APRIL FOOLS DAY - Engineering Style

Hi Jaxy -

Not sure if it was April Fool's day, but a radio station in Long Island, NY once "punked" me in the mid-90's, by calling the fastener factory I worked at. They asked for help designing a colorful head-piece using a variety of specially-colored nuts, bolts, and screws my company manufactured.

Since our products were used in a variety of very different applications, from NASA satellites to HP wafer processing to U.S. Army missiles to Broadway Theater productions, it seemed plausible to me what the "potential customer" was describing. For being such a good sport, they sent me a t-shirt with their station's name on it, but I never wore it outside the house. :)

<-- Photo courtesy Wikipedia. No, we had no bananas (made of 1/4-20 x 8 yellow hex-head cap screws).

Thanks for the topic and letting me share something funny from the engineering world of the 1990's.

Circa 1980's, 5 1/4" floppy disks. I don't think it was on April first.

We had one guy who would keep 100's of copies of programs. Now I'm all in favor of having a backup or 3, but this guy "over the edge". At 2am on Saturday morning the last thing you need to do is search through a 100 or so disks, writing down each time/date stamp, in order to get the plant back in working order.

So we took a large electromagnet we had around for degaussing CRT's, clipped and taped off the hot leg from the AC cord. When he walked in the door, saw that electromagnet plugged in, piled high with all of his disks, and then we turned on the switch, I thought he was going to have a stroke!

The 'Little Gem Fuse Tester' is a fave of mine ...nice diecast box, mains neon glowing cheerilly and a BIG biased switch with 'test' on it.
You leave it plugged in on a bench and wait for some sucker to press the switch and blow all the fuses in the lab.
Del

Simple useful add-on to any device on your colleague's desktop...

We managed one year to swap the "one way" signs in half of a street so that "East met West" in the middle of a block with no alleys. That was a good one. We were only visiting the town for a few days.

Took three of us around 3 hours to do it, took 2 council crews nearly three weeks to put them back.

Another good one that is still being investigated (No-one has owned up to it.) Imagine 2 houses in the multi million dollar range on 5 acre (2 Hectare) block with a vacant block between. Someone found a couple of discarded "Development Approval" signs, modified them to say a "1000 sow piggery with no requirements for odour control or effluent management" had been approved for the site and set them in place on the vacant block with rapid set concrete.

April 1 was Saturday, so council office was closed, the owners "went off". Newspaper and radio got involved, lots of public interest.

this would have been good YouTube material!

imagine the ruckus!

Back when I sold auto parts for a local chain of stores, when things got slow, we'd call up other stores and ask for a radiator cap for a '69 Volkswagen Beetle. Or a metric crescent wrench. We'd do that all the time, not just on AFD.

Similar to Kilowatt0's story ... with less eventual damage

In the early 80's I worked with a man who was the personification of conservative ... I mean, this guy wouldn't say !#$& if he had a mouth full of it .

He had been working on a program to automatically measure loudspeakers for several weeks. His storage media was 5-inch floppy disks, and his products were about 50 4-inch loudspeakers with ferrite magnets -- lots of stray field.

He was reasonably neat in his housekeeping, keeping his disks properly labeled near the computer, and the speakers on an adjacent workbench.

One evening, after he left for home, I took some blank disks, carefully labeled them the same as his, randomly laid the blank disks on top of the speakers, and took his disks and hid them .

The next morning, as I watched secretly, he came into his lab, saw the disks, uttered, "oh no", and put the first disk in the computer ... of course there was nothing. Then disk two, disk three until he was completely satisfied that all his data had been rendered unreadable.

Then, Mr. Conservative became Mr. Raving Lunatic shouting more profanity that I could imagine ... I was sure Turret's Syndrome had suddenly set in .

Later, when I gained MY courage, I returned his original disks to him ... hmmm, he STILL wasn't happy ... I wonder why?

He didn't speak to me for a week. BUT, he still remembers it to this day .

Saw off the tip of your colleague's soldering iron and solder it back...

It could be done with the old-style 24 V soldering irons:

Remove the heater and replace it with a 48 V phone lamp. It will glow similarly to the original heater...

You are good ! !

So you're the one !!!

Being born on the day!!!

Here is what one of our local radio stations in Sudbury, Ontario did yesterday.

A little background first...

The Inco Superstack in Sudbury, Ontario, with a height of 380 m (1,234 ft), is the tallest chimney in Canada and the Western hemisphere, and the second tallest freestanding chimney in the world after the GRES-2 Power Station in Kazakhstan. It is also the second tallest freestanding structure of any type in Canada, ranking behind the CN Tower but ahead of First Canadian Place.

