Meanest Thing You've Done/Said to a Rushee
 

Just something to bring some life to this Forum.

Blackballed a number of kids that guys in the house had come by for rush, like friends from home.

^^^Why would you do that to a friend?

I remember one time this guy had come by the house in the middle of the day to check our fraternity out, well the guy had this ugly tat that he couldn't finish because he didn't have the money to finish, who knows why the hell he was trying to rush a fraternity. So, a couple of us went to get beer, and asked anyone if they wanted any, and this guy said he did. So we went, picked up a couple of cases of beer for ourselves, and picked up this guy a Colt 40. He drank the whole thing too, which by the time he got to the bottom must have been really hot. He still tried going through formal rush, and I think after that he got the picture.

Let me clarify, I'm not talking about cutting in the middle of the semester. We do a single blackball rush, and I blackballed some of these kids, walked them out, whatever you want to call it.

It comes down to this - we're a selective house, and we can't let them in just because one person wants them in, that's not being selective. People don't see the faults with their own friends, other people can. The fact that they're friends with my brother doesn't qualify them to be my brother.

Did you say anything afterwards to the guys that had invited them?

I do know where you're coming from, we had a girl who kept inviting some of her friends even though no one else in the chapter had any interest in them at all...I guess she thought they'd "grow on us" or something.

Yeah, I explained why I didn't think that they should get a bid or if I thought there was a house they would be a good fit at I told them to point them that direction. There have also been some where I felt bad about it and just told my brother to try to guide their friends elsewhere because I was going to walk them out if they kept coming by our rush.

So in other words, you were a lot nicer than you sounded in your first post. :)

convinced a drunk rush to throw his shoes in the (lit) fireplace...then blackballed him the next morning.

If it's a kid I just plain don't like when they come through, I'll walk them out and tell them to go somewhere that they could get a bid because they won't at our house and are wasting their rush, whether they were invited or not. I will still at least tell their friend why I did it though.

If it's someone who just isn't going to get a bid that I feel sorry for, I'll try to get his friend to stop bringing him around first, but if that doesn't work I'll still walk him out.

sucks for that kid.

I would have loved to have been there for this. It sounds hilarious.

Oh man- good thread.

I was pretty blunt during rush back in the day. One guy showed up to a party in a knit vest and I told him he needed to go home, change and come back. He got an attitude about it, so I just told him to leave for good- and he did.

But it is really kind of lame to just tell some kid he sucks. It is a lot more fun to really draw it out and teach him a lesson.

My favorite tactic with a substandard rushee was to get him to start talking about everywhere else he was rushing. Often such rushees would take the bait and talk about the other houses they liked- and the higher their favorite was above their real chances, the better.

And then once we had this info, we would tell the guy we got a call from someone at that house and that he needed to go over there right away and hang out since he had a real shot.

You would not believe how often guys fell for this.

It does not really work so well during summer rush, but at Roundup or other times when all of the houses are having rush events- it is lots of fun.

The craziest thing that I knew that happened at W&L was one of my friends got a phone message (this was freshman year before most people had cells!) from a house that was just the "Na Na... Na Na Na Na... Hey Hey Hey Goodbye" song over and over again. And then at the end they were like "This is XYZ, don't come back." That was pretty harsh. And I know it's true because I heard the message.

More commonly kids got walked out/asked to leave parties/told not to come back.

Stuff like that makes me happy I'm a girl. :D

So true. I see it too often in sorority rush. One member's best friend since forever and everyone else who knows/met the pnm can't stand her. The active takes it as a personal insult. She can't see that if we did cave to her pressure/drama and extend the pnm a bid, that pnm would never be happy. Nobody can stand the girl and her life would be miserable. Is that what you want for your friend? The pnm's much better off finding another group where she fits in with many more people than just the 1.

With nothing underneath? :p :D

my school doesnt have a big, developed greek system, so I apologize if I sound ignorant, but is "walking someone out" literally just like kicking them out of a rush event and telling them that they shouldn't come back?

It's a nicer way of doing that. Especially if you see "back door", the guys are trying to be discrete about getting rid of an undesirable rushee.

When you put it like that, it sounds mean, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. If the fraternity knows that a rushee isn't getting a bid, then the rushee might like to know too, so he doesn't waste his time there when he could be finding his place elsewhere. Walking a rushee out can be much kinder than just letting the rushee hang around awkwardly, wondering when his bid is going to come.

I know this is kind of going off topic, but what's the meanest thing you/your chapter has ever done to a pledge??

One guy that was pledging with me got dropped 2 days before we were to be initiated. Lol

Yes but the question becomes a bit more of an issue when they're a legacy. We've had a few who were legacies and were complete retards. They still are complete retards, but got in anyways cuz they're legacies.

Yeah, that happened in my pledge class cuz the guy pissed off several brothers throughout the pledge process and was pretty damn racist. He was dropped the night of initiation.

One of my friends told me that his worst experience during rush was when he realized that he was not going to get any bid from any fraternity. He said that the silence from fraternity members and his fellow rushees was deafening.

You know, looking back I cannot think that there was anything that I thought truly mean.

The most important boss I have ever had- meaning the one person who has had the greatest positive impact on my career and my leadership style- once taught me an important lesson about firing people.

She told me that if I ever fired someone and they were totally surprised- then it was my fault because someone who is about to get fired should have already received proper warnings and specific expectations such that they would, deep down inside, know what was going to happen when they came in the office to meet me for a "chat".

I think the same holds true for pledgeship. Maybe not every semester, but at least once a year a pledge would get dropped. And yes, sometimes it was close to the point of initiation.

But I do not ever remember any of them being totally surprised about it.

So we did our job in making sure they knew before the fact that they were not meeting expectations. After that it was just a matter of them failing to fix the problem and then just waiting to be let go.

When I was rushing I had a member of a fraternity at a party pull the "race" card on me(since I'm Asian/Pacific islander) and when I asked for water they said, "You no want sake?", in a terrible attempt at an "asian" accent. I just took it as he was drunk and trying to be funny so I shrugged it off.