The Great Fire - RF Cafe Forums

 Post subject: The Great Fire

Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:58 am 

Here's one from way back which I hope you will enjoy.

As a young lad (yes I'm English) I was always amused by our office "War of the Roses", which like its precedent was fought between protagonists from the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire. In this case two Section Leaders. The guy from Yorkshire was always playing tricks on his opponent, who used to fly into spectacular tantrums.

On this particular ocasion, the Lancastrian had just taken delivery of about £30,000 of special development computer. The other guy ran a length of plastic tubing (ok, wide bore heat-shrink sleeving for the technophobes) from the back of this computer to the adjacent office. When the unsuspecting fall guy turned on his pride and joy, the (by now hysterical) prankster lit up a cigarette and blew smoke down the tube.

On seeing smoke the Lancastrian screamed, hit the power breaker, smashed the nearest fire alarm and set off a fire extinguisher. All over the computer. Unfortunately, the nearest extinguisher ejected a horrible sticky powder. Meanwhile in the next office, laughter turned to panic and, after hurriedly winding in the tube, the yorkshire gentleman proceeded rapidly to the exit.

Conclusions:
Laughter: Lots.
Computer: £15,000 to refurbish.
Lancastrian: Praise from management for putting out a potentially huge fire at great personal risk.
Yorkshireman: Relief he got away with it.
The rest of the office: a Priceless anecdote!

 Post subject:

Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:20 am 

Greetings MaC:

That's a good one. We used to do the same type of thing in the test department back in my technician days (I have matured since then - kind of). It only worked on the "new guys."

On a similar note, another common trick was to use the same type of Tygon tubing and tape it up under the workbench and have it pointed toward a guy's crotch. At an unsuspecting moment, a quick squeeze on a water bottle (the kind used to wet soldering iron sponges) connected to the tube from a few benches away would produce a hilarious wet spot in the most embarrassing place on the guy's pants.

I wonder if that kind of horseplay is even tolerated these days?

Oh yeah, another one for you. We used to have Q-Tip ("cotton tipped applicators" according to the bags) fights by inserting the round wooden handles into the air hose nozzles and shooting them at each other. I do not believe we were smart enough to wear goggles back then, but I do not recall anyone being blinded.

Ah, the good old days!


- Kirt Blattenberger

 Post subject:

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 11:26 am 

The water bottle trick reminded me of a similar trick we played on one of our coworkers. He turned his CPU on every morning by using his left foot to turn on the surge protector while sitting at his desk. We got a battery powered water gun and duct taped under his desk top. A bench to supply was plugged into same surge protetor and wired to the water gun.

We also did the cotton swap shot from a compressed air nozzle.

The labs I used to work allowed workers to have radios playing, we used RF gens with simple antenna to jam the annoying to 40 station.

The best one we did was played on a high strung manager of our group. It was the start of the Xmas holiday season and he remarked about a Xmas song on the radio that annoyed him greatly (never display you weaknesses). His office was in a secure area of the building and therefore very quiet when he was in it alone. We taped the offending song repeatedly on to a cassette and dropped it behind the wall in his office, great care was taken to adjust the sound so low it was barely perceptible, unless of course you were trying to concentrate alone. For the next week this employee was seen walking the floor looking for the source of the music (the building was rather large). He did eventually find it and took it rather well.