In Defense of Yard Talk

The crucial role of b*llshitting among craftspeople

NEWINGTON. Timber Yard. Kent., Thomas Hennell 1947

A Morning at the Shop

It's 6:46 AM and I still have a nugget of sleep cemented to my left lid. My driver's-side door greets my ears with its customary screech when I exit the dark cab and hop down to solid ground. As I cross the gravel and walk through the cement floored warehouse, I stop just short of meeting eyes with another zombified technician who also did not feel up to meeting eyes with me. It's too early to exchange pleasantries. Neanderthalic grunts are offered instead. My olfactory system pings my brain with the signal that is the true start of my day: the scent of crappy shop coffee wafts my way from just through the next door and around the corner.

About a half-hour later I'm back in the yard, my second (or is it my third?) cup o' joe steaming in my truck's cup holder, and Rick, who got there thirty minutes before I did, is in my ear. "I'll tell you what, Nate: I was not expecting that TracPipe to snap back and get me like it did." He was regaling me with the tale of some corrugated stainless steel tubing he had been fixing up for a gas job the previous day. "Let me show you somethin'." He pulled up his jacket sleeve to reveal an elastic bandage wrapped around half of his left forearm with about a quarter of an inch of gauze peaking out from underneath. "I just wasn't careful enough, Nate. I really wasn't." Rick pulled up the grisly picture of the wound on his phone. He may not have been paying attention to the pipe's recoil then but I certainly would be now.

Some organized fittings and another half-cup of coffee later, John walks up. "'Sup, brother! Whatcha got goin' on today?" I ask him. He tells me about a twelve-foot-deep sewer tap connection he has to make and some of the particular challenges he's preparing for. "Huh," I said, "I never would have thought of that. Sounds like fun." John took another five minutes to explain how he realized the issue, and just as he ended the lesson I remember, "Hey, isn't your kid still sick?" We talk about his family for a while and then, after thanking me for asking about his daughter, he saunters back across the yard to check the condition of the teeth on his backhoe before heading to his job.

In an office setting, this kind of ambient workplace chatter would be roughly equivalent to "water cooler talk," generally portrayed as various levels of tea-spilling or benign conversation. Debra is getting on Lindsay's nerves, Frank made a decision that the CEO didn't like and got his hand slapped, my sportsball team is gonna whoop your sportsball team's behind in this season's fantasy league. Another category of communal discussion we might think of is "locker room talk" which tends to bring out the filthiest language and lewdest thoughts a man can muster in the presence of other men while half-draped in wetted garments: either sweaty clothing or a freshly used towel. One might also think of “shop talk,” usually when a couple of dads at a gathering end up talking about how work is going.

My experience of the kind of conversation that happens in the early hours of the shop yard while prepping for the day is a bit of water cooler talk, yes, and there's definitely some locker room talk (with decidedly more clothing and less moisture) and more than a dash of shop talk, but there's another layer to it, an added complexity that can easily escape notice. The gossip and sexual references and the general “how’s business?” give way to language useful toward other, nobler ends.

A New Term: Yard Talk

In his book The World Beyond Your Head, motorcycle mechanic and political philosopher

Matthew B. Crawford

has a discussion on the role that language plays in skilled activities, both their development and their execution. "In the early stages of learning a skill, explicit propositional knowledge, stated in language for instructional purposes, plays a crucial role in directing attention toward its proper objects" (pg. 61). We use words to build an idea in someone's mind such that they focus on specific details or particular features we deem important, or to situate a familiar concept into a broader context so that it is given added dimension in the mind of the new learner. "Bathed with attention in this way, these objects become available for integration with affect and action routines by the subconscious mind..." (pg. 62). Prior to being discussed, certain objects are invisible, not even "available" for us to do anything with because they haven't yet been indexed to an emotion or sensory stimulus.

Take our sense of taste as an example. Refining one's palate, acquiring a taste for something: this is an activity that can often require linguistic support. A good friend recently got two bottles of Chartreuse as a gift from his wife and, the good friend that he is, he shared a pour from each bottle with me. He asked how they struck me — on the nose, on the tongue — and waited for me to wrestle with my own articulation of what I was experiencing. The word "sweet" kept coming to mind. "What kind of sweet," he asked me. I had no clue what to do with that. I took another sip. "Uhhh..." I ferped and sputtered a bit more. Mercifully, he offered, "Honey. I was trying to get you to say honey." As if by magic, my tongue could now detect honey in the sweetness weaving through the floral notes. Sensory data, already present but invisible until language was provided to identify it, was now available for my enjoyment. As Crawford puts it, "[my] own experience [was] altered in conversation" (pg. 62).

