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Urban legends are often told “on the job”—in two senses. For one, lots of legends are first told in the workplace, during breaks from the daily grind. Second, the legends told are frequently about the job itself.

These on-the-job legends often deal with the esoteric details of a particular profession or trade and are best appreciated by co-workers But the legends sometimes get told to outsiders, though they may need to be explained.

Here are two recent job-related legends sent my way by readers. Interestingly, both involve trickery in collecting payment for services.

James E. Hyman, who works for a management consulting firm, sent me a legend that he said is “used to socialize business people to the game of pulling the wool over the bean-counter’s eyes.”

In other words, it’s about the way consultants allegedly hide expenses in the claims they submit to the firm’s sharp-eyed accountants.

As told to him recently, Hyman wrote, this incident supposedly occurred “back in the days when my firm’s consultants had to wear hats.”

One day in the Windy City, one of the firm’s consultants lost his hat while rushing to a meeting with a client. He listed the lost hat as a business expense and requested reimbursement. But the firm’s accounting department rejected the claim, explaining that a new hat was a personal expense, not a business one. The consultant protested, but his arguments went unheeded. So the next time he filed an expense report, he documented his spending completely, attaching all the receipts for hotels , meals, transportation, and so forth. At the end of the report he added a challenge: “Find the hat.” The consultant was giving Accounting notice that somewhere in this perfect expense account he had buried the cost of his lost hat.

Hyman recognized this as an example of “the business sub-species of urban legends,” because he’d heard almost an identical story several years ago while working for a large bank in New York City.

He and a colleague were discussing their mutual annoyance with the the bank’s accounting department’s nit-picking ways. Then the colleague told him about a co-worker who had lost his hat while in Chicago on a sales call and had resorted to the same trick.

Maybe “Find the Hat” belongs to a particular sub-subspecies of the modern folk story: “The Windy City Business Urban Legend.”

I heard the second job-related legend from a builder in Youngstown, Ohio, who called a radio talk show on which I was a guest.

The most common bricklaying work, the builder explained, is putting up chimneys, and the hardest part of the job is collecting full payment.

So one bricklayer, he was told, got the idea of laying in a sheet of glass that would completely block the chimney opening about half way up the flue. The chimney would not draw, naturally, and the fireplace would emit choking clouds of smoke as soon as the homeowners lit a fire. But they would probably not notice the sheet of glass when they looked up the chimney for a blockage.

When the homeowners would call the bricklayer to complain, he would come to inspect the chimney. “Yes, I see the problem, and I can fix it,” he’d say. “But first you’ll have to give me the final payment for the job.”