hoochy cooch in those tins so
    I thought this would be a good attraction to him, I wrote inside the tin with a texta "To Chris from greasy' and then knocked 3 or 4 holes in the bottom with a nail and
    placed my new little hairy friend within.
    The following morning I found his bucket of rust (brickies tools in a 20ltr drum) and I deposited the Dr Pat tin under a couple of trowels.
    Unfortunately that day was a no show for Chris, then it was a no show for another week and a half, Chris had gone on a bender.
    His bucket of rust was moved to another job and with time marching on I wondered how my new hairy friend had faired a couple of
    frosty mornings with no tucker.
    Eventually Chris turned up to work, disheveled bleary eyed and with his tail between his legs.
    From what I was told the brickies labourer took the bucket of rust up onto the 2 mtr scaffold and as Chris reached in to grab his trowel
    and immediately the treasure and plucked it out, he said the labourer have you given me a prezzie? No replied the labourer, Chris shook
    the tin beside his ear and said with glee "there's a bud in here" and with that he twisted the lid and brought the tin to his nose and opened
    lid just slightly to smell the glorious aroma, but instead of a sensuous aroma he felt tickling in his nostrils and the brickies labourer jumped.
    Chris instantly cast his now wide open bleary eye's on the tin to see my new friends long hairy legs sticking out the crack waving frantically,
    spoze it was lucky that Chris was standing longitudinally on the scaffold eh, there was a catastrophic burst of three directional explosive energy,
    the tin and lid shot forward to left and right at supersonic speed and Chris time warped rearwards about 8 feet, the labourer told me that
    after about 5 seconds the startled and shocked look on Chris's face changed to one of anger with murderous intent as he beamed his gaze
    at the labourer, "no no no it wasn't me" he said as he now feared for his future, lol
    Chris now held his chest as his pump had nearly exploded and the labourer retrieved the tin and lid for a closer inspection.

    "To Chris from greasy" the mind was churning over, "what" "who"
    "when I find out who did this I'm going to .........."
    It took him 3 days to work out who greasy was
    and he told everyone he was gunna do some serious damage to me, hahaha, I met him up the pub and we drunk about 30 pots and laughed like hell.

    shed

  7. #7
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    Aug 2009
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    Perth
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    First job out of school and I was sent to get a "long weight". "Oh ffs, how stupid do you think I am?" and headed off to the canteen where I sat and read the paper for half an hour or so when the bloke who sent me off came looking for me.

  8. #8
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    Send the apprentice to the store for a can of striped paint, or a bottle of blue sparks. The ones that complain the most are always the first to play the same tricks later when the next batch of apprentices arrives.

    Handing someone a charged capacitor and wiring reversed tantalums (they explode with lots of smoke) are the electronic equivalent.

    I recall a crew from Melbourne visiting a local transmitter site with a VERY VERY expensive RF modulation analyser ( I think $100,000+ ), they wouldn't let the locals touch it, so when they went on break, one local guy slipped a lit cigarette into the back of the cabinet, when they came back, there was smoke pouring out of the back of their expensive toy... the panic was something to behold.

    No sense of humor those guys.


    Ray

  9. #9
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    Many years ago a tea boy decided to play a trick on one of the tradies, he cut up a piece of foam rubber, iced it and rolled it in coconut. When the trady asked for a lamington the tea boy went off and came back with his home made one. Trady hopped into the lamington, the foam got stuck in his throat and said trady choked to death.

  10. #10
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    I saw sadly at two places I was an apprentice serious injury and total degradation of a couple of apprentices I was glad to see the end of it. I was not one of those.

    Yes bucket of sparks. long wait, left handed screw driver they were all done no harm and the one I got done with was sent to the store for I can never recall but the storeman and I had a great chat for ages, he then asked shouldn't I go back to work! Why? Its my turn now to make the mechanic wonder whats taking so long. Sure enough Alex the supervisor walked round the corner and hit the roof. 7 apprentices were missing on missions to locate stupid requests.

