Tricks on apprentices

As I'm retiring tomorrow, I can now own up to the following, played on a cadet engineer about 35 years ago. This was done purely as a practical joke with no malicious intent, and apparently, after he recovered, was accepted the same way.

Every long uni break, the cadets used to be sent to a country office for a couple of months. This bloke went to Tumut and left his lunch, including some meat sandwiches and fruit, in his desk drawer.

We 'rescued' his lunch, boxed and sealed it in black plastic and left it in the summer sun to fester until just before he was due to return, when we posted it off to him through the departmental mail. It cleared the office when he opened it.

He's now Deputy Director General of the dept. and about the only member of the executive left who actually knows anything.

Sorry Fishy, it was me - whaddaya gunna do, sack me?

I once went to a B&S Ball where they hooked an electric fence up to the urinal.

Between school and Uni I worked at a sheepskin tanning place. When I left they held me down and dyed my nether regions purple. It was all a great laugh until I had my testing for the Air Force a couple of weeks later and tried to explain to the doctor that the 'bruising' around my groin would wear off in another couple of weeks.

The RAAF Fire Fighters (Firies) used to have a 2-part foam for extinguishing fires. They used to put part A in the cistern and part bowl and watch the FNG (***** new guy) react when the cubicle started to fill with foam.

The Yank ration packs are called Meals Ready to Eat (MRE's) and they had heaters for them, a couple of bits of cardboard wilth a chemical powder between them, just add water, the chemical reaction happens and gives off heat and hydrogen. In Somalia we occassionally used to scrunch them up to get the powder out, stick it in a water bottle with about an inch of water, put the lid on, give it a good shake and pop it under someone's bed. About 30sec later the pressurre would build up, the bottle would explode and they would levitate off the bed.

Another good one was to get a Bograt (really junior officer) to go out on the airfield and then radio him to tell him the rotating beacon on the vehicle was 'intermittent' and to go and see the Techs to have it fixed. The Techs would check it and say their old chesnut 'No fault found' and tell him to ask the control tower for more info about the fault. So we'd get him into a possie where the firies and and everyone else could see him easily and then say it's still not working properly because its on, it's off, it's on, it's off......

One of the best was vegemite on the eye pieces of the binoculars - ink was better because you couldn't smell it.

i was re roofing a silo 20+metres high ,me and another bloke was up on top and a young bloke on the ground attaching to rope to the next sheet which i would haul up, being a hot day i had a big bottle of water and i noticed the young bloke was not looking and just staring at the ground waiting for the sheet to be pulled up,so i poured water over him when he looked up all he saw was me shaking my old fella and putting it away ,he always paid attention after that :D

All pieces of timber are 600mm long

All joints must be of an acceptable tradesman standard and be exactly as per sketch.

I've seen a few apprentices caught with this one

Tricks and practical :D jokes in the services are a whole new topic. Many's the soldier who's gone to bed with a good bellyful of Dr. Foster's sleeping medicine and woken up to find his bed in the middle of the parade ground, or suspended from the rafters in the old Kingstrand huts.

In my early days at work we had a young secretary, who did typing etc for us, but secretarial and phone service for 4 managers. She thus had a bank of 4 telephones at her workstation.

The scams were many;

Rearrange the handsets onto different cradles. (she had the phones changed to different colours)


Randomly change said coloured phones into different sockets (she arranged to have the plugs screwed into place)

Use the call-forward function to do the same thing electronically (she learnt to check)

Change the ring-tone selection

Tape down the cradle with "invisible" sticky tape

When we ran out of the above, we started combining them. She finally cracked, burst into tears, and started throwing stuff at us---- must have been something we said?

More apparently true military pranks.

A guy went on leave and they hosed his room out and tossed grass seed everywhere and another bloke came back to find a sheep in his room and one hell of a mess. I haven't heard of anyone combining these two to allow the sheep to feed on the grass.

And here's a dead-set true one because I know one of the members involved exteremely well. They had a ball in the Officer's Mess at a northern RAAF Base and two blokes, notorious for always being the last to leave a party, dragged the 300 or so rented palm trees into a little used ladies loo. This was Fri night and the RAAF Police (Elephant Trackers) were at a loss to work out had driven a truck or similar up and absconded with the palms. On Mon morning, they had to go and show them where the palms were 'hiding' because no one had bothered to look there.

Now this pair have a tradition that whenever they get together they put all the plants in the ladies dunny.