Railroaders' Nostalgia > A Snake in the Drawer

   While we are on the subject of practical jokes, (keep 'em coming),  this remends me of an incident back in the 70's when I was working as a conductor on the old SP Palmdale-Bakersfield pool.
   We were in the siding at Bealville on the west slope of the Tehachapi grade on a Bakersfield-bound westbound.  It was a fine late spring day.  The eastbound we were meeting was going by the caboose as we started to move.  I was out on the caboose platform rolling the eastbound, when my rear brakeman swung on the caboose holding a little gopher snake.
   I guess he thought he was going to scare me with it, but snakes don't bother me in the slightest.
   "What are you going to do with it?" I asked.
   "I'm going to put it in the stationary drawer for the Valley conductor to find."
   "Like hell you are!" I replied. "Either take it home and make a pet out of it or let it go.  You'll give someone a heart attack playing around like that!"
   We were still moving slow so he tossed it off in the deep grass and we went on in to Bakersfield.  We get to Bakersfield, and guess who our relief conductor was... Rodney Howard, a nice old man, but extremely exitable and nervous.  My brakeman said, "Yeah, I think you might have been right about the heart attack."

Brian Black
Castle Rock, CO

Reminds me of an incident I witnessed. When working my part time job as a runner on the NY Stock Exchange one of the phone clerks had hidden a live large spider in the drawer of a member who was deathly afraid of spiders. Long story short some hours later when he opened the drawer it caused him to go into a deep fainting spell. EMT's were called and worked over him for about 10 minutes until he came out of it. 

    The phone clerk was fired and banned from the industry thereafter. 

   Ross Rowland 

I took a fake spider to work and showed it to one of the switchman and knowing ahead of time he would jump and run .Sure enough,even after I told him it was fake, he continued to jump and run.He was a younger guy that dished out lots pranks  and he accepted the incident with grace.Bill Webb



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/20 10:38 by spider1319.

co614 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Reminds me of an incident I witnessed. When
> working my part time job as a runner on the NY
> Stock Exchange one of the phone clerks had hidden
> a live large spider in the drawer of a member who
> was deathly afraid of spiders. Long story short
> some hours later when he opened the drawer it
> caused him to go into a deep fainting spell. EMT's
> were called and worked over him for about 10
> minutes until he came out of it. 
>
>     The phone clerk was fired and banned from
> the industry thereafter. 
>
>    Ross Rowland 

Could you imagine if the person had passed away? I love practical jokes but they can backfire if not thought through.