30 Hilarious Fake Errands Industry Workers Use to Fool New Guys

In Germany a spirit level is called Wasserwaage (water scale). So the kids are sent out to get the Ausgleichgewichte (balancing weights) for the Wasserwaage. But I'm glad that my company doesn't allow that s**t. You got a little kid in front of you. That kid is 16/17/18. They are nervous as f***. No need to take them down even more just because it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of being smarter. If that's what you are aiming for... Seems like a sad life. Be a mentor, don't be an a*****e.

I'm a nurse and used to work in hospitals. We had little biohazard bags that we would use to send tubes of blood and other assorted bodily fluids to the lab for tests. I had a fellow nurse who would blow a bag full of air and label it "[gas] sample", then give it to an unsuspecting unit secretary. One poor secretary failed to find any [gas] test orders in the computer and asked us how to enter it in 😆.

When I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the air wing as a repair squadron as a tin bender. My Sargent told me to go to the supply building and get 100ft of flight line. I already knew about this since my buddy worked in supply. So I said "sir, yes sir" and just spent two hours hanging out with Buddy. When I get back I pretend to be confused and he has a good laugh. Win, win all around.

“WD-40 isn’t gonna be quite strong enough. run to the supply room and get a can of WD-41”.

In anesthesia, sometimes we ask the patient, "let me know when you're asleep.".

Rock climbing guide. I constantly get people asking how I get the ropes up. My coworkers and I all have different answers varying from "there's a ladder/elevator in the back of the rock" to "we retrained old mail carrier pigeons" or "grappling hook." I've had a shocking amount of people who will walk around to look for a ladder then glare at me later once they realized the joke on them.

Me setting up gas/air lines in the prenatal chemistry lab: *Hey new kid, go get me a roll of fallopian tubing*.

I used to work in a diesel engine manufacturing plant. We would send new people to the parts cage to get spark plugs.

I worked at Best Buy in college and we would have tell the new guy that when they clocked out they needed to hit #19 on the desk phone and say they were leaving for the day, what they accomplished, and their favorite part of the day. We told them it was an automated time and labor tool that automatically clocked them out . Really it called the stores intercom system and blared it over the loud speakers for everyone in the store. Pretty embarrassing and gave all the rest of us a good chuckle. The best part it was delayed so they typically made it all the way across the store until it started to play back.

Working at a McDonalds in the mid to late 1990s we’d sent the new employees out into the lobby to water the numerous plants in the entire seating area - they were all fake plants.

Send the apprentice to get the wire stretcher. Have the apprentice hold a bucket under a cut cable to catch the extra amps that leak out.

I work on an airfield. We have the new guys stand outside holding a piece of printer paper above their heads at night so the air traffic controllers can “calibrate the light gun”. It’s literally just a fancy flash light. We had one guy stand out there for almost 20 minutes before he realized we were messing with him.

When I worked at Pizza Hut in the 90s we would send the new driver to another Pizza Hut to get our cheese grater. We would call ahead and that store would send them to KFC, KFC would send them to Burger King. I don't recall it going farther than that.

Fun fact... I know a guy who started a company selling "blinker fluid" just to make a buck off people who still think this is funny. He gets angry email messages from senior mechanics all the time, who made the mistake of telling the new guy to get blinker fluid, only for the new guy to realise they didn't have any, and to ask purchasing to order a palletload. Apparently, this extremely specific scenario happens enough for him to drive a current year car.

This isn’t going to all fit, go get the shelf stretcher.

Aluminum magnets, left handed screwdriver for the left handed thread.

Two cans of steam.  My buddy confused the heck out of a trainee in the kitchen by, during a rush, frantically telling him to go and get two cans of steam from the back.

Surgeon here. We peel tissue off bones and cartilage with various named types of “elevators” to elevate tissue. So we’d ask new scrub tech’s to pass an Otis elevator. (That’s the company that makes regular elevators in buildings).

Asking to check the to see if the new guy's hammer has a whee.  Then tossing it as far as possible. .

I like to write on a piece of paper "help I'm stuck in the copy machine" and scan-to email from a central unit to a coworkers's inbox. Alternatively, I just write it on a piece of copy paper and put it back in the hopper so it shows up on someone's print job.