Cartoon Man posted:

Miloshe posted:

I just caught up with the thread since the "In the Rod we Trust" post. Holy poo poo.

It jarred loose a memory of mine from MCT (marine combat training) 15 years ago when I was jolted awake in the middle of the night. I was sleeping on an iso mat on a top rack in a dark, ball-sweat-infused, and cold quonset hut waiting to be assigned a company. For the uninformed, you graduate bootcamp and after 10 days leave, if you're not infantry, you go to Marine Camping Trip. You're as boot as boot can be.

Door slams and out of the darkness I hear: "CLP is to be applied to your weapon only! It is not to be used as a personal lubricant!" Bookended by another door slam.

So a few days later I asked my new training Sergeant what happened. This was in the days of flip phones. He popped his phone out and within a millisecond showed me pictures of a dick that looked like three bocce balls crammed into a sock attempting to cry. It's like my own bespoke goatse. My eyes are forever tarnished.

Thump! posted:

Wow, my version of that from MCT was some guys using icy hot and getting chemical burns on their dicks

Dillbag posted:

From the OSHA thread

Lemniscate Blue posted:

When I worked in the show department at a Medieval Times, one of the hazing rituals when a squire began training as a knight was for them to be peer pressured into putting healthy application of Icy Hot on their own scrotum.

The hazing when someone performed in the show as a knight for the first time was worse (and crossed the line into sexual assault, looking back), but thank god that had been stamped down on by management as soon as they became aware of it and I never had to take part. Even that horrible company knew that hazing was a recipe for disaster.

The Navy was positively gentle by comparison.

Dillbag posted:

From the OSHA thread

Lemniscate Blue posted:

When I worked in the show department at a Medieval Times, one of the hazing rituals when a squire began training as a knight was for them to be peer pressured into putting healthy application of Icy Hot on their own scrotum.

The hazing when someone performed in the show as a knight for the first time was worse (and crossed the line into sexual assault, looking back), but thank god that had been stamped down on by management as soon as they became aware of it and I never had to take part. Even that horrible company knew that hazing was a recipe for disaster.

The Navy was positively gentle by comparison.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

When I worked in the show department at a Medieval Times, one of the hazing rituals when a squire began training as a knight was for them to be peer pressured into putting healthy application of Icy Hot on their own scrotum.

The hazing when someone performed in the show as a knight for the first time was worse (and crossed the line into sexual assault, looking back), but thank god that had been stamped down on by management as soon as they became aware of it and I never had to take part. Even that horrible company knew that hazing was a recipe for disaster.

The Navy was positively gentle by comparison.

Dillbag posted:

From the OSHA thread

Icon Of Sin posted:

Wasn't expecting "SF soldier goes on leave to get in gunfight", but here we are regardless!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/26/us/shooting-bowling-alley-illinois/index.html

Killed 3 old people, wounded another + 2 teens that were there randomly. He's out of 7th group, 3rd battalion (so of course there's a potential Florida Man angle to it).

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Holy poo poo. Please don't say it's live.

PopeCrunch posted:

Jesus. What do you even do then, who do you even call. AAA won't touch that poo poo, the military just spent a lot of money and effort chucking that Problem Tube in the general direction of 'away' so they might not want it back?

I would call a used car lot and get a different car, because that one belongs to the Devil now.

Scratch Monkey posted:

All I need to know about medieval times I learned from Cable Guy

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Ok you gotta tell it then if it's that bad.

Grem posted:

Oh. My. God. Huge Medieval Times fan here! Please tell all the stories..

Skelaboo posted:

Please go on.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Jeez, okay.

I worked there from late 2000 to early 2003, so the workplace culture at that castle has surely changed, though I doubt corporate culture has. No really long involved stories, just a bunch of little things as I think of them.

You got hired as a squire first. There were eight to ten squires on the payroll at any given point. Squires were responsible for getting weapons and other stuff ready before the show: swords and axes etc were made of titanium (lightweight and made really impressive sparks) so you grind the slivers off the edges, pound the aluminum plate shields back into shape and repaint them, pre-cut balsa dowels into lance tips so they shatter impressively and paint them, that sort of thing. Make sure everything is in the right place on the arena walls and everywhere else. That took a couple hours generally if you do everything right.

Squires got paid a little over $8 an hour, as I recall. Depending on the season you might get 30 hours or you might get overtime if it's a busy time of year. We had matinee shows Wednesdays and Fridays for school field trips. Evening shows ran Tuesdays through Sundays, and on a Friday or Saturday they might be busy enough to run two shows. Fridays with a matinee and a double were awful, and I think once or twice we ran a triple on a Saturday, which was a goddamn nightmare.

During a show, a squire was assigned to one of the six knights. There wasn't a rotation or anything, it was pretty random, but some of the knights had a squire that they liked to work with and would ask for them more often than not. The head knight placed colors on a whim so that any color had a chance of being a champion, but not every knight knew all the fights so the champion was typically one of the senior guys. A squire was there to hand his knight the weapons he needed for that fight, that sort of thing. We placed the rails for the joust and took them down, set up the games. We also scooped horseshit. A lot of horseshit.

(But don't make it, y'know, a thing. I got yelled at by management once for showboating with the poo poo bucket. I thought it was funny as hell.)

