I never came across the left handed wingnut, but sending a youngster to collect a bucket full of holes was not unusual a while back; later on I used the Galactic Storage Device Specification - asking a youngster who thought he knew all about programming and design to go away and specify a driver for that interesting piece of hardware (which was, basically, specified as a load of balls) was often amusing, especially if the victim was impatient to get started and began working on his driver spec before reading all of the device spec (those who read to the end first never did start designing); and then someone invented C and C++ and we needed look no further to give our juniors something completely stupid to do.