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Got Volunteered
aka: Lets Get Mikey
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Boss: I need three volunteers... *points* You, you, and you.
Minion: Why don't we send a volunteer to ________?
Boss: Good idea! Thanks for volunteering!
A dirty job needs to get done. The boss is asking volunteers to step forward. No way are you going to get mixed up in a sticky situation like that. Your mama didn't raise no fool. Suddenly you are shoved forward by some of your "friends". The boss smiles. Wait- No! You just got volunteered!
There are lots of different versions of this:
- As above, but your friends don't even bother pushing, they just say you volunteer.
- The guy in charge picks people and simply calls you "volunteers."
- The person who suggested the job in the first place is volunteered.
- (Usually military) Everyone is lined up, and the leader/commander asks for volunteers to step forward — and promptly everybody except our protagonist steps backwards, making it look like the protagonist stepped forward.
- The heroes are faced with the challenge. In unison, everyone turns to look at one person.
- When one person is out of the room for some reason, the rest have a vote and elect the unlucky absentee to the post.
- In a duo, one person asks the other to pick a number, and upon hearing their answer immediately declares them the loser.
However it happens, the Unwilling Volunteer agrees to do it anyways. Maybe because he's just too nice a guy to say no. Maybe he doesn't want to leave people in the lurch. Maybe he really doesn't want to cross the boss. Or maybe he just doesn't want to be labeled a coward.
Usually played as comedy, although occasionally it's played for drama.
Commonly volunteered in this way: Boxed Crooks, Condemned Contestant, The Bait, and Cincinnatus
The opposite of Martyr Without a Cause. If it's the Call to Adventure, then the protagonist never got a chance at Refusal of The Call because other people accepted it for him.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Comicbooks
- In Astérix the Gaul, the Roman soldiers decide this by a game of Musical Chairs.
- In Kajko And Kokosz Clumsy gets volunteered by the brigants every time - either everyone else takes a step back or someone kicks him foreward.
- Naturally, occurs in Dilbert
- In Popeye one of Wimpy's trademark phrases — that he normally uses after wronging a big strong guy who now has come for revenge — is "You want to fight? All right! Let's You and Him Fight!" Then, you guessed it, Wimpy steps aside and makes way for Popeye, who has to fight the big strong guy.
Fanfiction
- In The Tainted Grimoire, Luso and Villi would unwittingly be roped in as dance partners for Kanin and Adelle when they get Cheney to teach them how to dance.
Films — Live-Action
Literature
- Simon of Cyrene in The Bible, making this Older Than Feudalism.
- In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, the narrator notes that he never got actually asked if he volunteered.
- Used unusually in The Book Thief. The commander asked for one man who would stay out of battle that day. Nobody can volunteer without being branded a coward, but if you Got Volunteered... (and Hans Hubermann does).
- Pextel in Stationery Voyagers. The Call was more complex than that, and he was largely ignorant of most of it for a little while. But since he saw no other way, he just accepted it.
- Discworld's Nobby Nobbs has such an intense fear of this, he once jumped out of a second story window, when the nobles attempted to "volunteer" him to be the ruler of Ankh-Morpork. This is reinforced by the fact that the only 'logical' outcome he sees is that Commander Vimes will, in Nobby's words, "go spare" and behead him for becoming a king (Vimes's ancestor being a notorious regicide).
- This has happened so often to Rincewind that in The Last Hero he volunteers ("I do not wish to volunteer", followed shortly after by "I'm volunteering. I just don't wish to.") just to get it over with.
- Inverted in Pyramids when the handmaiden Ptraci refuses to drink poison so she can be interred with the recently deceased king of Djellibebi. ("It's voluntary, isn't it?" "Well, yes... but she won't do it!")
- In Ciaphas Cain, after a riot gone bad, some soldiers under Cain's command are sentenced to death by "volunteering on the next suicide mission". Cain is satisfied with this judgment (he had maneuvered to avoid an execution that would be disastrous for morale) until he's himself required on a very dangerous mission, meaning he has to take them along instead of more reliable soldiers.
- Happens in the novel ''A Ship of the Line''. As his ship was undercrewed, Hornblower had exempted sailors from the merchant convoy he was escorting press-ganged in his crew. When the captains of the convoy protested he said his sailors had misunderstood his orders and that he had sent them to search for volunteers, and that he'd check who was a volunteer and who was pressed... And as soon as the convoy captains return to their ships, he sends the signal "All volunteers".
