One of the things I Do Not Get is the concept of pride by association. I am very much not a ‘joiner’ by personality, and find it hard to imagine why people would feel good to work at a company/attend a school/support a sport team without hard data to back it up. So, how about you all?
Well, I take a great deal of pride in where I work, but then I feel it is a worthy organization and I have dreamed of working there since I was a little kid. I have days when I simply can’t believe I get to work surrounded by dinosaurs and rocks and artifacts and big stuffed bears, oh my!
I’m not really into the school spirit thing. I don’t belong to the alumni association or attend games, though I do have an alumna license plate frame on my skanky, beat-up junker.
Well, I’m not a part of any team, so I can’t answer there. Unless you mean rootin’ for the city sports team, which would be a “no” for me since I have zero interest in sports.
I’ve been to several schools in my life and didn’t give much of a damn about them beyond attending them. Like LSU, for example. Now, i liked LSU just fine when I went there, and I got a decent enough education out of them, but I don’t get a warm fuzzy whenever I hear about them. I don’t think much about the school as a school at all. I certainly don’t belong to any kind of alumni group or whatever.
As for work ethic, that would also be a “no”. I do inasmuch as I want to do a good job (if only so I don’t get yelled at or fired) but honestly, I’m not rootin’ for the big team. I don’t look at trade magazines to find out how the company is doing, and I’ve managed to go to none of the big company meetings (or holiday parties). Work is work - it’s what I do to get a check, and that’s it. It’s not my life. I got home at 4:00 and don’t give the place a moment’s thought until I show back up at 7:30 the next morning.
For the record, I also don’t feel any kind of special association to my family (my parents, siblings, and other relatives). I don’t have much in common with them and don’t particularly feel inclined to go out of my way to have much dealings with them.
Somehow I never developed this kind of attachment process. I tend to have very few, but somewhat close friends. And I don’t mind being by myself.
Oh, I see what you mean. At first I thought, now what does work ethic have to do with team spirit/college pride?
But I get it. I live in a town that is taken over by rabid football fans every Saturday. BIG football school down the street here. The games are always the topic of conversation on Mondays, and sometimes throughout the week, depending on what game is coming up, how the team is doing, etc. I know people who work here (note: this employer has nothing to do with Big Football School down the street) who have purchased tags for their car for the school in question. Or have bumper stickers and wear t-shirts advertising this school. These people didn’t go to that school, their kids don’t go to the school, and have never had any association with the school except they live in the same town.
I don’t get it either. I’ll put the school’s logo on my car, when I have paid several thousand dollars’ worth of tuition to earn the privilege. Until then: No misdirected loyalty from me. (I always tell people, “No I emptied my bank account at some other school, so I won’t be rooting for you this weekend. Sorry.”)
Same goes for company logo. I’ll wear it on my shirt when you pay me to advertise for you. Otherwise I’m too embarrassed for the general public to read my chest and know where I work. Which, IMHO, still has nothing to do with my work ethic…
I have a work ethic. That being: I’m at work, and you’re paying me, so I’ll give you what you’re paying for, and deliver what I’ve said I will. As for team spirit? College pride? No comprende, senor. 
I’m the lonerest loner you ever shall see, and people who can get all worked up over such things are utterly alien to me.
I follow Ole Miss pretty closely. I love college football. I also love college basketball. I pay my alumni dues but that is all. They are constantly asking me to buy $200.00 bricks or something. I am a school teacher so, no money for that kind of thing.
I am very proud of the place I work. I have invested lots of time and energy into the organization. There are things about it that I hate. For the most part, I am a good soldier and I am proud to be part of a successful undertaking. I feel committed to the people I work with. I feel obligated to do my part with my sights set on excellence.
Nope.
I went to Purdue. I didn’t follow the Boilermakers when I was there and I care less now. The alumni association tracked me down, and their mailings go into the trash. Their phone calls get a hangup.
The organization that employs me can be found in the dictionary under “fiasco” - the upper level politics and the BS is inane. I do my job the best I can, but I can’t brag about where I work.
I don’t base my identity on my school or my job - they’re part of me, but they’re not me.
Good question! I have never felt this sense of team spirit at work or at school. I just never got it. I’m not a loner, but I would never wear a shirt with a company logo on it, or even one from the school I attended (although I have several that people keep buying as presents). I do avoid company events and have no alumni association with my school. I sometimes feel that people who are very team oriented in these areas might be compensating for some void in their life, but if it works, more power to them. School was a place to learn, work is a place to make money, my life takes place elsewhere.
Glad to see I’m not alone in my lack of spirit. There’s no “I” in TEAM, unless you spell it TEIM.
I had a lot of Team Spirit and Company Pride when I joined this magazine nearly five years ago—I had all kinds of ideas for articles, interview subjects. But I have been told—to my face—that my ideas and input are not welcome, and that my job is to sweep up after the punctuation of 25-year-olds, and to get back to my desk and stop thinking.
I am part of a monolithic, single-minded socialist organization who’s members frequently exhibit an unhealthy and unforgiving amount of pride by association, but I find life in the U.S. Army just isn’t for me.
