Have you ever been at a get-together and found yourself in the middle of a conversation with someone and realized that you had just spilled a line of profanities while telling a story about a recent recovery you had performed?
Well I have. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t intend to offend it just came out as easily as answering the phone. Maybe it had something to do with watching too many episodes of “Wrecked” or the new YouTube show “Bill and Sons Towing”.
I decided to investigate the reason for the prolific use of profanity in the towing industry.
So I went to the source, the towers themselves and asked: “Why do you use profanity?” Simple, straight-forward question right? I expected to receive the same simple straight-forward responses. What I got was not fit for print so I’ll summarize.
One tower responded: “It’s not something I really think about, I just start talking about the accident and what I had to do get it out of the woods or wherever it was and those words just fit.”
Another tower commented: “I think maybe I use them when I’m remembering back to what I was going through while working an accident and what was going through my mind.”
What I found is that most towers are good people who are proud of the jobs that they do and part of the enjoyment of doing a job well is relaying that information to other towers, friends and family.
(It’s our version of killing it and dragging it home for supper.)
When in the course of relaying information about a particularly difficult situation, we find ourselves in, we tend to get a little excited and use expletives to get our points across. To the fellow tower it’s a cue that what was happening at that point in the recovery was exceedingly difficult and to the non-tower it’s a hint that they should start paying attention to the story once more.
The use of profane language is not unique to the towing industry you can find it anywhere you look. Whether you’re hunting for gold, cutting timber or fixing choppers there’s always somebody being bleeped out because of their poor choice of words.
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