It was constructed by Inco Limited in 1972 at an estimated cost of 25 million dollars; from the date of its completion until the GRES-2 chimney was constructed in 1987, it was the world's tallest smokestack. Between the years 1972-75 it was the tallest freestanding structure in Canada.

The Superstack sits atop the largest nickel smelting operation in the world at Inco's Copper Cliff processing facility in the city of Greater Sudbury.

OK... So an annoucement is made during morning rush hour that plans are in the works to build an observation deck and rotating restaurant at the top of the Inco Superstack. It was a hoot to listen to some people call in. Some callers couldn't keep from laughing asking if gasmasks were going to be supplied. Some dunderheads thought it was a great idea to bring in extra revenue. It was too funny!

Taped a piece of paper over the led on a coworkers mouse when he was away from his desk....

reboot....son of a.... reboot again.... more swearing.... under the desk checking usb plug.... storms off to IT......

Turned mouse over so tape and paper was visible when coworker came back with IT guy and a new mouse....

Best kind - fast - painless - obvious

A fellow coworker and I are putting that into motion (a day late mind you) now. We have an engineer coworker who's always complaining about the quality of the computer equipment he was issued. As an added bonus, he can swear a blue streak at the slightest of misfortunes in his day. He's a pretty smart cookie and we're betting he'll figure it out, but will keep you all posted as to the results!!!

Variation to the theme being that we are using a '3M page tab' to cover the laser eye, clear, yet not so clear as to allow the mouse to work.

LOL! please let me know how it goes.

Another one we use on computer geeks (read - engineers) once in a while - take a pen knife or letter opener and pry off the "N" and "M" keys on their keyboard. Switch positions and press them back on. This works really well on those who have to "peek" when typing.....

Alas, he was too much of a smart cookie to be fooled (plus his first reaction is to tilt the mouse 90 degrees and smack it on the desk, which allowed him to view the tab over the laser eye). All we got for our efforts was a 'Nice try!'.

Haha! I did the same exact thing yesterday for a prank. Unfortunately, I did not get to see the response of my victim.

I just happened to notice that the head machinist had ordered a new "Machinists Handbook" on April 1st about 20 years ago, as it was delivered to the mail room while I was in there, and I had also just happened to have found a 1922 edition of "Machinists Handbook" (along with several other engineering books) a few days before which had belonged to a man named Coleman in the basement of a house he once owned and which my sister-in-law had rented.

A colleague of mine and I meticulously peeled the carton apart and replaced the new with the old and glued it back together and placed it in his mailbox. His office was across from mine, and when he opened it, he immediately called the publisher, McGraw-Hill, and asked why they had sent him a 1922 edition. When the woman on the other end started laughing, he got very pissed (not to be confused with drunk, Brits and Aussies) off, which apparently caused the woman on the other end to laugh even harder.

I though I had better let both of them off the hook, so I walked in with the new edition while he was on the phone and asked if he would like to swap his old one for a new one. His jovial, laughing response: "You son-of-a-bitch!"

And finally: about 25 years ago there was a lady in our team and she was a talented phone-virtuoso. She was able to talk for hours and we could not use the phone. I built a small add-on and placed it into the wall outlet. First she got 5 minutes, then the circuit disconnected the line. If she dialed again immediately, the available time were halved, and so on. If she waited at least some minutes she could get 5 minutes again...

It's now the morning of the 3rd here and I've just been "got" by my wife and now it's a year to get back at her with an appropriate prank.

The "set-up" and the prank.

I should have been suspicious as the supply of clean underpants diminished over the last couple of weeks until on April 1 there was a choice of three, April 2 a choice of two then today!!!!!! It has been rather wet here the last few days so no washing or drying didn't seem out of the ordinary.

She has managed to find a black mastic that almost exactly matches the stitching around the edges of the legs. Not sticky enough to notice while putting on, but with body warmth and time has become rather tacky.

Got to work, all's well until toilet break and when removing said article, I had an immediate lesson in "inside leg waxing". Fortunately have a full change of clothes at work.

Yes I have already phoned her and she confirmed the source of the prank. She couldn't believe my luck though to miss the "trap" until today.

Usually she cannot keep a straight face when something like this is "on", but this time she did well.

I love her so much it hurts sometimes.

Oh, there was another ...

Years ago (hmmm, it seems all my life is now 'years ago'), a man in our department was ... how to say ... DIFFICULT to work with.

