TOPIC: Whatever Lady

Our snipe hunts were different.  We took the new kids and had them hunker down under a tree quite a ways from camp.  They held a blanket like a small lean-to and one of them would shine a flashlight back and forth at the back of the blanket.........  all the while chanting quietly...... here snipe....here snipe...... here snipe.

Of course the rest of us would go out and rattle the bushes as we headed back to camp for a nice evening around the campfire without the new guys.  Ive seen kids out there chanting for hours.....lol.


The best pranks were pulled on adults at the airline I worked for.  We would send the new guys over to another airline for "prop wash", bin stretchers, metric crescent wrenches......  and of course everyone at every other airline knew to send them to yet another airline that "had just borrowed it".  Sometimes they were gone for quite a while.  I had some people try it on me after I had returned from a 6 year leave of absence with the Union.  They thought I was a new guy.  Of course I took off across the ramp, doubled back into the break room and stayed there playing cribbage for a couple hours.  And those lucky "seasoned" workers got to load and unload a number of flights by themselves, down one worker.  When they finally got a break, they found me playing and laughing with all the other senior guys.

The best however was the "echo check".  We would tell the new guy that while we were talking to the flight deck on the headset, the needed to go yell "echo check" into the engines so the pilots could check the engine sensors.  We would tell them louder, louder or softer.  It was really great when they would be standing there screaming "echo check" into the engine while everyone was watching...    ;D

LOL. I can picture the poor newbie shouting into the engines.

Every industry, group, affiliation has its treatment of new guys!  Who knows how many ways there are to hunt snipes!

Dom, when you are 11, bacon stretchers, smoke changers and snipes sound plausible and important.

Very true. You believe pretty much anything at that age.

Oh man, in the Navy we use to tell the NUBS (Non usable Bodies) to go back to control and ask the engineer for some dehydrated H2O, or tell em to go feed the shaft seals, or tell em that when we go shoot water slugs to make sure they keep their mouth shut so Greenpeace wont find out.  Shaft seal is just what it is.  Its a seal around the propeller shaft that keeps the sea water out.  Water slugs are when we shoot our torpedo tubes while they are flooded full of water.

We had many many more but those were the nicer ones!  lol

I've got to find the video I took of a young copilot while we were on a Pacific trip.  We had an over-night at Guam and the next day we got the young lad outside to do required radar calibration check with one of our plane's thermal curtains (Nuclear war thing).  We had him duck-walking in an arc out front.  The morning sun was in his eyes so he didn't see the three video cameras on him.  LOL! 

Nuclear alert was yet another Boy Scout Campout.  ;D  Crazy days!