  11. #11
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    I can remember a young bloke starting in York St, fell for every single setup, they never let up on this bloke. Ever day his mum and sister would come to pick him up, his sister had downes and was quite sociable with everyone. A couple of the younger blokes thought it would be funny if they were to tell her I was keen on her. She paid quite a bit of attention to me after that, followed me everywhere, I wondered what was going on. Eventually they let me in on the 'joke' and I just laughed it off. Even though I never played long with them, looking back I think my behaviour was abysmal, I really should have said something, hindsight is a great thing in hindsight. Shortly after someone let it slip to mum and not long after the young bloke left. Different values back then, not everything was good in the good old days!

  12. #12
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    Emerald Central Qld
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    Send the new apprentice to get some rubber electrodes to join the conveyor belt, weld the senior fitters toolbox to the bench, fill lunch bag of the guy who was always first out the door at finish time , with 1" plate offcuts.

    And the usual oxy acet filled paper bags.

    Michael

  13. #13
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    On night shift we are allowed to go to bed after 11:00pm once all our duties are finished for the night. We each have our own dorm and bed which we usually make at the start of shift. Some smart ar*e decided to get a saline drip from one of the ambo's and put it between my matice and base, with the drip line sitting just under my sheets. Of course once you jump into bed, your weight squeezes the bag and saline goes everywhere under your sheets.

    Putting a clock radio locked in someones locker, set to go off at some ridiculous time is also another oldie.

    My boss was due to attend a formal occasion requiring the wearing of his formal dress uniform. Our dress uniform usually sits in our locker 99% of the time doing nothing, until you need it on some special occasion and so you never really inspect it and assume it's all OK. I decided to bring in our sewing machine and sew a seam across one leg of his trousers…..

    In recruits we bricked up someones locker. When he opened his locker, all he saw was a brick wall.

    In the days when all computer screens were CRT's, one particular person (who was a computer geek) took the boss's computer screen apart and re-installed the actual screen unside down back in it's case so that the image was "upside down". The poor boss (who was computer illiterate) spent the whole day fidling with vertical hold and every other adjustment of the screen and then ended up nearly throwing it!

    That same person I remember running after me trying to zap me with a megger.

    I've had my locker filled with bean bag beads. I've had the legs of my bed removed and then they sat the bed on coke cans.

    When someone buys a new car and won't shut up about how good it is, well there's a couple of options here:

    inject about 100ml of diesel into their muffler. When they get down the road and it warms up, it starts to smoke like crazy. or, put a couple of large cable ties on their drive shaft. The excess length will make a terrible noise when driving. A tin of tuna or sardines down the air vent is probably going a bit too far…..

    Occasionally, a 12V siren my find it's way under someones bed and somehow manage to be remotely activated.

    Door to a dorm may somehow get superglued shut so that when we get a call, the only way out is to climb through the window.

    During rescue training in the old days it was not unusual for the "victim" in the stretcher to be hoisted vertically up the hose tower and left for half the morning.

    I remember spending nearly an hour hiding in someones locker, waiting for them to go to bed so I could jump out and scare the out of them.

    In the time before we had keyless entry in cars, it was a good prank to freeze peoples car keys in a block of ice in the freezer. In fact we went through a period where anything left lying around would end up in the freezer. Shirts, keys, coffee mugs, etc. etc.

    There was a time when people would come in off the street to hand in distress flares after they had expired. We used to use them for training….. well until we got a bit silly and nearly burn someones car. Now they are banned….

    In the old days when the entire shift would sleep together in a single room, every bedside table would have a bible. In the middle of the night it was not unusual for a "bat" to fly across the room and hit you in the head!

    It's rumoured that many years ago a goat was found wandering in a 000 call centre.

    Hundreds more where these came from...

    Simon
    Girl, I don't wanna know about your mild-mannered alter ego or anything like that." I mean, you tell me you're, uh, super-mega-ultra-lightning babe? That's all right with me. I'm good. I'm good.

  14. #14
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    Simonl, what an absolute vandal you were, you must have been a mischievous kid, same as me.

    At Tech school, it was a good prank to lift the teacher's small car up on blocks so the wheels were just off the ground.........

    Not really a prank, but something else I did in Tech school, make a .22 single shot pistol. 99% finished, a Prefect dobbed me in to the Principal.

    I was severely hauled over the coals after being complimented for my ingenuity and fine machining. Just loved those Hercus lathes.

    Mysteriously the next day, the same Prefect's bike had badly buckled wheels........

