Study Notes on Occupational Folklore and Technique

Fundamentals of Occupational Folklife

  • Occupational Folklife: Encompasses the informally learned skills, technical practices, verbal expressions, and customs that constitute a shared culture and lifestyle in the workplace.
  • Historical Shift: Studies began with frontier occupations (cowboys, miners, lumberjacks) that produced work songs and specialized skills, subsequently expanding to urban settings such as factory and mill labor.
  • Cultural Scenes: Recurrent social interactions where two or more workers share occupational lore and technical evaluations (e.g., coffee breaks, after-work gatherings at a bar, firehouse equipment cleanups).
  • Documentation Challenges: Direct physical work techniques are difficult to capture because activities are often covert, rapid, or require specialized recording tools; folklorists consequently rely on verbal accounts and critiques.

The Canon of Work Technique

  • Definition: The informal, unwritten standard of technical knowledge generated, maintained, and judged by workers themselves to perform work tasks.
  • Social Hierarchy: Establishes an informal hierarchy of competence and status based on a worker's capacity to demonstrate technical proficiency before peers.
  • Levels of Technique:
    • Mundane Skills: Elementary tasks that become unconscious reflexes over time (e.g., reading micrometers for machinists; sizing dresses for salespersons).
    • Daily Central Performances: Informal, routine technique demonstrations subjected to peer scrutiny and evaluation.
    • Complex Innovations: High-level technical achievements and procedures (e.g., milling innovations or marketing new designs) that become near-legendary within a trade.
  • Safety Boundaries: Workers earn respect by pushing safety margins only to reasonable limits; violating safety parameters (such as ignoring low-air warning bells to play "big bimbo") invites ridicule and lowers cultural standing.

Verbal Arts and Workplace Jargon

  • Occupational Metaphor: Conceptual terms that transfer work experiences to broader social contexts (e.g., a firefighting hose error described as "laid out short" used to denote any shortage, such as insufficient steaks or bed sheets).
  • Trade Terminology and Jargon:
    • Ventilation: Facilitating the escape of superheated smoke and toxic gas.
    • Bells Going Off: Audio alarm indicating that an air bottle has only 3 minutes3\,\text{minutes} of emergency air remaining.
    • White Hat: Color of helmet designating an officer.
    • Tour: A work shift duration or a 6-day6\text{-day} duty rotation.
    • Pumping Water / Telling Lies / Swapping War Stories: Naturally occurring informal storytelling sessions.
    • Take Up / Rack Hose: Replacing hoses into a hose bed.
    • The Corridor: Occupational nickname for Fourteenth Street.
    • P.O.D.: Sick leave.
  • Joking Relationships: Social control mechanism used exclusively among workers of equal rank to test emotional tension, monitor attitudes, and challenge incompetence through verbal "darts."
  • Narrative Performance Types:
    • Conversational Critiques and Stories: Collective exchanges enabling workers to evaluate events, reinforce safety codes, and align personal standing with the canon of work technique.
    • Extended Personal Narratives: Longer, introspective "full performances" delivered during formal ceremonies (retirements, promotional dinners) linking personal history and collective standards.

Occupational Customs and Rites of Passage

  • Habitual Customs: Unconscious individual patterns for managing repetitive tasks (e.g., lunch routines, plant pathways, distinctive ways of wearing hard hats).
  • Customary Status Markers: Privileges and attire signifying rank (e.g., colored helmets on construction sites, white hats in firehouses, schedule flexibility for journeymen versus rigid hourly control for apprentices).
  • Career Benchmarks and Rituals:
    • Rookie Transitions: New firefighters spend 1 year1\,\text{year} on probation before earning insider status, marked by providing a meal where experienced firefighters offer acceptance via verbal "darts."
    • Promotional Celebrations: Ritual meals commemorating elevation in rank (such as promotion to sergeant) through narrative tributes that link old training to new responsibilities.
    • Retirement Dinners: Highly elaborate ceremonies organized by a retiree's home company (announced a month in advance) that bring together peers to celebrate a complete career, execute verbal roasts, and address past blunders.