I would like to suggest that, at its best, this particular phenomenon, combined with the other categories of chatter and the social dimension that allows it all to happen (more on that in a minute), forms a new category I am calling "yard talk." Installers and technicians engage in lower levels of conversation, creating a cohesive social network within which trust is built and, on the basis of that trust, experiences from both work and personal life are shared. Yard talk, if space is made for it, can culminate in "the establishment of those perception-action-affect circuits which, once integrated, become the basis for high-level performance" (pg. 62), or in other words, something like mastery.

Put simply: bullshit in the yard can fertilize cohesion in a team and yield a harvest of craftsmanship. Of course, some weeding and cultivation is required.

Resistance to Yard Talk

One unfortunate reality of being in management is the propensity for walking through the yard at exactly the wrong time. The Operation Manager wants to see how his techs are doing, wants his face to be seen, wants them to know he's one of them, and so steps into a world of personal insults and more references to bodily organs than a biology textbook. Especially if this manager doesn't have a trades background, this can seem unnecessary and, frankly, barbaric: he catches whiffs of the fertilizer being laid but sees no immediate good coming from it.

His mistake is precisely to assume that nothing good CAN come from any of this and to interpret what he experiences as evidence of the negatives that leadership tends to be nervous about, things like low morale, a low view of the company, and decreased efficiency among others. Time is money, after all, and time spent towards these ends seems a waste. There is validity to these concerns, so let's sum them up briefly.

It seems true that every group has one personality capable of toppling the good mood of everyone they come into contact with. To prevent this person from spreading their dark shadow over the light of others, killing their levity and productivity, it is tempting to simply eliminate all possibility of socializing. The bellyache of one becomes the bellyache of many and it's not long before they collectively begin blaming the company for their gas pain. Mutiny draweth nigh and hell hath no fury like blue collar laborers scorned by the suits, even if the suit's collar was formally a shade of blue. The slander leveled against the company becomes formative in the minds and imaginations of employees, and this dissatisfaction almost directly results in decreased quality and quantity of work. In the end, money was spent paying the guys to talk with no return on the investment.

What this all amounts to in the eyes of the business leadership which must value revenue generation in order to keep its doors open is decreased efficiency. Company time and resources are wasted on, at best, crude jokes and stories shared by a cast of failed stand-up comedians, or, at worst, bad moods spreading like an infection to the detriment of employee satisfaction with their employer. None of this smells particularly good, admittedly, and a manager might be forgiven for not wanting to see what results.

The Value of Yard Talk

Yard talk, if only witnessed for a brief window of time, can look like a giant pot-stirring session or an HR violation waiting to happen. In short, it can look an awful lot like a liability, or worse: a waste of money. Or both. And yet yard talk has immense value beyond these potential risks. What aren't as readily observable because they grow over the course of time are two interdependent realities fostered by yard talk: what philosopher Richard Sennett refers to as a "workshop" and a complementary idea in Crawford, "the art of philosophical conversation."

The Yard as a Workshop

One facet of yard talk that is easy to miss is its establishment of a kind of social order. Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman, helps us to understand what he calls the workshop. Far from being merely a particular space in which work happens, the workshop is "a productive space in which people deal face-to-face with issues of authority" (pg. 54). In our modern era, authority as it relates to trade work is a big question: who is the master of a trade? The one who is licensed by the government as such? Or the one who is recognized by fellow practitioners as having mastery of it? For Sennett, it is more so the latter, and I think that most tradespeople would agree with him.

Delving into the merits and politics that surround municipal, state, or federal licensure and its relationship to true mastery are outside the scope of this essay. What I hope to establish is that whether or not mastery involves government licensure, it most certainly involves Sennett's workshop, and workshop is not possible without yard talk.

In a workshop, "legitimate authority in the flesh" is established. A community of practitioners bring their work to be seen by other practitioners (mostly in the form of a picture on a smart device of some kind in my field), which results in enduring some degree of ball-busting even if it is exceptional work, and to likewise judge the work and bust the balls of others. Over time, those who submit themselves to this twofold social dynamic of hazing and critique will prove themselves to be part of the community — they pass the vibe check, as it were — and to share in the respect of those who do the same work that they do. Within this structure a master or perhaps masters are identified, and their years of expertise are available for all.