Live-Action TV
- Band Of Brothers sort of subverts this. Maj. Winters asks for volunteers to check out a suspicious house in the forest; although he does "volunteer" two guys, Blithe does volunteer by his own volition, which is even more awesome as he had a nervous breakdown a few scenes before.
- One could also interpret Blithe's state of mind at that point to be in permanent Got Volunteered. He does not want to be in the war but he does not have a choice. Winters might have asked for volunteers but The War has already volunteered Blithe for the patrol.
- Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide had an episode called "Guide to Volunteering", in which no voluntary volunteering took place, just school-required community service.
- In the MASH episode "Edwina", one nurse was so clumsy that all of the men were afraid to go out with her. The other nurses got together and refused to go out with any of the men unless one of them agreed to go on a date with her. The men drew straws and Hawkeye was chosen to "volunteer" for the job.
- Yet another variation: on LOST, Hurley is looking for someone to help him jump-start the Dharma van. Everyone else walks away, except Jin, who doesn't speak English and has no idea what he just "volunteered" to do. Hurley cheerfully acknowledges this fact.
- Happened all the time to Oliver on Green Acres. Typical plot: The town's residents would come up with a Zany Scheme, Oliver would rise to protest and get cut off as everybody thanks him for volunteering to lead the scheme.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sisko, O'Brien, Bashir, and Worf's son Alexander are taking part in the Road to Kal'Hyah, the Klingon bachelor party equivalent. When told about the ritual shedding of blood, Worf asks for volunteers. Collectively, Sisko, O'Brien, and Alexander look to each other and step back, leaving Bashir to go first.
Worf: I did not expect you to be the first, Doctor.
Bashir: *looks at others* Neither did I.
- Mythbusters Build Team method of choosing a volunteer, Ro-Sham-Bo, generally ends with Tory having two fingers pointed at him.
- Another method used is for the other two members to say "not it!" before the third even finished explaining the myth.
- On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Snyder "volunteers" students to escort trick-or-treaters.
Xander: Note his interesting take on the word "volunteer".
- On Drop the Dead Donkey, in the season 2 episode "Baseball", Gus has to volunteer staff members, including Dave, Damien and George to play in a corporate game of baseball. Alex is offended when she isn't volunteered, being a woman.
- In Veronica Mars, Logan volunteers his father to donate money to a soup kitchen. He does so publicly enough and with grand enough reception that his father can't back out without looking like an ass.
- In It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Charlie gets third-party-volunteered so often that the things he's volunteered for are called "Charlie Work" by the other characters. They call it that to the character's face and he still does it.
- In one episode of Red Dwarf, Rimmer mentions that Lister once put his name on the waiting list for experimental piles surgery.
- In another episode, they stumble upon their personnel files. Rimmer's says "There's a saying amongst the officers: if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Rimmer'".
Newspaper Comics
- In one Hägar the Horrible strip. "I have good news and bad news! The good news: I just want volunteers for this mission! The bad news: I need four volunteers." (There are just four guys.)
- Also in the Beetle Bailey cartoon Cosmo's Naught it happens but even more extreme: Volunteers have to walk the distance of 50 miles. Beetle Bailey, Zero and Cosmo complains how ill they are until Sarge tell them to shut up and that if anyone of the soldiers need to see the doctor they should go. Everyone except Beetle Bailey, Zero and Cosmo immediately run away leaving the three back as the volunteers.
Tabletop Games
- Paranoia encourages PCs to throw their underlings under the bus this way, while pretending that you're doing them a favor ("Suck-R, go disarm that berserk scrubot, you'll probably get a commendation for it"). If the underling seems devious enough to actually pull it off, then you may need to pile on some complications ("oh, but leave your toolkit here, we wouldn't want it to get damaged").
- The Flavor Text of the Magic: The Gathering card "Goblin Hero" reads: "To be a hero, you don't have to step forward. Everyone else just has to step back."
Theatre
Videogames
- One dialogue option in the opening of Mass Effect 2 is Shepard asking the Illusive man if s/he's volunteering or being volunteered. The Illusive Man tells him/her s/he can walk away, but to check out Freedom's Progress first. Shepard wants to take out the Reaper threat too much and no one else is willing to believe and help him/her, so this is more of a case of The Illusive Man knowing Shepard won't not jump at the chance.
- During a mission briefing in Wing Commander, Spirit volunteers herself and Maverick for a mission.
