AUCKLAND APPRENTICE, 17, SPENT SIX HOURS LOOKING FOR TARTAN PAINT — LADS ON SITE 'GENUINELY IMPRESSED'

It was a Tuesday morning in Manukau. Nothing about that day suggested what was about to unfold. Least of all to Kaleb, 17, an apprentice chippie on a build off Great South Road. His foreman had sent him for two urgent items: a tin of tartan paint, and a long weight.

By 4.47pm, the lad had visited four Resenes, two Mitre 10s, a Guthrie Bowron, and a Paint Warehouse in Papatoetoe. A staffer named Deidre reportedly told him to "try the Bunnings, love." At Bunnings Manukau, Kaleb asked the trade desk for a long weight. Staff obliged. He waited, by his own account, four hours before asking if it was ready.

"Mate, I nearly shat," said foreman Dylan Pukeroa, contacted at smoko outside a Z on Cavendish Drive. "We sent him at ten. It's a piss-take we've done to every apprentice since I was one. Normally they twig by lunch. This cunt — and I mean that with love — rang me at two to ask if satin finish was alright."

The gag has done the rounds on NZ sites since about 1962. Kaleb's version got worse when a Resene bloke in Ōtāhuhu, thinking he was actually lost, rang three suppliers on his behalf. One was a paint rep in Rotorua. "Assumed it was a tourism thing, eh, like the luge," the rep told The Daily Yarn. "Thought maybe Taupō had gone tartan. Sulphur does weird things to a bloke."

A Bunnings Manukau spokesperson confirmed a young fella in hi-vis had "sat very patiently near the timber" most of the afternoon. He was offered a sausage at 1pm and accepted. "He said please. We didn't have the heart."

Kaleb has since been told. According to Dylan he took it "like a unit — barely cried." He's back on site Wednesday. The foreman is sending him to Repco for blinker fluid.