Why Is It....

...that people talk endless shit about trailer parks, but if you shrink the trailers to half size, cram twice as many in, and call it “a campground”, people line up and pay good money to get in?

Thought For The Day

“Maybe you're your brothers keeper not by code or creed or canon, but the simple hope that someone will be yours”

“West Allis” - Matthew Grimm

Pranks A Lot!

I have had the fortune/misfortune to work with some of the most outstanding pranksters and jokesters ever.

I have even been accused of being one of them, but what meager skills I have, I learned at the feet of the masters. Al, George and Stanley were the Obi-wans. I was just an aspiring Jedi.

At the steel mill, when I found the day shift guys had left their coffee cupboard unlocked, I found a sleeve of styrofoam cups and suggested poking holes in some of them. Al immediately pointed out the error of my ways and admonished me to “...go get a piece of welding wire and run it through all of them”. Silly me and my small time, chickenshit thinking.

He also was the one who taught me the art of subtle, long cons and gaslighting.
One of the day shift guys used to leave his hard hat on top of his tool box, when he went home. Al would tighten it up one notch, every night.

I walked in the office one night to find him sitting at the foreman’s desk and linking all his paper clips together. He explained he hoped that one day, when the foreman was having a bad day, he’d go to reach for a paperclip....and finding the whole damned box in one long chain would just send him over the edge.

That was all well and good, but at my next place of employment, I learned to take it to another level, from George and Stanley. The pranks were extremely clever, highly original...and pretty relentless. To give you an idea of what life was like in the toolroom, one of the kids on the shop floor, working with Garry, gestured toward the toolroom and said “What do they do in there?” He replied “oh, don’t go in there....they’ll make you cry”. BUT...there were unwritten ground rules. You weren’t allowed to do anything where someone would get hurt, you weren’t allowed to do anything that would screw up what they were working on and doing something that would ruin something -like stain someone’s clothes- was verboten. But that was ok - it just made it that much more challenging.

From George, I learned the art of social engineering - creating a prank based on the predictability of the victim’s response.

He was known for putting things in your lunch bag, if you left it unprotected on your bench, when getting ready to go home at quitting time - particularly something he knew you’d have to remember to bring back, like one of your tools. You’d get home, empty the bag, find your calipers or something and go “....aw shit....”

My favorite of his gags involved Stanley’s penchant for eating sardines. When he was finished, he’d throw the can in the trash. George would then go and retrieve the can and hide it in the boss’s office. Eventually, the boss would trace the smell and find the offending tin. Of course, the only guy who ate sardines caught hell for it. Now this would have been a small potatoes kind of a prank, but for the change of tactic that followed. Astute student of human nature that he was, George did this two or three times, but figured if he pulled the same gag again, it would start to look suspicious. He switched up the game - the next time Stanley threw out his empty can, George took it out and put it on the floor, in front of the trash can, which was just outside the office door. Exactly as he predicted, the boss happened to walk out the door, saw the sardine can on the floor and bitched at...Stanley: “Stanley! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you even put this thing in the trash???” I was in awe. 

We got a die in from a vendor that needed work done. We did the work and put the die back in the wooden box that it came in, for return shipment. I watched George put the lid back on with about 175 drywall screws. Then he went and got two or three three inch ones that damned near killed the screw gun putting them in. Eager to participate and show what I had learned, I went and got one screw with a straight slot. Some poor bastard, somewhere must have cursed us for days, after trying to get that box open.

George was the one who told me that if you want someone to believe something, let them think it was their idea. From him I learned that nosy people were almost too easy as targets - just give them something to be nosy about. For months on end, I would clean every chip up around my area before going home. I put hash marks on my machine so that I could put the table back in the exact same place and zeroed the readout, at the end of the day. Hopefully that fed the night shift guy’s suspicions that I didn’t do anything all day. Sadly, I never found out if this paid off. My making a fake invoice for a ten thousand dollar TT bike and hiding it in some papers on the desk did, though. My intended target snooped through the papers (I left the top, with official looking letterhead sticking out), exactly as I predicted he would and immediately went and started gossiping about how I’d bought a “ten thousand dollar bicycle!” (Everyone else was in on the gag).

But Stanley....Stanley was the master. Nothing escaped his notice and everything was a potential target. If you saw him walking around and giggling to himself, it was a pretty good indication that you should check your shit, because it was guaranteed he’d fucked with something.

Who but Stanley would realize that a pneumatic cylinder could also be used like a syringe? He submerged a cylinder in water and pulled the piston back, filling the cylinder with water. He then made a bracket to hook it to the cabinet door. His only miscalculation was that the victim -me, in this case- was shorter than him. When I opened the cabinet, the blast of water shot harmlessly over my shoulder. Instantly realizing who was responsible, I turned to him and said “....nice try...”

