From the Archives: Chads Away
Originally posted December 15, 2004
El Bandito at Baby Wings is a retired Army intel troop. He brought back some old memories with his tales of newbie hazing and General Officer tagging. At Air Force sites, we didn't pester the Generals much because we were too busy messing with each other. I've had my cover (hat) frozen at least once and I'd done my share of practical jokes. The best joke ammo in the old days was the little yellow chads left over from the secure 5-level tape teletype machines. With a rubber band and a note card you would rig a drawer to dump a handful of chad onto the opener's lap.
The midnight shift was the best time to plant jokes, and my office (Training) was working straight mids. While I was away at NCO school for a week, my trainees launched a campaign against a little stuffed bear owned by the NCO in charge. It started out with chaining him to a stapler with paper clips, taping his mouth shut, a taping a razor blade to his paw. "Introducing: Bondage Bear!" the sign read. From there, it got meaner and I'm sure it wasn't just the airman trainees doing it. The bear was stuffed head-first into a cup of grape juice slovenly left behind by the NCOIC. The resulting purple head led to the next night's prank...hanging him from the ceiling with a suicide note pinned to him. The last straw was when the bear was frozen in a water/chad slurry inside the Office Chief's candy dish. The chief put her foot down, not only because it was her dish, but because the idiot NCOIC put the bear in the microwave to melt the ice and started a fire on the ops floor when the bear's metal parts started sparking in the oven. I was a brand-new SSgt at the time and I'm sure that incident had a lot to do with the chief "losing" my end-of-tour decoration.
One of the legendary pranks was when somebody climbed up to the movie marquee our ops building used to welcome visitors and posted, "Merry Chistmas, Joseph P. White, wherever you are." Joe White was the grunt to defected to North Korea that year.
My own crowning achievement was replacing the portrait of a space-suited U-2 pilot in flight with this from my Ferret Calendar at midnight 31 Mar 2001:
The Ops Officer didn't notice it for three days.
h/t to American Warmonger.
El Bandito at Baby Wings is a retired Army intel troop. He brought back some old memories with his tales of newbie hazing and General Officer tagging. At Air Force sites, we didn't pester the Generals much because we were too busy messing with each other. I've had my cover (hat) frozen at least once and I'd done my share of practical jokes. The best joke ammo in the old days was the little yellow chads left over from the secure 5-level tape teletype machines. With a rubber band and a note card you would rig a drawer to dump a handful of chad onto the opener's lap.
The midnight shift was the best time to plant jokes, and my office (Training) was working straight mids. While I was away at NCO school for a week, my trainees launched a campaign against a little stuffed bear owned by the NCO in charge. It started out with chaining him to a stapler with paper clips, taping his mouth shut, a taping a razor blade to his paw. "Introducing: Bondage Bear!" the sign read. From there, it got meaner and I'm sure it wasn't just the airman trainees doing it. The bear was stuffed head-first into a cup of grape juice slovenly left behind by the NCOIC. The resulting purple head led to the next night's prank...hanging him from the ceiling with a suicide note pinned to him. The last straw was when the bear was frozen in a water/chad slurry inside the Office Chief's candy dish. The chief put her foot down, not only because it was her dish, but because the idiot NCOIC put the bear in the microwave to melt the ice and started a fire on the ops floor when the bear's metal parts started sparking in the oven. I was a brand-new SSgt at the time and I'm sure that incident had a lot to do with the chief "losing" my end-of-tour decoration.
One of the legendary pranks was when somebody climbed up to the movie marquee our ops building used to welcome visitors and posted, "Merry Chistmas, Joseph P. White, wherever you are." Joe White was the grunt to defected to North Korea that year.
My own crowning achievement was replacing the portrait of a space-suited U-2 pilot in flight with this from my Ferret Calendar at midnight 31 Mar 2001:
The Ops Officer didn't notice it for three days.
h/t to American Warmonger.
posted by Cowboy Blob @ 11:56 AM
2 Comments:
At 9:14 PM,
Anonymous said…
You and me...
We knew chads before Florida made them the media "word of the day".
I used to own a Model 19 rig, I thing its military designation was TT-7 FG.
It wa snothing short of miraculous to watch and hear in action...
At 10:05 PM,
Anonymous said…
Ha! We had a newbie stand on his chair and call out the time every minute because he was led to believe that the "ZULU clock" was broken. It got really annoying after about 2-3 minutes, with this guy yelling out, "It's twenty-three oh-five, zulu!"... then "oh-six" and "oh-seven." It must have gone on for at least 10-15 minutes before someone snapped and told him to shut up.
And another great moment -- I was USAF working in a joint intel center. The Army guys were nuts. One guy got under the floor tiles [with all the wires and the rats!] and resurfaced right behind a one-star who was touring the ops floor. He finished his tour with shiny tin-foil spurs on his boots. Everyone did a good job of keeping a straight face when he popped-up like a prarrie dog.
jp
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