If after a couple months working there you proved to generally be competent and not a bag of rear end, you'd start getting trained in stunt falls and the basics of the company's particular brand of stage combat: big, flashy movements that could be seen from the upper seats. Your first actual fight was a short exchange during the climactic fight with the bad guy (this changed from time to time - when I started it was the Black Knight, then they wrote a new show where it was the wicked Lord Marshall). He'd have a handful of dudes in masks with him (squires and knights who'd already lost and done a quick-change) and they'd have a fight that ended with the Champion beating the bad guy, saving the day, hooray.

My first time in that fight I was too far out of place and got loving rammed from behind by a horse named Muerte, who was notorious for doing that if you were in his way. Most riders couldn't stop him if they wanted to. A little warning beforehand would have been nice.

You'd also get a little basic riding training, mostly so you could warm up the horses backstage before the show. The head horse trainer was a complete bastard who I was told was allowed to be because he was one of the top twenty trainers of Andalusians in the world.

If you continued to show evidence that you weren't a complete chucklefuck and got halfway decent at that stuff, you'd start to train to do one of the fights, and learn to joust and do the games and fall and all that. Convince the head knight that you wouldn't embarrass yourself or hurt somebody, and you'd get put in the show, usually for a matinee or the first of a double show. If a squire was performing as a knight, he'd get junior knight pay for the two hours he was in that show, a whopping $10.50 an hour. Which now that I do the math means five bucks. drat.

After your first show as a knight, you got hazed by having the other knights ambush you backstage, duct-tape your hands and feet, pull your "chainmail" tights down, and spraypaint your rear end whatever color you wore. The couple times it happened while I was there the guys got their junk painted too, because this kind of poo poo escalates. A new head knight and a couple complaints put an end to the physical hazing about mid-way through my working there.

I don't want to turn this into the Medieval Times Story Hour but there's a couple other things I could type up later if people want, including how I got hired and why I should have known better immediately, some of the absolute mutants that I worked with, and what a hosed up company it was behind the scenes.

rndmnmbr posted:

Relaying this story my morning cook just told me:

"Outside of Kabul, we convinced some hajji to get us some liquor. Around sundown, we saw them drop it outside the wire, so me and my buddy go hustle it inside. gently caress watch, we're getting drunk.

At formation the next morning we're still feeling it hard. Sgt decides the two of us get poo poo burning detail for it. We're still buzzed, so it seemed like a good idea to talk poo poo to the mortar team.

" Y'all motherfucker can't hit poo poo."

"gently caress you we can hit anything we need.

"Bet you can't hit these poo poo barrels, and I mean inside the things not just blow up beside them. Bet you all our leftover liquor."

"Drag them downrange."

So we did, and the mortar team nailed them dead center, vaporizing the barrels and poo poo in a huge cloud. The CO stepped out of his hooch, and started shouting "What's that smell?"

We both lost rank that day, and had to give our liquor to the mortar team and find new poo poo barrels. Best day at work ever."

Wasabi the J posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnJI0Zz2Qh8

Anil Dikshit posted:

gently caress you just post

Anil Dikshit posted:

gently caress you just post

Anil Dikshit posted:

gently caress you just post

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

So they could hit poo poo.

Anil Dikshit posted:

gently caress you

Lemniscate Blue posted:

All right, keep your shorts on.

I did theatre in high school, but I wasn't really comfortable on stage and preferred the tech side of things. I wasn't in the headspace for more school, so after I learned this by crashing and burning out of community college I was looking for something in tech theatre and decided to fill out an application with the tech department at Medieval Times, since they must use light and sound people, right?

I'd been growing out my hair and beard for about a year in a typical post-high-school-goon sort of way by this point, so when I was in the security office filling out an application some guy with 80s rock hair wearing tights walked by and saw me.

"Is that an application? What are you applying for?"

"Uh, yeah. Tech department. I did tech theatre in high school, and-"

"You look like a squire. Put down 'squire'," and he walked off towards what I later learned was the smoke pit.

So I did. A few minutes later he came back and grabbed my completed application and vanished, came back with another guy who looked like a variation on the same theme, and we all went out to the smoke pit while they looked it over.

They asked me literally only one question before offering me the job, and that was: "Could you pass a piss test now, or do you need a few weeks to clean up first?"

I was clean, so I was hired.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

They asked me literally only one question before offering me the job, and that was: "Could you pass a piss test now, or do you need a few weeks to clean up first?"

I was clean, so I was hired.

Wasabi the J posted:

Lmao you got enlisted into medieval times

Lemniscate Blue posted:

All right, keep your shorts on.

I did theatre in high school, but I wasn't really comfortable on stage and preferred the tech side of things. I wasn't in the headspace for more school, so after I learned this by crashing and burning out of community college I was looking for something in tech theatre and decided to fill out an application with the tech department at Medieval Times, since they must use light and sound people, right?

I'd been growing out my hair and beard for about a year in a typical post-high-school-goon sort of way by this point, so when I was in the security office filling out an application some guy with 80s rock hair wearing tights walked by and saw me.

"Is that an application? What are you applying for?"

"Uh, yeah. Tech department. I did tech theatre in high school, and-"

"You look like a squire. Put down 'squire'," and he walked off towards what I later learned was the smoke pit.

So I did. A few minutes later he came back and grabbed my completed application and vanished, came back with another guy who looked like a variation on the same theme, and we all went out to the smoke pit while they looked it over.

They asked me literally only one question before offering me the job, and that was: "Could you pass a piss test now, or do you need a few weeks to clean up first?"

I was clean, so I was hired.

Hedenius posted:

Anil Dikshit posted:

gently caress you just post

Wasabi the J posted:

Lmao you got enlisted into medieval times

bulletsponge13 posted:

That place sounds dumber than the Infantry.