Navy cadets aren’t supposed to take their phones to training in Thailand. If they do, their superiors give them blocks of concrete and a tough order: SMASH IT!
Don’t believe me? Watch the below video of officers-in-training smashing their phones with blocks of concrete. It was filmed — ironically enough with a phone — at the Thai navy’s Communications and Information Technology School and uploaded to Facebook.
“You just bought this, right? Expensive, eh?” says someone behind the camera says. “Smash it!”
This is pretty mean. Sympathizers on the internet think that the Thai navy should just put cadets’ phones in little lockers until their done with training. The Thai navy explained that the school has an “honour system” whereby rule-breaking students could “destroy their phones voluntarily.” This seems like a bad system so the Thai navy said, “the school has ordered this form of punishment to stop.”
Mean as it seems, making someone break an expensive communication tool as punishment for breaking a rule at a communication school is the ultimate ouroboros. What if the next phase of the punishment is that the cadets have to build smartphones from scratch? What if that’s what this is really about?
[Mashable]