How to get paint off of your hands and live to tell about it

The gas station I worked for back in the seventies needed a new coat of paint and the guy who owned it figured he'd save a little scratch by telling his register monkeys that it was their job.

I'd known for a while that one of the guys who worked with me was a little slow. He got stressed out real bad when he had to run the cash register, and the drawer would always be off later, so when he and I worked together, we almost always had me running the cash register and him doing the full service stuff.

I really wish he'd given me some sort of hint about how stupid he actually was.

We came in special to paint one day; me, him, and the owner, and when we were washing the paint off of our hands, the aforementioned co-worker asks, while he's watching this, "Hey, man, how do you get paint off of your hands?"

I, not realizing that he was, in fact, slow as a stalactite in mid-formation, said, "You just pour gasoline on your hands and light it. Paint comes right off."

To which he replies, "Oh," with a tone suggesting that nothing should have been more obvious.

A few moments later, we hear him screaming, go outside, and find him running in goddamn circles with his hands putting off miniature infernos. We extinguished him, and his hands were mostly okay, which shocked the hell out of me. But not nearly as much as when the idiot looked me in the eye, held up his hands, and said, "Gee, thanks Rick, it worked!"