Posted on 09/10/2018 4:40:11 AM PDT by vannrox
Up until the 1980’s, the “hazing” of new employees was a time-honored tradition. Here, the new employees would be given the crappiest jobs, told to do the hardest things, and treated horribly. This all seemed to disappear in the middle 1980’s. This article is dedicated to all those older workers who had to endure the “hazing” period and what it was like… Introduction
Today, little remains of the old days of Hazing. You can see it on College campuses and universities when people “rush” to join a sorority or a fraternity. That’s about it. The hazing during High School has pretty much been eliminated. With the only vestiges of it being the movie “Dazed and Confused“.
People have forgotten that “hazing” was an important part of life. You went through it numerous times in your life, and one of the most harrowing was when you started work at a new job. Here, we look at this aspect of life. In it, I describe the hazing rituals that I experienced in Western Pennsylvania in the 1970’s. Hazing in the Coal Mines
One of the first jobs that I had was in the coal mines when I was 14 years old. My father believed
(Excerpt) Read more at metallicman.com ...
This, like "practical jokes", very much has a regional element to it. Its a problem with your local culture. Own up and fix it. Here we would have beaten your ass as many times as necessary for you to understand that there is no time or place for either.
Itching powder in the jock strap
Never experienced such a a thing.
My first full time professional job was in 1978.
But I only had 5 employers in my professional life — the last 3 really being the same one (company A became company B which was bought by company C). NOw I work for myself (well, Mrs. FD is company CEO ;) )
OTOH as a consultant for the last 20 years I have worked probably 20+ “new jobs” and still never saw nor heard of such a thing.
I was a volunteer firefighter when I was young. When we would be loading hose in the hose bed and it came up short we would send a new member to go get the hose stretcher.
I’m getting my blinker fluid replaced today.
Yep. I was working back then. Nobody I knew was subjected to or subjected anyone to work hazing. Idiocy. You take the new employee around to meet everyone, then out to lunch, and help them any way you can.
Jeesh!
As a (mostly) retired carpenter/cabinetmaker, I've always maintained that no one with an architecture degree should be allowed anywhere near a drafting board (cad these days) without spending at least a year on a framing crew.
Bucket of steam
Relative bearing grease
Striped paint
BT punch
Collect these things and we’ll go snipe hunting later. We’ll let you catch the snipe, being as it’s your first time.
Or a bucket of steam.
No harm in sending the newbies to get the shelf stretchers or the sky hooks, but most of the hazing and initiations into fraternities and athletic clubs probably need to end. Those get out of hand too often and result several deaths each year.
The left-handed saw !
Power saws come in left/right handed and blade-left and blade-right.
I just watched an episode of ‘Alaskan Taxidermy’.. Seems they have kept that tradition alive. Heh.
True that, but had the hand powered variety in mind.
(bet you knew that tho ;-)
First off, I don’t think initiation rites have any place in the civilian world.
Secondly, in any “initiation” I agree that things can go over the edge both intentionally and unintentionally.
However, I do believe they had value in a military setting, although as Drew68 pointed out, there are always people who go overboard.
The military is not civilian life. It just isn’t. And the people who treat it like is is are putting our country in danger, IMO.
With that in mind, I believe in the military, unit cohesion is an important element (and in certain situations can be a key and determining element) and belonging to a unit can mean something. (Sure, “unit cohesion” is important in the civilian world, but at the end of the day, you all go home for dinner)
My experiences back in the Seventies in the Fleet would not be acceptable by today’s standards.
When I entered the Fleet from A-School, as an aviation person, you are sent to a land based training squadron for a few months (I don’t recall, but think it was three months or so) where regardless of your rating (Powerplants, Airframes, Ordinance) you become a plane captain trainee and learn about all aspects of the whole plane. This prepared you so that when you got assigned to a squadron, you could go in there and with training, become a plane captain trainee there, and by the time you become a plane captain, you have a pretty good base of training. All in all, I thought it was a great way to do it.
