I don't have a good joke, but I will tell you the story of how 2 grams of hash cost the U.S. government one million dollars.

I was in the Army, stationed in Turkey. I worked 24 hours on, 72 hours off with an Army chick. (Kick ass, eh? That's almost two 3-day weekends every week!) Well, I decided after watching Midnight Express one night (banned in Turkey) that I wanted to try some kickass Turkish hash, so I talked to a Turk friend of mine about it.

Getting a couple of grams of hash was waaaaay harder than I thought it would be, I guess because they like throw you in prison forever if you get caught with it. We drove around a lot, switched cars, finally ended up meeting a guy in a tea house who slipped me the hash. Looked good, smelled good, wasn't expensive (because the dollar was mighty compared to the Turkish lira).

So, the next time my shift is up, I bring the hash and me and the Army chick smoke it. And it is goddamn POTENT, we're just blazed off our asses. Our job was working at a nuke-proof facility way out in the middle of nowhere, keeping an array of (brand new) Racal-Vadic 50,000 watt HF transmitters going. Each shift, we'd clean the dust out of a transmitter, preventive maintenance stuff.

Well, we open up the front plate of transmitter #10, and I tell the girl I'm going to shut the power down to it so we can do our work. Well, she spaces out right at that moment and taps the bottom of the giant tube inside the case with a grounding rod. There is an enormous brilliant blinding flash of light which blinds us both, and we smell molten metal and plastic.

I tell the chick, if I can't see in 30 minutes I'm going to kill her, and they'll find my blind ass laying next to her corpse when the next shift arrives in the morning. But our vision slowly returns, and in 10 mins we're okay. The transmitter, brand new, cost $1 million. And it is not in good shape at this point. In fact, it looks kinda like someone took a flamethrower to its innards, melted shit everywhere. It's completely destroyed.

Obviously, we're scared as hell at this point, not knowing what could happen to us. On the plus side, the hash is all gone. I tell her to let me handle it when the next shift arrives, and we spend an uneasy night waiting for our shift to end. The next shift arrives, which includes my boss, and I tell my him, "Hey, transmitter 10 just went down, not sure what the deal is. Anyway, we gotta catch the bus back to Izmir, so good luck with that!" And we brazenly walk by, get on the bus, and get the hell out of there.

By the time it's time for our next shift, four days have passed, and they ask us a few questions, and we stick to our story: we don't know what happened, transmitter just went down right before our shift ended. They couldn't prove we did it, so that was that.

The lesson: don't work on powerful electrical equipment when stoned off your ass on hash!