Working healthcare, I tell all other healthcare / first responders “I hope you have a boring shift” (every once in a while a younger person objects, but they are almost immediately hushed / corrected by their senior coworker).
But it occurs to me that many office / sedentary workers might not find this to be a blessing. What would I say to a desk worker that might be equivalent?
Working in maintenance, automation to be specific, and I always leave the site with “I hope I never see you again!” to the client.
I tell this to my Psych patients too (depending on rapport obvs).
What area of the world do you live in? In my neck of the woods wishing a “boring shift” or a “quiet shift” is considered a curse and will bring about all the crazy cases.
We typically wish each other a “safe shift” instead of a “quiet shift” here.
Working in a restaurant the word quiet will not leave my mouth as long as I’m working, and the moment someone else says it I know we’re about to have a horrible shift
I would never say quiet, hence boring. Also reminds people that a shift that drags a little is better than an interesting one.
“Don’t let your knuckles be whiter than the clouds below you.”
I climb communication towers, and let the new guys know not to over grip the tower. Trust in your harness.
What’s the downside of over gripping?
Muscle fatigue in the forearms and hands. And it also means, don’t be scared. Trust your training and gear.
Ah, makes sense! Perhaps a dumb question, but I was curious for an answer from someone with experience vs assuming, so thank you :)
not at all qualified to answer but id imagine it tires your hands out worse which is a problem with the hundreds of rungs they need to climb
“Hope there are no notes.” Audio Post-production before client playbacks.
May your code run on the second try. Because if it works the first time, that’s suspicious. And if it fails the second time, that’s frustrating.
Unless you didn’t change anything. Then it’s unsettling.
It’s that damn compiler again.
If it fails the second time, that’s reproducibility.
If it fails randomly then starts working again the next day without any changes, that’s when you get yourself a headache. And it took someone’s wife, a year later, to figure out the failures only happen on Tuesdays.
One of my favorites is still “we can’t send email more than 500 miles.”
That was a FASCINATING read, thank you.
Not officially, but I’ve definitely said to coworkers “I hope your meetings are cancelled”
I mean the classic is actors saying “break a leg” - which actors actually take very seriously.
Back in the Klingon Navy we just said “die with honor”.
good luck fuckface!
I worked in an ironworks and that’s how most shifts greeted each other.
- Happy landings
- Keep the blue side up
- May you have fair weather and clear skies
Blue skies and safe landings.
- Planes
- planes
- Planes
I think someone fly’s planes
One that I read that I found interesting is in the busking community is “fat hats!”. Since they sometimes use a hat to collect donations, it’s an expression that you hope they collect a lot of money.
One thing that was common in my EMS organization.
Don’t say the ‘Q’ word!
Q=quiet. If you say 'it’s a quiet night, you’re sure to get slammed.
I once told my EMT student that if he said “quiet” one more time I was throwing him off my truck and sending him home. He laughed. I was not joking. I’d been slammed all week and it was a pretty chill day and I needed the break.
Instead of telling co-workers goodbye in EMS, it’s common to say “be safe”
May you have no teacher dreams. Teacher dreams, common among teachers, generally have you going to class unprepared or having a class out of control.
Sounds a bit like server nightmares. You’re fully aware you have gone home for the day and even in the midst of a good night’s rest. But wait! Table eleven had asked for a side of Ranch and they are still there waiting for it all these hours later!
Ha! Up until “table eleven”, I was sure it was going to be an IT thing.
I’ve done both.
It’s the same as realizing you swapped cables in ports 14 and 15 and they’re gonna pull one tonight thinking it’s the other.
Being chased by little children nthwt will tear your soul apart hellraiser style
Hope your Friday is read-only. Because no one wants to ship code changes on a Friday. (No one will be there on the weekend to babysit changes)
Yet. And it’s the weekend when they want to do all the production patches. “Well sure, we can assign the last people to step back when asked, the least senior or adept, and have ZERO backup when they fuck up your prod server. See ya Monday!”
Not my line of work, but I think that acting’s “break a leg” is a pretty oddball benediction.
They have a bunch of weird superstitions. Like how you can’t say the word “Macbeth” in a theatre. Something about whistling backstage too?
Also, the ghost light, which is a lamp on stage or back stage that they leave on 24/7 so ghosts can use the stage at night when everyone is gone. Or something.
Huh. Never heard of the ghost light thing. Neat! Thanks for sharing it!
Wikipedia says that it’s got some weird traditions around it, but that it has a real safety rationale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_light_(theatre)
A ghost light is an electric light that is left energised on the stage of a theatre when the theatre is unoccupied and would otherwise be completely dark.
The practical use of a ghost light is for safety. A ghost light enables one to navigate the theatre to find the lighting control console and to avoid accidents such as falling into the orchestra pit and stepping on or tripping over set pieces.
The superstitious have various justifications for the ghost light in relation to the supernatural. A popular theatrical superstition holds that every theatre has a ghost, and some theatres have traditions to appease ghosts that reach far back into their history. For example, the Palace Theatre, London keeps two seats in its balcony permanently bolted open to provide seating for the theatre ghosts.
Many theatres that were forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic renewed the tradition of ghost lights as a way of indicating the theatres would re-open.
EDIT: Actually, this is a good candidate for !wikipedia@lemmy.world. Gonna go submit it there!
Whistling comes from when whistling was used to communicate to stagehands to lower and lift the various backdops that used sand bags as counterweights. Whistling could cause someone up in the grid to send something down that was heavy, injuring or killing people.
The thing about the Scottish play that you mentioned (which is what most theatre folks call it) is more of an actual superstition, but may well stem from the fact that the play has a lot in it that can cause injury if not done safely, so the thought is that a lot of productions of the play can feel cursed, so that turned into referencing the play feeling cursed.
Is the Scottish play superstition only for theaters which are currently rehearsing/performing that play, or is it an all-encompassing sort of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named situation, where the proper title is never utilized if it can be avoided?
The latter; and it’s taken seriously by many, less seriously by many others. For some, they will never utter the name; others simply don’t say it in a theatre. My wife is well into the second camp, and for example, while explaining it to kids in kids camp at the theatre, was quite willing to say the name.
For me, my main basically hard-and-fast rule is not saying it to actors or techs during rehearsals or productions, but that is mainly because for the ones who DO believe in it, it might make them nervous enough to actually do something that they would attribute to the curse. Placebos have real effects. :)
Fascinating. The first time I ran across the superstition was in a high school English class, in which the teacher would wheel out the TV and her Slings and Arrows dvds whenever she didn’t want to do the lesson. I don’t recall much (other than it being quite funny), but the “curse” of the play (and it’s legitimacy) came up frequently over the course of one of the seasons.
Neat!