Workplace Dialogues and Narrative Interactions

  • Post-Fire Critique on Air Supply and Technique:
    • Officer to rookie: "Kid, you worked your ass off tonight. Turn around here and let's see if it's still on."
    • 1st fire fighter: "Who ran out of air?"
    • 2d fire fighter: "The guy who wouldn't leave when his bell rang. Had to hang in there and play big bimbo."
    • 1st fire fighter: "Hell, I could ring your bell with your mask not even on."
    • 3d fire fighter: "I want to tell you something, man [to the rookie]. We shoulda had it, buddy; we went right on by that damn fire. But that's what you got all them other guys for is to back you up when you can't find it, but we shoulda had it."
    • Rookie: "I tell you I went into that room and looked around. I thought we were really gonna come into something there on the left."
    • 3d fire fighter: "I hung around as long as I could. But after the third 'Get your ass out of here,' by the white hat over there, I couldn't ignore him any longer."
    • 1st fire fighter: "Yeah, when it's time to get out you got to get out. Like those fires we caught on the other tour when W. knocked him on his ass trying to get out."
    • 2d fire fighter: "That was on Third Street, right? When I was on the pipe?"
    • 1st fire fighter: "The one after that."
    • 2d fire fighter: "No, I wasn't on that."
    • 1st fire fighter: "What fire was it that W. either run out of air or whatever, but he about killed you when he came out of there?"
    • Officer: "Municipal Building."
    • 2d fire fighter: "Oh Municipal . . oh man, I hadn't run out of air, I was just scared."
    • Officer: "Oh you were? Well then you were the only one. Just because there was live ammunition and tear gas exploding everywhere …."
    • 4th fire fighter: "Yeah, I wasn't scared at all. I just decided I'd stroll out to the street and lay there on my face for fifteen minutes trying to get my breath. I think I only sucked up about six or seven inches of concrete off of that sidewalk trying to get some air."
  • Coffee Break Joking Banter:
    • 1st fire fighter: "Anybody else want a refill?"
    • 2d fire fighter: "Yeah, and see if you can get it right this time, will ya?"
    • 1st fire fighter: "Why sure and is there anything else I can get you while I'm up?"
    • 2d fire fighter: "Now that you mention it …."
    • 1st fire fighter: "After all, if you drink coffee the way you drive the damn truck, you need all the help we can give you…"
    • 2d fire fighter: "A rose among dandelions …."
    • 1st fire fighter: "Hey, Billy, got any training wheels for this cup? Wouldn't want any unnecessary P.O.D."
  • Watch Desk Storytelling on Halligan Bars and Face Masks:
    • Olson: Stated that in garden-type apartments, the fire doors had brick exteriors with Sheetrock behind them; instead of forcing deadbolted doors, smacking the corner brick above the doorknob with a Halligan bar allowed quick entry.
    • Saunders: Added that coming off elevators, firefighters often have to back down to the floor below and take the stairs.
    • Olson: Confirmed that entering high-rise fires via elevator without a mask creates severe personal vulnerability.
    • Saunders: Emphasized that entering an elevator without an air pack poses extreme danger if heavy smoke descends.
    • Olson: Recounted an event at HEW where Bill W. handed his mask to an unmasked officer, leaving the crew on the floor sucking air when the fire exploded like a blast furnace.
    • Saunders: Described entering an elevator without masks to challenge a tough ex-Marine officer, only to be forced to drag out burning mattresses in heavy smoke on the target floor.
    • Olson: Concluded that the incident involved an entire hotel storage room filled with mattresses.
  • Promotional Dinner Rescue Narrative:
    • Sergeant: "Ya know, I can't believe all of the crazy things we've seen in the five and a half years I've been here … some of the things people do …."
    • Retiree: Recalled the sergeant's first fire call at 4:00 AM4{:}00\,\text{AM} with heavy black smoke boiling from the second floor; after laddering down a young couple, they pulled out an elderly woman weighing roughly 400 pounds400\,\text{pounds} (exaggerated to 9,000 pounds9{,}000\,\text{pounds}), after which the couple revealed a baby remained trapped in a crib between the windows, requiring an unmasked rescue in the smoke.
    • McCarl: "Dead?"
    • Sergeant: "No—smoked up pretty good, but he was tough, made it."
  • Retirement Dinner Roast and Presentation:
    • Emcee: "J.F. is an Italian. That's about as good a thing as you can say about him. J.F. is an Italian—mango idioti dingolini . . . get yerself up here. Let's have a big hand forJ.F…ain't he wonderful! [Applause] O solo mio…it's the only Italian song I know, Joe."
    • J.F.: "And you don't know that one very well."
    • Emcee: "Who the hell you think I am, Mario Lonzo?"
    • J.F.: "Well I don't know what the hell I'm doing up here."
    • Emcee: "I don't know either."
    • J.F.: Presented retiree Jerry with a miniature galvanized bucket rigged with a trip wire, commemorating a water battle prank at Engine 24.
    • Jerry: "This undoubtedly . . . if there was anything that I've ever done wrong . . and I'll regret it until the day I die. Well at 24 engine they had the usual thing with the water battles and all, and they used to figure out all kinds of ways to get you with a bucket of water. Well I never was in on any of those tricks, you know. [Laughter] So one night he says that he's got a problem. And I thought, 'Oh my God, what the hell is wrong now?' So I went over there and just as I got there I looked up and there must have been ten thousand gallons of water. I mean I was soaked from my nose to my toes. And then, being a perfect ass, I got mad atJoe and walked into it. And like I say. If there was any moment that I regret in this fire department, it was that. I did live up to it later on, but like I say that was terrible and I regret it to this day and until the day I die."