Firefighters take the heat

[cronus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/0 ... y-services

Firefighters bear brunt of 'Trumpton' jokes among other emergency services

Police and ambulance crews tell jokes about firefighters as a way of coping with the death and destruction they deal with on a daily basis, according to new academic research.

Both services regularly refer to them as "water fairies" and "drip stands", as well the more well-known "Trumpton", but also often joke that they sleep on the job, cut car roofs off unnecessarily and hose away vital evidence.

But they also often feel that the public image of firefighters, particularly among women, is undeserved, pointing out that they don't actually run into burning buildings very often. "You could say we're not ramming it down people's throats that we rescued a cat out of a tree," said one police officer.

The research, by Dr Sarah Charman of Portsmouth University's institute of criminal justice studies and published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, says such black humour helps "glue" ambulance crews and police officers together.

"Emergency workers frequently find themselves in unpleasant and unpredictable situations at odds with the heroic status and image presented in television dramas," she said. "They regularly deal with death or near-death. They face messy and mortifying situations the rest of us never have to encounter."

Charman added that they managed such stressful situations with humour that allowed them to control their feelings of fear or vulnerability.

"For these people, it is often a case of if you didn't laugh, you'd cry. Both have a tension-reducing effect, but it's not socially acceptable for professionals doing their job to cry."

But she said the unexpected finding of her research, based on interviews with 45 ambulance staff and police officers, was that while all three emergency services enjoy a mutual respect and camaraderie, firefighters were often not included and were likely to be the main target of their light-hearted banter.

(continued)

[JimC]

Burn, baby, burn...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Clueless here.