But, coming into the Line Division of the training squadron, they had an “initiation”. When you came into the line shack, you would be grabbed and subdued by a number of people and would have thick, black, molybdenum based tail hook grease applied to various body parts, not your face and head, some normally covered by clothes.
You were expected to resist. If you put up a fight and were greased, you were in.
If you didn’t resist (we had one guy who just went limp) and he got greased several times until the word got out to leave him alone.
When you went to your squadron, the process was repeated by your new squadron mates.
We were nearly all 17 and 18 year old guys, so the process of grappling and subduing a person could be a pretty violent and raucous affair, with tables and chairs being scattered and much yelling and swearing. When done, the ‘grease-ee” was helped up, and he usually had a big grin tempered by the realization that the black grease was going to take a while to get off the bare skin. But all in all, we never had anyone hurt (amazingly) and nobody ever filed a complaint.
We did have one really funny incident, though. We had a young guy of Korean extraction who was coming to our squadron, in in the unofficial information grapevine that exists in the military, we head that he was a 10th degree martial arts guy, in what turned out to be Tai Kwon Do. (None of us knew what that was, but it sounded really high)
When he showed up at the squadron, he was very slight, standing maybe 5’3” or so, and his Korean face was so flat it was nearly concave. He was a nice kid.
Well, his time for getting ‘greased’ didn’t come about until we were at sea, and when the time came, we all waited in the “Line Shack” (our work compartment) for him to come down off the flight deck.
When the door opened and he walked in, he still had his helmet, goggles, and vest on, and looked quietly at the group eyeing him as an intiation-ee, and seeing the situation, calmly said “You guys can do what you like, but I won’t be responsible if anyone ends up in Sick Bay.”
LOL, nobody moved a muscle. “Bruce Lee” as we called him was never initiated by greasing, but his demeanor was more than adequate for the waiving of the initiation. He was in, and that was fine.
On a separate incident, one night I was walking down a passageway on my way to the Line Shack, and this hatch flew open, and the torso of a guy screaming “Argggggh! Arghhhhh! flopped face down in the passageway illuminated by the yellow light from within the compartment. He was grinning, but there was an air of desperation rather than humor clinging to it.
Like some kind of horror movie, the guy began to disappear back into the compartment, clawing wildly with his hands until he grabbed onto the edges of the hatchway. I discreetly stepped by in the passageway looking in as I went, to see a bunch of guys holding his legs and pulling wildly, grinning madly and laughing. When I passed, the guy let go, disappeared inside, and the hatch clanged shut and dogged!
Bottom line-I never saw any real harm from this but I completely agree, in today’s military with all the PC crap, co-ed ships companies and such, this kind of horseplay would never be allowed, nor should it be in this current environment.
But it was the kind of horseplay that was part and parcel of the military for centuries, and I believe that is for a reason, and a good one. When the chips are down for whatever reason, and a unit has to go above and beyond what is normally done to succeed or even survive, those “rites of passage” mean something with respect to how you relate to the people around you.
I do not condone hazing in the sense that it can get out of control and people can be humiliated or hurt. But in my experience, the overwhelming majority of initiation rites I saw were nothing more than teenage horseplay you would expect to see guys engage in, and nobody took it seriously past that.
“And I don’t get the hazing that occurs at our military academies”
Then you do not understand the purpose of this in a military environment. Granted, it should never get to the point of physical injury (that is the definition of hazing, in my opinion), but there is a specific military training purpose for what is done at the military academies, or at least there used to be.
I can’t speak for the rituals, hazing or otherwise in civilian fraternity environments. In the workplace it does allow you a way to gauge the temperament of a new employee - especially when you may have to count on that employee in a life/death safety situation - so it’s not necessarily a bad thing in some situations - again, not to the point of physical harm.
Exactly.
The only job I’ve ever held which involved any “hazing” was with the United States Army (the dog tag division).
Sounds like an excuse for homo-eroticism.
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