Otherwise, I’m pretty much on the same page as Legomancer.
In school I never understood what the big deal was about “school spirit.” Pep rallies were an utter bore to me and I wish that attending them had been optional (I would have rather hung out in the library). I didn’t care one way or another whether or not our school’s team won or lost (most of the time I never even paid any attention). I never participated in any extra-curricular activities. 7 to 8 hours of classes, plus homework, was enough school for me, thank you. I never wore clothes with the school colors or mascot/logo. In my workplace I am no different. I put in my eight hours and I do what they tell me to do, and I get a paycheck. Beyond this, my time is my time. I have better things to do than read up on the latest goings-on in my company or within my industry. I’ll still go to company parties for the free food, but I don’t really like to spend extra time there socializing with my coworkers. Nothing against them, but like others who have posted to this thread, I am mostly a solitary person who doesn’t enjoy being in large gatherings.
I’m pretty neutral about college pride, but I can say I have plenty of pride for my work. I’ve found that the more demanding the job, the more miserable you’ll be if you don’t take pride in what you’re doing. I haven’t come across any people with fanatical pride in the Navy, but personally, if I had to choose between serving with fanatical pride and no pride at all, I’ll take the former any day.
High school in general? Nope, because I hadn’t done anything special to get there other than survive to age 14, it wasn’t any special effort to stay there, and had I lived just a few miles over in any direction, I’d be at a completly different school.
The high school track team? Some. I was actively involved in it, and my efforts contributed to the overall score of the team, so I felt pride in that. Owing to the nature of the sport, my performance didn’t depend on anyone else, and no one depended on me, so I probably felt less connection than a member of the football or basketball team.
College? More. Unlike high school, I’d chosen my college, and actually needed to put in a fair amount of effort to get accepted and stay enrolled. I felt pride in my school because I felt it reflected the work I had put into becoming a part of it.
My work? Probably even more so. Unlike college, I know everybody here (it’s only 22 people) and am friends with everyone. Also, the work that I do very directly affects the overall performance of the company; if I do good work, the company does well, and if I do crap work, the company loses clients.
So for me, I guess, it’s not pride by association so much as pride by participation.
I belong to a fraternal organization, in which I have a great deal of pride and team spirit. Why?
Because it is a group of generally like-minded individuals, pooling their talents and resources to accomplish goals that would be beyond the reach of any one of us working alone.
We feed needy familes over the winter holidays, for exmaple. Now, I alone could not raise the money, buy the food, get it cooked, identify the recipients, and get it delivered to them. It’s far too daunting a task.
But I can, and have, joined an organization that does this. So my five or ten hours of effort raising money, or cooking, or delivering, is added to the hours that my brothers put in, and together, we accomplish something that really makes a difference. Alone, each of us could do a little something; together, the whole is more than the sum of its parts and we do a BIG something.
For this reason, I have great pride in my organization, and wear shirts with our emblem.
Proudly.
- Rick
Someone has to speak for the other side…
I donate to my college’s general fund and I follow the football, basketball, and hockey teams closely, as I did when I attended school. When the Nobel prizes are announced, I scan them closely to see if any winners are associated with my alma mater. I am proud of the company I work for as it is one of the most respected in it’s field and I feel proud to respond when I am asked where it is that I work. I have been on the other side of that situation, where I was embarrased to say where I worked because that company had little respect.
I volunteer my time at a local civic institution because it is one of the best around and I want to do what I can to make it better and keep it’s profile high. I am proud of it.
I will say that from the age of 5 until I graduated college, I was a member of a team almost constantly. My completely uninformed guess is that most of the responses above come from people who didn’t participate much in team sports or activities such as drama, orchestra, yerbook, etc. I could be completely wrong, but that’s my hunch.
OTOH, I have no “spirit” for professional athletics and live in an area where people paint their houses in the pro teams colors. I go to games and cheer for the home team, but I would never wear logoed clothing or put a bumper sticker on my car. That I don’t get.
School spirit? I go to Syracuse. We just lost to Temple. Enough said.
I think the only spirit I would feel is for our hometown hockey team, the Wilkes-Barre Penguins. My family has season tickets, and I’ve been a big fan ever since they began 3 seasons ago. It was really cool to talk to people in New Brunswick about the Penguins and Wilkes-Barre (we went on vacation there the summer after the Penguins lost to the St. John Flames in the finals).
School spirit? Don’t make me laugh, I actually hate the university I attended and consider it not to be an alma mater in the true sense of the word.(Ok, I call it malignus mater but my latin isn’t so good.) As I always say the only reason I wouldn’t want to see the whole thing bulldozed into the Charles River is that I’d hate to see it repolluted with so much garbage.
I never did have much school spirit, and while i do take pride in my work, it would be really funny if i could have a tshirt that says “property of /place of work/serial number”.
I used to have a pretty strong work ethic, but it’s faded away over the years. My contribution to society through my work is so abstract as to be meaningless. So no.