Sorry but I can’t get behind any adage with so much emphasis on ‘Never’. Doesn’t do it for me.
I’m a thinking creature who can decide what individual circumstances require, thanks anyway.
I keep imagining that one character from Galaxy Quest dramatically proclaiming “Never Volunteer! Never Refuse!”
Classes it up a bit I think.
I’d never heard the “never refuse” part. Refusal isn’t an option.
From Anthony Burgess comes my favorite British Army saying: “They can kill you but they can’t fuck you; or maybe they can, but they can’t get you pregnant; or maybe they can, but they can’t make you love the kid.”
That’s kind of the point of it though. In the military they rarely say, “I need 3 people to volunteer to scrub the latrines.” They either say, “I need 3 volunteers” without telling you what you’d be volunteering for, or they say “You 3! You are “volunteered” for latrine duty! MOVE!”
So, it’s more like…Never volunteer [for unspecified duties], [but if they assign you a job] never refuse. (suck it up and do it without bitching)
Also, being a MeMeMe person who takes on every shit job voluntarily rarely gets praise or credit, just more shit jobs.
At least, that was my interpretation of the advice. YMMV
At one point (near the end of basic) I and a couple other guys actually did that. Drill asked for a number of volunteers and we turned into 6 year olds and started hopping up and down, “OOh! Me! Me! Me!” He just growled at us to shut the hell up and do some pushups and pointed out the requisite number of problem children to rake some rocks into a pattern he found satisfying. Good times…
My favorite made up word I heard in the military: Voluntold.
I always heard it as “Don’t be first, don’t be last, and never volunteer for anything,” and that it mostly applied to basic training. The idea is that if you stick out in the instructors’ minds, then when they need someone to clean out the toilets, you’re the first name they think of. And when you’re explicitly told to do something, refusing is not really an option
Nothing made up about it. It’s a real word with a distinct meaning. 