The first thing that came to my mind was car repair.

This one wasn’t one purpose. I went to a shop for an oil change and 10,000 point inspection or whatever they called it. I knew one of my headlight bulbs went out a week before, but when I got the inspection report, it said everything was fine. I went to the shop manager and asked him to confirm that the mechanic had checked everything on the report. I didn’t blame him for the oversight, but he was kind of a dick when I pointed it out and had him do everything again until they found the problem.

Also, my dad always wrote the date on his air filters when he put them in because mechanics would often keep a dirty one laying around just to show it to customers and tell them that it was their filter and it needed replaced. He always got a kick out of calling them out on that kind of bullshit.

Turtle.

My 11th grade English teacher would hand back essay assignments with grades at the top and no markings throughout. I tended to get high but not perfect grades, but the impetuousness of youth got the better of me. In my next essay, which I wrote normally, I wrote the word “turtle” in the middle of a sentence somewhere in the middle of each main body paragraph. Just somewhere in the middle of a sentence I turtle copy pasted the word “turtle.”

That paper made a 94. There was no mention of it. I’m pretty sure she just graded on who she liked and I wasn’t a problem.

Not me, but an old coworker used a similar trick to see if reviewers were actually reading his documentation. Before sending a large document out for review he would add a sentence to some random paragraph stating, “If you read this, come to my office and I will give you $20.” Surprisingly few people ever came for the money.

When I first heard about the brown M&M thing, I thought it was just celebrities being petty, or maybe a joke. Years later, when I heard Roth’s explanation, I thought it was absolute genius.

I use this VH trick at work occasionally for fun just to see if anyone reads my service report. “Your boilers are about to fail in the middle of winter but don’t worry I sprinkled pixie dust on them and did a rain dance”. Never heard from anyone not even my boss. One customer I used to write “Does anyone ever read these? If so call me at (phone number)”. I handed it to the man in charge, he pretended to read it, signed it and handed it back to me. The only one my boss called about was the one I wrote that simply said “I took a shit in the floor drain here”

I work in the event industry as a production manager, I get to write these things.

As is typical when you have a large crew there will be dietary restrictions, some of them can be deadly. So before me or any of my crew starts unloading the truck I need to have a cold Dr. Pepper in my hand. If I don’t, we doordash, we do not eat the food provided.

This is gonna be controversial.

When I find out someone is a Christian, I ask them about their favourite part of the sermon on the mount. If they don’t know it, they’re ‘cultural Christians’ who’ve never opened a bible. If they’re familiar with the sermon, it means they do the work. The sermon on the mount is the section of the bible where Jesus explained to people what values they should hold and how they should behave in order to call themselves his followers.

I’m an ex-Christian and so are a lot of people who just don’t know it yet.

In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.

In Windows XP/Vista times I used to be the “computer kid”, helping others in the neighbourhood with their computers, in exchange of some pocket money. My brown M&M was a huge amount of desktop icons - nine times out of ten it meant that the issue with the computer (typically “why is it so slow???”) could be easily solved by:

• uninstalling crapware
• updating and running the anti-virus
• updating the system itself
• running disk cleanup
• defragmenting the hard disk

And boom, as if by magic, the computer was over 9000 times faster!

The desktop icons themselves aren’t a big deal, but they show that the person is rather sloppy on maintenance of their own machine. And they probably can’t even move files here and there.

I say howdy to gauge people’s initial reaction when I first meet them. Their reaction to the corny and outdated term is telling about their mental picture of the world. It is the only time I use the word.

I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.

They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.

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Whenever I show up to a “mobilization project” which involves lifting and mounting shipping containers of machinery and IT equipment onboard ships, I check whether the containers have had their grounding wires attached, as well as checking if the deck welds have been spray painted with protective coating.
If not, I need to check if the cable runs are properly done, deck fiberoptics protected from crane operations, antenna mounted without obstructions, etc.

Checking random coax cable connections whether they’ve gotten a proper dose of molycote inside is also a pretty good indicator, but the tech department has gotten really attentive in regards to that. The grounding wire is really the only brown M&M I have left on them.

Part of my job (fibre project engineer) is to oversee the building of fibre optic spine cables. Think of an 864 fibre cable snaking it’s way through town with various drop off nodes for local access networks to be built.

I also oversee the termination of the cable in the exchange, and the testing of the spine to make sure it’s within loss limits and that the right fibres are going to the right nodes.

I will often put a minor fault on in the exchange to see if the guys doing the testing pick up on the issue and report it back to me. Maybe a slightly dislodged connector, or fibre 275 crossed with fibre 276, for example.

Most of the time, the guys doing the testing will pickup on the issue and resolve it report it back to me. If it doesn’t get picked up on, I’ll make sure I keep a closer eye on the build crew.

I leave a statement in each version of my resume, and see if a recruiter mentions it. It’s like “ask me about the western 5-legged salamander and how it’s linked to the Olympics” (hint: 5 rings) or something equally absurd but a little more relevant.

If they say the line, then I know they read it. If I ask, “so, did you catch the Olympics?”, and they still don’t pick up on it, they’re judged.