- While you were out adventuring in the Kingdom of Loathing, your guild had a meeting, and decided that Gorgolok/Stella/Spaghetti Elemental/Lumpy/Spirit of New Wave/Lopez is your Nemesis, so you Got Volunteered for the single longest spanning quest in the game.
- In an interesting twist, you do have a chance to refuse the call. It's an optional quest, in that you don't need to complete it to finish the game, so you can completely ignore it without affecting the storyline of the game.
- The story to Magi-Nation kicks off when protagonist
Foney BonesTony Jones gets 'volunteered' to go spelunking for a cave treasure, by two guys who tried and failed to foist the task upon one of their younger brothers.
- In the first Fallout, one of the premade player characters has as his back story that he was simply the only one dumb enough to leave the vault (the other two characters were ones who Jumped at the Call).
- In Portal 2's companion material, protagonist Chell originally wasn't even intended to be a test subject due to her psychological profile indicating near-pathological tenacity, but a paranoid-schizophrenic researcher who survived GLaDOS' purge altered her records to get her into the testing program. The rest is history.
- Whealtey's done this too. In the final battle, he boasts that Chell isn't the first test subject he broke out of Cryo-Sleep and sent off to get a portal gun. Just the first to survive. There's a chance he's lying given the circumstances, though.
- In Quest For Glory I, none of the fairies want to give the hero any fairy dust, so they make a fairy named Mikey do it.
Webcomics
- Robin in Books Don't Work Heregets "volunteered" in the first page and has yet to be given the chance to back out.
- Susan and Nanase from El Goonish Shive (especially Susan) during their trip to Paris to kill an aberration.
- In one of the greatest What the Hell, Hero? moments in history, they got two teenagers to kill someone when it would be easier and faster for them to go to the authorities, more reliable and wouldn't have put two girls in the first year of high school in mortal danger. To summarize how much of a jackass the Immortals where being, see here
- In Wapsi Square, Bud got volunteered to recover an artifact from Ireland.
- When Spoorflix ask Vexxarr why he thinks Spoorflix's people didn't expect him to succeed, he responds with "Let's say I know a thing or two about being volunteered for one-way missions."
- In this strip of Schlock Mercenary, company lawyer Massey Reynstein demonstrates a knowledge of how to tackle the financial end of a mission, and is promptly volunteered to take care of it since everyone else in the company prefers a more brute-force approach.
- In Red String, Miharu's cousin Karen volunteers Miharu to help at the family restaurant, causing Miharu to miss a date.
Web Originals
- In Thalia's Musings, this happens to Apollo when he tries to get Thalia out of watching eternal adolescent Eros for the day. (She owed Hephaestus a favor.) Hephaestus thinks Apollo is volunteering to help. Apollo is too nice to refuse.
- Zack is only involved with Tom's show. because the camera equipment belongs to his father and Zack's dad made Tom let him tag along, and Tom put him to work.
- Done several times in AH Dot Com The Series, usually with perennial Butt Monkeys Luakel or Michael as the "volunteer".
Western Animation
Real Life
- Fun Fact: in Dutch there is an actual expression for this concept: Chinese Volunteer. What Do You Mean It's Not Politically Correct?
- Well, the Dutch will be Dutch.
- In the US military, it's "being volun-told."
- "Volun-told" is also current slang in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and is spreading to Canadians in civilian life.
- A saying in the US Army goes something like, "Never be first, never be last, and never, ever volunteer for anything."
- Less pretty and more succinct is the version that simply goes "God hates volunteers."
- What does "NAVY" stand for in the US? Never Again Volunteer Yourself.
- In the Soviet Union, there was a saying, "Collectivization is a voluntary affair" (original full version: "collectivization is a voluntary affair, choose to opt in or get shot"), which was in essence used as a trope name back before anyone had ever heard of tropes. In fact, so many assignments that were de jure voluntary were de facto obligatory, to the point of inspiring tongue-in-cheek oxymoronic terms like "voluntary obligation".
- In the Cadet Corps, a call for volunteers means everyone has to raise their hands. The "volunteers" are consequently picked at random (that or they're the last ones to raise their hands).
- Supposedly George Washington wrote letters to his wife talking about how he didn't want to lead the Continental Army and how he felt completely inadequate to the task after he Got Volunteered. Of course, he never mentioned how he turned up at the meetings in full uniform every single day.
- C'mon. You know you've seen this first hand. We know.
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