One time, we were loading a 767, and things got really tight—we had about 60 bags or so to fit in, and it was a real squeeze. So, I decided to have a little fun and told one of our newbies to go fetch the roof rails for the aircraft.
We shuffled the load around for a bit, finally managed to fit everything in, and sent the plane on its way. A few hours later, it hit us that we’d completely forgotten about the newbie we’d sent on the wild goose chase. We decided to go find him and eventually tracked him down behind one of the larger maintenance hangars, with only his feet sticking out of a dumpster.
It turns out, he’d searched all over the airport and ended up in the hangars, asking the mechanics where he could find the roof rails. The mechanics, getting in on the joke, told him they had just scrapped a few and suggested he check the dumpsters. Sure enough, that’s exactly where he ended up—digging through trash, still determined to complete his “mission.”