In that situation, we had to submit requisitions for nearly everything we wanted to buy. In an office supply catalog I found an executive chair, very nice, leather, reclining, foot rest ... even had a massage. VERY expensive.

SO, I wrote a purchase requisition for the chair ... in HIS name, of course. Reason for purchase: "I work 8 long hours each day. I believe some relaxation and rest now and then would improve my efficiency." I signed his name and put it in the boss's in-box.

The next morning HE was called into the boss's office to explain. As voices elevated, he SWORE he knew nothing about it, but the boss never believed.

Poor man ... he KNEW he was 'had' by one of his loving co-workers, but never knew who.

My life has been full of April fools day jokes.

First a good one that I was on the receiving end of.

My wife and her sister have always been close. When her son was graduating from the U S Marine Corp Training facility in Virginia, my wife and I were going to drive there to meet up with My wife's sister and the rest of her family.

I decided to register a different vehicle for the trip. I neglected to put the licence plate on the car. I drove for 6 hrs before I happened to notice it. So I made a paper tag up and wrote "LOST TAG" on it. When we got the the motel, all of the family laughed about it. But my brother in law got up in the middle of the night and changed it to "LOST FAG" for the trip to the Marine Corp base.

It was only after we got back to the hotel later that day that they told us. (His other children were in on it also.)

Never admit to anything.

As a repay to him, Next time I was at his home (Airmont area of NY) I did this.

He was retiring, and his son bought him a good new set of golf clubs. (He has spent 25 years assembling his previous collection of clubs at yard sales)

The last golf outing with his company was while I was visiting him. The night before, I snuck his car keys out of the house, went through his garage and collected every golf club in sight. There were so many that I could not get the last 2 to fit in the bag. Then I took a 15 to 20 pound weight he had for some reason and put that in the shoe section of the golf bag.

Put it back in his car and went to bed.

The next day when he got to the golf course there was someone to take the golf bags out of the cars and put them onto the cart. When he got to the starting point he went to put his shoes on and found the weight. When he went for the first club, he found 25 30 clubs. He told the co workers that his wife must have cleaned the garage and did it. He then proceeded to remove all of the old clubs and carry them about a city block's length to take them to his car. Dropping all the way. When he got to the car he discovered that the valet had parked the car, and he didn't have the keys any more. So he dropped the clubs on the ground to go get the keys. Naturally the valet wants to do all he can to please the customer, so they both went back to the car to put the clubs away. Only found out it was me when he got home again.

Did I get him?

You are right to never admit anything. I will remember this for the future pranks :D

Good simple one from the old days when plenty of people smoked.
Run a length of sleeving or tube under the air inlet grille on the 'scope of the new bloke. Once he's looking at the 'scope blow smoke through the tube and watch his face!
Del

Bloke I worked for, many years ago, didn't need the tube. There you'd be - testing your new design - & he'd manage to exhale half an Embassy just where you were hoping (praying?) not to see such a thing.

Then, there was the other bloke, who used to walk round, occasionally clapping - just once - at some poor Newbie (like me)'s critical moment.

Oh yes the well timed clap, is beautiful in it's simplicity and never fails.
I like the Gary Larson cartoon (also B'day card) of the guys working on the missile/rocket and one is about to burst a paper bag behing the guy doing the delicate bit.
I sent that card to my Dad years ago...he used to work on such stuff...really tickled him.
Del

Glueing the toolbox to the bench, or welding it closed is always a good 'un too.
Del

Not April Fool's day, but worked nonetheless. Guy on another watch section in the US Navy regularly left his coffee cup, full, cream and sugar, on a metal bench top, for his off 4 days (shore station, 4 twelves on, four days off). My section always found it, with mold legs growing out of it, on our first Day Watch in the string. My guys drained it into another cup, drilled the offending cup, used Silicone RTV caulk to glue it to the bench, filled it back up with the ugly crud. Owner comes in on HIS day watch, spiffy in whites, expecting Dress Inspection. Sees cup, tries to take it to clean (TOO late!!), can't lift it, tugs mightily, RTV yields, Rainbow colored coffee all over dress whites, inspection commences in 5 minutes. Worked perfectly. Never left his cup unattended again. Never figured out who did it, either. Micah

Ah, military pranks! I used to hand someone the plug from a field switchboard's operator's pack, tell them to hold it with their fingers across the conductors. Then I'd spin the handle on the hand-cranked ringing generator. IIRC, the generator put out about 90V! Fortunately the amperage was low, but they still wouldn't hold on for long!