The joys of being an apprentice!

[skotl]

I once got gaffer taped to a 4x4 steel pillar on the sales counter at the wholesalers by my legs upside down didn't mind that so much and they left me 10 minutes and all the blood brains rushed to my head before they cut me down

Fixed that for you

 

[Keith 66]

A boat yard near here had a toilet built out on stilts next to the slipway, accessed by a walkway the hut contained an empty putty barrel under a plank with a hole in it. When it got pretty full it was thought great sport when an apprentice went in there for a couple of chippies to run down the slip grab the legs of the hut & rock the lot, this would cause the contents of the barrel to slop up the occupants ****.

 

[ronan]

Practical jokes are ok, but i dislike them as they can go to far, especially when a gang of lads egg each other on.

Read somewhere yesterday that a lad in a garage was getting married, the other lads grabbed him, stuck an airline up his backside for a joke and killed the poor git. Thats at least 4 times i have heard of this happening.

 

[wookie]

Practical jokes are ok, but i dislike them as they can go to far, especially when a gang of lads egg each other on.

I've always stuck to the rule "Would I find this funny being done to me ?" if the answer is no then don't do it. Sending someone on a fruitless hunt around a factory for a couple of hours is harmless, getting @Keith 66 's barrel contents on you isn't.

 

[Scruffywelder]

TBF other than occasionally hooking electric fencers to the steel bench edge* or the handle of someones tool chest our place was pretty tame.



* Turns out the 12 joule mains powered ones sting a bit if they haven't got 12km of wire hung on them.

Who knew...

 

[Screwdriver]

There was no mucking about when I did mine - at The Ministry of Defence. We were serious dudes

Having said that, there was one quite memorable occasion when we were working on some valve gear and one of the lads managed to zap himself. This was, ahem, a few years ago...

Anyhow, we are called over and gathered about the bench where the instructors wanted us all to see what had happened. "What were you doing when you managed to get a shock", "Well I just put the probe here and..."<bang> he did it again!

Chaps name was Alan Brain. I'm not kidding either....

 

[Keith 66]

I've always stuck to the rule "Would I find this funny being done to me ?" if the answer is no then don't do it. Sending someone on a fruitless hunt around a factory for a couple of hours is harmless, getting @Keith 66 's barrel contents on you isn't.

I do agree, my friend who worked there said that the chippies were a right horrible bunch, but look on the bright side. An old boy i knew witnessed a banging out ceremony at Cape asbestos in purfleet, apparently it was usual for the "victim" to be chucked in a skip full of blue asbestos.
Doubt there are many of them left now.

 

[Kayos]

Practical jokes are ok, but i dislike them as they can go to far, especially when a gang of lads egg each other on.

Read somewhere yesterday that a lad in a garage was getting married, the other lads grabbed him, stuck an airline up his backside for a joke and killed the poor git. Thats at least 4 times i have heard of this happening.

Completely agree, the airline one is another avoidable tragedy

 

[Browser]

As has been said above, verbal wind-ups and sending people to stores for a long stand are OK, but there's always one idiot in a bunch who, again as said by another poster, egged on by the group or just ruch of blood to the head, just take things one step too far and someone's injured or worse.
A 'game' when I was an apprentice; We had a wax bath which was used to coat tools we didn't want to rust. A large metal container full of wax with a heater to melt it. The game involved sticking a finger in the wax 'til one had a large buildup and then seeing if it would come off in one piece. No, I couldn't and still can't see the point either! However, legend has it (always the same that isn't it, stories always went 'a mate in the factory told me.....' ) that an apprentice or older bloke saw this done and thought he'd dip his whole hand in one out on the factory floor. Trouble was, that one was a plastic bath and ran at a rather higher temperature. Needless to say, trip to hospital swiftly resulted.
I moved soon afterward to a cement works for the rest of my time, where I once witnessed Halon fire extinguisher fights, after which the part-used extinguishers were put back in the cabinets!!!

 

[brightspark]

srapped the door on the portaloo on site with the joiner in it for 10 minutes then chucked a few bricks at it last year that will teach him for putting salt in the sugar bowl I saw one on u tube hoisted up in the air with a crane and some poor sap in it

theres loads of them

 

[Wallace]

Saw a Portaloo wrapped in pallet wrap at Santa Pod one year with a guy in it on a hot day. Eventually they pushed it over and rolled it down the pit lane with him still inside!

 

[Keith 66]

Saw a Portaloo wrapped in pallet wrap at Santa Pod one year with a guy in it on a hot day. Eventually they pushed it over and rolled it down the pit lane with him still inside!

Wonder what he had done to deserve that? he would have needed a stomach pump afterwards.

 

[Wallace]

Wonder what he had done to deserve that? he would have needed a stomach pump afterwards.

It was the group of lads he was with all weekend that did it to him, top class mates!

 

[Stingray]

Not into the bad pranks, if some lads could carry on like that at work it makes you think what they’re upto at weekends,
Anyway worst I ever done was when tacking up with HF and getting the fitter to hold the elbow or whatever and forget and put My Earth on (not to be done with anyone with a pacemaker), also used to get two earths and run the earth below the Welding machine (neatly coiled up) and have the other earth (dinse plug tucked in below there as well) so it looked like the cable run below the machine and back out, it’s good how simple things can screw people up, the old sharpening a bit of stainless to look like a tungsten got a bit boring after a while as lads would always check for a nice shiny ground “tungsten” after they went to the toilet, after that it went on to reversing the polarity on their machine, one guy resharpened his tungsten about six times before he got fed up and got another tig machine set up...

 

[wookie]

after that it went on to reversing the polarity on their machine,

One guy I worked with used to do that if you lent on his bench and started chatting to him, he would secretly swop the leads as you stood there chatting and then press the trigger on the torch. Getting a HF zap up your **** didn't half make you jump, I know he got me 2 or 3 times