According to recent reports, floating blue hard hats have been spotted hovering around campus and peddling more blue hard hats to the public. This has spurred a flurry of controversy surrounding the reasoning and ethics behind this development.

“I can’t believe that they’re trying to profit off of people’s desire to feel included in the community!”  exclaimed one student, who preferred to remain anonymous but claimed to have been pressured to buy a blue hard hat.  “People have a hard enough time to fit in without being overwhelmed with the products that all these organizations are putting in our faces to make us feel like we belong but make us feel excluded if we don’t.”

A spokeshardhat for the floating blue hard hats, while unable to communicate verbally, was able to indicate via sign language the following:

“Well, originally we tried selling things like T-shirts and patches, but the demand has been steadily declining.  We’ve already had to sneak stickers into vending machines since we’ve had trouble even giving them away for free. Hard hats are simply the next logical step because we can implant within them mind control devices that’ll make those deep-pocketed losers want to buy more merch–I mean, get more involved in Skule and stuff.”

However even within the ranks of the floating blue hard hats themselves there are some concerns as to what this means moving forward.

“Now that we’ve started selling these, what makes anyone who buys one of these hard hats any different than me,” pantomimed another blue hard hat, who resolutely claimed to be a different from the previous one.  “Other than the fact I don’t exist, of course.  Everyone and their mother already has the patch.  Now how else am I supposed to silently lord my superiority over others without a hard hat that contains different pigmentation than the kind that everyone else has?”

Meanwhile, a small group of predominantly first year students are thrilled with the new product.

“Oh my God, this means I’m basically part of the [REDACTED] now, right? This is so cool! I’m going to become Mario Attiliator by next year for sure,” said Brenda Hypebedahype, thoroughly obsessed with her new purchase. “I’m going to buy tons of [REDACTED] swa–I mean, get more involved in Skule and stuff, for sure.”

While the long term implications of this change remain to be seen, some sources say that the Engineering Society is considering a similar idea by simply giving away green, orange, and white hard hats in an effort to pre-motivate people to get involved.   It has been proposed that this initiative would be funded by creating a new student levy on top of the 263 levies already in place to support the various design teams’ end of year pizza parties.

Whether this Skule Nite-esque method of making everyone unwittingly pay for something while marketing them as free in the hopes that more people participate (while pocketing the remainder from anyone who doesn’t) is certainly contentious.  However a lot of details are still caught up in red tape within the Engineering Society’s Board of Directors, so it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to see that particular policy in action in the near future.  

Luckily the floating blue hard hats have been able to avoid that bureaucratic tangle and launch into it right away, although it’s still unclear if by the end of it people will actually  be more willing to buy lots more of awesome [REDACTED] merch–err, get more involved in Skule and stuff.