Crewe Works Puns

I was on the Crews' crew's crew cruise crew.

At first the curse just brought him bad luck, causing vital equipment to break and provoking frequent but small injuries to him and his crew. Soon, however, the curse darkened and diggers the man had hired to help work his claim began to die in bizarre ways.

One was killed by an African scorpion that should never have made it to Alaska, let alone have survived the cold. A second drank a gallon of the mercury used to separate the gold from the ore. A third was found with a tree growing up through his body.

The man himself who owned the claim became more and more pale. His eyes became all white. His skin began to give off an overpowering smell of sulfur. He slept all day and at night he wandered the mountain above his claim, coming back each day looking more like a beast than a man.

The curse became so bad the last worker alive ran away to the nearest town to tell the authorities what was happening at the claim.

In an attempt to save the claim owner's life and lift the curse, a priest was brought in by dogsled to perform an exorcism on the man.

A sherriff from the town came with the priest as a bodyguard.

The exorcism was long, but apparently successful. Immediately the man's color returned, the sulfur smell disappeared, and he was able to sleep through the night for the first time in six months.

After the man awoke, the sherriff immediately arrested the man and brought him back to town with the priest. Standing in front of the judge, the sherriff was asked what charge the law had against the claim owner whose life had just been so dramatically turned around.

The sherriff looked at the man, then looked back at the judge and said in a slow and rumbling voice, "Possession as a miner."

They can work with a skeleton crew

I work in an office with 2 other guys and we all get along very well. Once every other week, a cleaning crew comes in to sweep, dust, mop etc.

One of the cleaning crew had a duster out and was dusting my coworkers desk. He told the lady to hit me with the duster as I was acting silly as usual. She said she couldn't as she would go to jail for battery. I said, "No. You would go to jail for assault with a dusty weapon."

The audible groans and chuckles were fuel to my dad humoured fire.

Back a few decades, I was working in a program with a local college in the Middle East.

The name of the program for ExPats has the clever acronym of "IDEA" (hey, I said it was clever); which stands for "Inter-Departmental Educational Adjunct". It's interdepartmental because my particular specialty not only covers field geology but also paleontology and a bit of archeology thrown in for good measure. Everyone hopes to have a good IDEA...

ahem...

Well, we saddle up and head for the Dune Sea out in the west of the country, where the Precambrian, Cambrian, Silurian, Cretaceous, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene crop out and access is relatively easy and non-injurious.

Well, we caravan out, some 30 Land Cruisers, Nissan patrol, and the odd Mitsubishi Galloper strong. We all get our maps, compasses and split up into 5 or 6 special interest groups ("SIG's"); where each IDEA has his own GPS and LIDAR laser ranging apparatus. Reason being, that there are very few benchmarks out in the desert, and even those are constantly at the mercy of the shifting and ever-blowing sands.

Since we're split into groups and at any one time, ranging up to and including some 50 km2, when a real find is located, a device called the "DIME" (Digital-Interface Monitor Encoder) is attached and programmed into the GPS for location later; it is a digital sort of low-frequency transponder, developed from technology used by offshore drillers and jacket setters where benchmarks are even more transitory.

The way it works is rather simple. When something is to be marked for later retrieval, a series of wooden posts are pounded in a triangular manner around the find and the DIME is set, programmed with the GPS and attached to one or more of the posts.

That's the theory, at least.

Everything works well, especially all the hardened electronics and computer gizmos, but attaching the DIME to the stakes is the real problem. It can't be nailed, screwed or fastened with any sort of metal contrivance as that farkles the magnetic field and causes all sorts of goofy spurious signals. Zip ties don't last long in the heat and duct tape is right out. Many sites have been lost to the shifting sands this way.

Velcro doesn't work too well, as the sand fills the hooks of the receiving piece of velcro and soon renders it useless. String or fishing line work, but that's temporary (they melt). Glue or mastic are out as these are supposed to be temporary. Even plastic sleeves don't work due to the heat out

So I work construction and it was me and 2 other guys working a few days ago. Working in an unfinished home when my coworker drops a tape measure in a small floor vent. Me being the smallest guy in the crew he asked me to see if I could reach it because he can't fit his arm in to grab it. So I was able to get it but it scrapped up my arm pretty good.

Coworker says "dang, that looks like it hurt, we could've gotten it another way. You didn't need to do that."

I reply with "It's okay, desperate times call for desperate measures."

Much grunting ensued.

Basically set decoration, we had a small crew. A lot of the actors and the rest of the crew were confused who was in charge of those items. Luckily, Jason was a reliable, honest guy. In fact, he was one of the most honest, dependable people I knew on set.

So that evening before we had dinner together, I called Jason to the center, and thanked him for the quality of work that he'd put out so far, and I said "Props to Jason."

I was at work and an older gentleman came in with a Brookwood Golf windbreaker on.

"Oh, do you golf at brookwood?" "And I've worked there for many years" "You know I'm a scratch golfer!" "Are you?" "Yeah, I swing my club and just scratch my head."

Groans from my entire crew, laughs from all the grandfathers.