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Booming dangerous
This week, the newbie humiliation takes a cruel and dangerous twist.
‘Back in the ‘60s at EMI Electronics, a favourite trick with new apprentices was to sit them down to do some soldering at a bench, under which had been placed a really beefy electrolytic capacitor connected to a raw AC supply,’ says Richard Anderton.
‘After about 20 minutes the capacitor would heat up enough to blow off its end cap, making a truly deafening explosion. Many apprentices were known to run off in sheer terror.’
We understand this just enough to know that lots of you will write in to tell us just how terribly dangerous this is. ‘No doubt today the Health & Safety Mafia would disapprove of this character building exercise,’ says Anderton. With good reason, it seems.
Meanwhile, an anonymous informant writes to tell us the humiliation meted out to a colleague who wasn’t even a trainee.
‘His van had an extra wire run in from the brake lights to the horn,’ he says. ‘We all heard him trying to negotiate a crossing, traffic jam, and traffic island, before coming back strangely irate,’ he says.
One more week of stories, then we’re going to pick three finalists, and you can vote for the most exquisitely humiliated employee.
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