    Ken

  15. #15
    BobL is offline Member: Blue and white apron brigade
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    At the end of my first week as a trainee science teacher in the early 1970s, instead of going to the pub the head science teacher said he and another teacher were going to "dispose of some excess chemicals" before going to the pub and did I want to come along and see the disposal. The wink in his eye told me this was going to be interesting so I tagged along and 2 minute slater I was sitting in the back seat of his Holden HK along with about 7kg of solid sodium metal in 10 or so rusty tinplate cans each containing 500 and 1kg amounts.

    The story was that the head science teacher was new and had just been at the school for a few weeks when he discovered a cupboard full of old chemicals including the sodium. Back in those days if you didn't request your full annual school "Chemical Allowance" it was cut by the same amount in following years so most schools kept requesting chemicals whether they needed them or not. The problem for this particular school was that the previous head teacher was terrified of most chemicals so no teacher was permitted to use any except the most harmless stuff.

    The sodium was in large sugar cube size lumps surrounded by a paraffin oil inside the cans.
    The proposed disposal method was to drive t a local metro beach, pierce the Canned peach size cans containing the sodium in multiple places, pour the paraffin liquid onto the sand and hoike the can into the water.

    It was a relatively calm, warm mid afternoon, Perth February day with relatively few people around.
    All up there were a few dozen sun bathers and some, kids, Joggers and several dog walkers on the beach.
    We fortuitously moved up the beach to a spot where there were no one in the water.

    After the first can went in it took about 10 seconds before something happened, but the resulting KA-WHOOMPH and water spout shooting into the air, was like a small artillery shell with the addition of small marble size fragments of sodium fizzing about on top of the water for 30s or so afterwards. It was quite impressive until I realised that they were the cans containing just the half kg amounts.

    At that point the head teacher sent me back to the car to get a clipboard and a lab coat from the back seat of his car - he said put the lab coat and make like we were doing something official.
    As I came back down to the beach one of the 1 kg lumps was tossed into the water. The much louder KA-WHOOMPH made everyone on the beach sit up and everyone turned to see the water spout and more sodium shrapnel fizzing on top of the water. Several people continued to stare and the head teacher told me to check my watch and make out like I was writing something down on the clipboard.

    Then we decide to try two cans together. By then a group of about a dozen people had started to gather about 30m away from us and talking amongst themselves and pointing at at us. In those days teachers wore ties and business shirts and together with short shorts, long socks and sandals we hoped we looked like a group of boffins doing something boffinish.

    We disposed of two more cans and now someone from the group came over and tentatively said "What's going on". The head teacher said we were from the local Uni and to please stand back as it could be dangerous and it will be all over in a few minutes.

    By now cars and trucks driving along the beachside road were seeing the water spouts and hearing the noises, stopping and drivers were getting out of their cars to come over to the roadside to look.
    The head teacher looked at a can and called out a sort of code.batch number and said "!,2,3" and we threw the remaining cans into the water - I furiously pretended to write something and kept looking at my watch.

    The head teacher called out "All clear" and we then strode nerdishly back to the car and drove away.

    As we drove away I noticed there was still a 1kg can that had rolled off the seat onto the floor and drew this to the head teachers attention.

    As we neared the Fremantle Bridge he turned and said "I know a quiet place to dispose of that" and we drove under the bride where there was a small shaded carpark.
    As we pulled into the parking area we parked a couple of bays away from a Kombi right by the waters edge, with curtains drawn and a few towels acting as curtains on the front windows. The Kombi was oscillating strongly suggestion horizontal dancing was underway inside the van.

    The head teacher said "Quick open the can" - which I did - "Now pour the oil out", done. I handed it to him and he threw in in the water relatively close to the van.
    Being under the bridge and he surrounding river banks and buildings seemed to make the sound even louder.
    The next thing we saw was two very worried faces peeking through the curtains as they watched the water spout drop onto their van and within 5 seconds the van was off.
    Did we have a good story for the rest of the teachers at the pub.

    We did so many silly things with chemicals, rockets, etc in those days when OHS was largely non-existant and I don't know how we didn't injure or kill someone in the process.
    I have many stories like this and have forgotten a few as well, maybe I should write them down before I forget them all.

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