Crawford, although he doesn't use the same term as Sennett, agrees conceptually. "For experiences to become part of the secure, sedimented foundation of a skill, they must be criticized. Other people (and the resource of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are partial, and may sediment as idiosyncratic bad habits" (pg. 63). Sennett says no one working in isolation from other practitioners can figure out how to overcome their own lack of skill and produce high-level work. No one sees the trade from all angles. If you can't hang with the community because you don't like their jokes, you don't get to participate in that circumspective criticism which leads to the acquisition and refinement of skill. Recognizing "authority in the flesh" requires being with others who are in the flesh. No community, no growth; no workshop, no work talk; no master, no mastery.

The Workshop as the Forum for Philosophical Conversation

The social dynamic provided by the workshop is in part created by and ultimately becomes the locus of Crawford's philosophical conversation. The "resource of language" that shaped the relationships that began the community through innocuous conversations and joking around is now, in the context of that community, used to draw attention to the particulars of their shared work for the benefit of all. "The cohesiveness and ongoing association of a...unit offer an advantage...: they are under mutual surveillance and can criticize one another's mistakes" (pg. 62). With the social agreement made that those who are present deserve to be and, as such, are deserving of whatever an individual has to offer them in the shared enterprise of perfecting their work, the mutual criticism begins in earnest.

Crawford called this an art, which seems like an interesting application of that word in the context I'm suggesting here. His explanation is worth quoting at length.

"Getting things right requires triangulating with other people. Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether 'metacognition' (thinking critically about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an 'art' because it requires both tact and doggedness. And I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. This is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit." (The World Beyond Your Head, pg. 63)

It goes without saying that there are those who love their own current state of understanding more than they love truth and have nothing to offer the workshop. Such individuals tend to see themselves to the door after a time if they aren’t pushed out by others before then. When the ethos of the workshop is the pursuit of excellence, jokers are welcome but slackers are not.

Yard talk cannot be reduced to the "idle chitchat" of the water cooler or the locker room, even though it may include them. There is so much more at play: the creation, maintenance of, and participation in a workshop; critical thinking about thinking; the dogged pursuit of truth and, perhaps paradoxical to our view of tradesmen, the humility that is required to obtain it. This is not merely a group of employees riding the clock (although it can become that), nor is this a labor union meeting of endless politicking (although it can become that), nor again is this just bros being bros (although it can become that). Yard talk contains within itself the upward call toward mastery.

Let Us Talk

I am not suggesting that the weeds be allowed to have the run of the yard; careful and tough hands are needed to ensure that what should thrive, does. But if, for fear of weeds, the possibility of yard talk is altogether removed from the landscape of a company's culture — if only silent efficiency is allowed — then at risk is the unintended cultivation of two more dangerous invasive species: impaired social cohesion within the team and forswearing that cross-pollination which brings forth the fruit of mastery. These, I think, are a far greater price to pay than some gossip and off-color jokes.

And rather ironically, the feared results are often exactly what leadership gets by trying to keep the yard talk to a minimum: because each service tech feels like they are in their own world in their truck with no vital connection to anyone else in the company, they sense they have been reduced to a number and so morale decreases; because they feel like merely a cog in an impersonal system and merely a flesh-machine among many flesh-machines used to get the structure built, their view of the company is less than favorable (and do not think for a second that they will not say this to others out of leadership's earshot); because they are cut off from the opportunity for learning by mutual sharing and critique of experiences, they struggle more in the field or on the job site and their efficiency slows.

If my ten years of trade experience have proven anything to me it is that in the end, the less desirable categories of conversation happen anyway, smuggled in as contraband to an invisible network of communication that thrives in spite of leadership's desires rather than in support of them, and with none of the benefits — to the individual, the workshop, or the company — of yard talk.

Yard talk ought to be seen for the good thing it is: the crucible in which sociability is vetted, the mold in which comradery is formed, the classroom in which technical competence is nurtured, and the forum in which mastery can be recognized. One's license or certification matters little if true masters of the craft do not accept one's work as being representative of their trade's ideals. It is within a thousand small workshops that dot our country's landscape that those ideals are made known and to which one's own work is held up for comparison.

So let us talk, that community might be established; let us talk, that craftsmen and women might rise up to take their place as preservers of ancient knowledge and teachers of their trade; let us talk, that mastery might be attained; let us talk, for our good and yours.