I work at a place that manufactures composite items. We have a lot of scrap pieces of rigid foam, honeycomb, and other items laying about. Some of them are trimmings and leftovers and over-age material that has essentially no value, so nobody really cares what happens once it’s trimmed off or discarded as over-age.
We also have a practical joker in one of the support shops.
[Joker] had been running in and out of the office all morning. Shortly before lunch, he came in bearing a seasonal cake on a multilayer piece of corrugated cardboard wrapped in foil — your standard discardable potluck/party serving platter.
We didn’t realize the significance of the repeated trips to the office until later; he was waiting for a time when the minimum number of people were present.
I walked in just in time to see [Coworker #1] try to cut the cake… and fail. The knife refused to cut; it was like he was trying to cut the Formica tabletop!
Everybody laughed, and I realized what was going on: [Joker] had taken a piece of rigid foam and covered it with the polyester “spackle” that the production shop used to smooth out defects and joints, smoothed it into place with a wet knife (standard practice), and then made up a wax-paper icing bag to decorate the “cake” with colored spackle.
It actually looked pretty good, aside from having a mild smell of polyester — but most of the building smelled of polyester most of the time, so that wasn’t especially noticeable.
Then, [Coworker #2] walked in.
Coworker #1: “Oh, you’re just in time! Here, you cut it.”
And he handed [Coworker #2] the knife.
Repeat until almost everyone in the office had tried to cut the thing. ([Coworker #3] didn’t, and I didn’t; we had seen someone else try.)
[Joker] had gotten pretty much everyone he wanted to at that point, so he didn’t care what happened to the fake cake… so we took it across to the group meeting we were going to attend.
We noted the number of a pay phone downstairs — this was before cellphones were common — and I went upstairs and waited until most people had cleared out to the standard pre-meeting restroom break, then called the phone and said, “Now!”
They brought the cake up into the office and asked someone to cut it “so we’d be ready for the meeting”. We got about half the crew to try to cut the thing, including our manager! One of the women said:
Woman: “Oh, don’t use a knife; use dental floss! It cuts much cleaner!”
It does, too — if you’re cutting a real cake and not a polyester fake cake! Of course, the floss didn’t cut at all!
The really funny part was that most of the victims were indignant — until the next victim showed up. Then, they’d say, “Here, you cut it”!
Once we’d gotten everyone in our work group, we didn’t know what to do with the “cake”…
…so our manager packed it off to a manager’s meeting he needed to attend!
When last sighted, a third-level manager was packing it off to another meeting. I suspect that cake circulated through the company all the way to the holiday!
Oh, and I suggested to [Joker] that if he decided to do this again, he should mist the fake cake with lemon oil so it would smell better.
Related:
The Cake Is A Lie, Part 10
The Cake Is A Lie, Part 9
The Cake Is A Lie, Part 8
The Cake Is A Lie, Part 7
The Cake Is A Lie, Part 6