Gene got a new oilstone. He took it, with the transparent plastic sleeve it came in, thumbtacked it to the window frame and filled the sleeve full of oil, for the stone to soak up. Every night, after he went home, Stanley would empty the oil. The next morning, Gene would refill the sleeve and marvel at how much oil the stone had absorbed... This went on for weeks.

It was Stanley who came up with the idea of putting a bolt and washer in the end of one of the collets in George’s collet rack. When George tried to pull the collet out of it’s hole in the rack, to use it...it only came out as far as the washer and stopped dead.

Stanley was the author - but not the perpetrator- of the “sooting-up Jay’s earmuffs” gag. (This involved using the torch with acetylene only, no oxygen, which makes a nice, sooty flame). The unsuspecting victim walked around for a couple of hours with big, black rings around his ears, on both sides of his head.

...and it went on and on....

With mentors like these, is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?

Touchstones and Nostalgia

Writing my post about my “abnormal” lack of need for social interaction made me wonder how many other things I lack in common with “normal” folks.

In no particular order,

Holidays. Everyone seems to have pleasant memories of Christmases or birthdays that they draw upon and perhaps try to recreate. Not me. I half-ass remember putting up a Christmas tree, up until I was about eight or so. I remember a Christmas at my grandparents’ when I was five, when I got the car carrier toy truck I really wanted, but that’s about it. At some point, we just stopped celebrating holidays. No explanation given. I’m sure there wasn’t a lot of extra money in the budget for such things, but we did ...nothing. No special meal, no decorations, no dessert, not even a “Happy Birthday”. Thus, I have nothing upon which to base any feelings of nostalgia. It’s just a blank page. I remember going outside to play one Christmas Day and no one was around - it was like the Zombie Apocalypse. I realized that for me, it was just another day.

Television and movies. Not having a television made for some painfully awkward social moments. Other kids were watching (and talking about) Dark Shadows and Championship Wrestling. I was reading a book. For the sake of social self-preservation, I got good at faking familiarity - even today I remember Barnabas Collins and Crusher Verdu, but I have no context in which to put them. They’re just names.

Movies were never really much of a thing - but then I don’t think they were, even for my friends. It was much later in life that this became much more pronounced. (I think the advent of movie rentals really pushed this to the forefront). I’ve realized people can talk endlessly about whatever movies they’ve watched...and as far as I’m concerned, they may as well be speaking Martian. I have no patience for sitting and passively staring at a screen and I think it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older.

Celebrities. I’ve never understood this one. I dimly remember music, movie and sports idols, but they never meant anything to me. The current trend for people to be famous just for being famous makes even less sense. “Who are these people and why do I care?”

Comfort food. As an unrepentant foodie, this should be a thing with me, but it’s not. “Comfort food” has been described as “...like the tomato soup your mom gave you when you got sick, to help you feel better”. Hell, my mother never even gave me an aspirin when I was sick, just banished me to the back bedroom so my coughing wouldn’t keep her awake. So no, I have no particular dish that I wax nostalgic over. I miss my dad’s breakfasts and his homemade applesauce - but that’s a manifestation of missing him. Maybe that’s close enough?

Family vacations. Another big “nope”. Everyone seems to have fond memories of vacations, picnics or camping trips. I got nothin’. Other kids went to Disney or weekended at Old Forge. Those places might as well have been on Venus for all I knew. We weren’t exactly wealthy, but it seems we did nothing as a family, regardless of cost. About the only thing I remember is having a picnic/cookout in a park once (prior to age seven, when we moved here). It started raining, so we took shelter in the car. To our great amusement, the blackbirds were in no way deterred by the rain and helped themselves to the hamburger and hot dog buns - right through the plastic bags. That was it...up until I was fourteen or fifteen. My mom went somewhere on a weekend retreat and my dad grabbed some picnic supplies and a couple of office mates and we had a picnic at Lake Delta. I was floored. It was completely out of character for him and unprecedented. It was only afterward that I wondered how many other things he didn’t do, because she had no interest. A sobering realization, to be sure.

Now I know you’re thinking “Aw Jesus, he’s whining about his childhood again....” but that’s not the case.....really! It’s more the case of me seeing these things as an outsider and not really comprehending them. The saying “You can’t miss what you never had” applies perfectly here. I don’t feel depraved - er- deprived. It’s a weird state of dispassionate observation. I think maybe I see things more clearly, for not owning rose colored glasses. I don’t wax nostalgic about Happy Days and the Fifties, for example because I realize that it was a great time...if you were a white male -  women were still supposed to be subservient and black people were supposed to be seen and not heard. While I understand the postwar euphoria and the astounding growth of America, it was also the days of Fallout Shelters and “duck and cover”. So I see the balance.

In some ways, I find it liberating.  I’m not bound by tradition, not burdened by nostalgia. I can celebrate - or not - in a way that has meaning for me, not Hallmark. If I want to celebrate Dio de los Muertos I can. (And have!)