This is what I mean when I say that recreationally lying to kids is an important family tradition.
An old boss of mine was in the Navy, and as always they haze the new guy. Told him to go get a bucket of checkered paint from the quartermaster (I think it was; any mistakes in nomenclature are mine, not his).
The QM, tired of the nonsense, actually made one. He put a grid of cardboard in a bucket and carefully filled it with alternating paints, then removed the grid, leaving a bucket of black and white checkered paint.
I feel like if you come back with a bucket of checked paint, you should immediately be promoted to general. That takes moxie.
My mentor in the garage had a shop kid who was especially keen before I started working there. Guy was dumb as a rock, but just so enthusiastic.
One of our usual pranks on the new kid was to send them out for something that didn’t exist. So one day things are slow and R sends him to our usual parts store for left-handed wheel nuts.
Kid comes back several hours later, and goes ‘boss, I got your wheel nuts! I had to look all over town, but here they are!“
And sure enough, he’s got left-handed thread nuts.
Turns out, some equipment does have different directionally threaded nuts for each side of the vehicle. It’s rare outside of very high-end cars, and definitely not the sort of cars we saw in a little prairie town.
Somehow this guy found the only set of left-handed wheel nuts in town and brought them back. It wasn’t the last prank we pulled on shop kids, but damn did he make a point.
