B is for Bagging*

If you don't know what "bagging" is, you will find that dictionaries are not going to be much help. Unlike my last entry in this series, it is not formal technical language, but is the informal technical language of site operations.

I'll get to the definition in a bit, but I'll digress to tell you a bit about where I first came across the term. (Sorry if this constitutes an unexpected item in the bagging area as they say in self-checkout). I left school at fifteen and went to work on a road construction project near where I lived, as a "chain lad"(aka chain man/boy). I think this job no longer exists, like so many 1970's jobs. It generically means the lowest ranking monkey/gofer on site. Labourer is something to aspire to if you are a chain lad.

The reason why I think the version of it I did doesn't exist any more is because I mostly had the task of holding the graduated staff which the civil engineer uses to measure elevations on site (and the dumb end of his tape measure). I see lasers appear to have superseded quite a bit of this job, though I still see the stakes and batter rails I used to construct out of rough timber to record the engineer's measurements as I pass civil engineering sites, so some of it must survive. Fifteen year olds don't get to work on site nowadays though.

I'm also not sure how many of today's fifteen year olds could carry a 16 pound sledge hammer, a bundle of stakes and boards, a bag of Hilti nails, and a staff across site. (I once offered a holiday job which required to ability to lift a manhole cover to take a sample to my twenty year old students. Only two of them had the strength to do it. That one of them was female might be a kind of progress)

The other thing that hasn't survived, I think are the chances we had back them to try things out for size, make mistakes, and change direction radically later. In the cabin with me on that site was a Polish guy who went on to do a PhD and become a Professor of Biophysics. There weren't a lot of recent Polish immigrants in the UK back then, so he was something of a novelty. I don't think he even made chain lad, due to his poor English, He always seemed to be allocated the job of sweeping the cabin.

Back them we had FE colleges where you could do O levels and more importantly A levels if you had left school without enough qualifications to go to university. You could do them whilst unemployed (as I was along with a high percentage of young people when I did mine in the 80's ) as long as you didn't study more than 16 hours per week. You could even live away from home whilst doing it, and claim benefits. There are very few FE colleges now, and I'm not sure that any of them offer the second chances I got. I know for sure that the state supported second chance I got is no longer available, as well as the grants for tuition and living expenses which took me to university.

I am bemused by a lot of what it happening in the UK now, and personally I voted to remain, but anyone looking for the reasons for Brexit might want to look here. Working class people can see their kids have less chance to advance than they had. A lot of people like me pulled the ladder up behind them.

But I have (perhaps self-indulgently) wandered a long way from my starting point. What is "bagging"? The commonest usage of the term is for the cheap, light flexible hose used on the delivery side of the pumps used to dewater excavations on site, essentially a very long plastic bag without a top or bottom seam. As it collapses when not pressurised, it is also known as "layflat" hose, which means that it cannot be used on the suction side of pumps. Hose with spiral reinforcement ("suction hose") is used for this duty. Sometimes "bagging" is used more generally on site for any pump hose, leading to confusion as to whether delivery or suction piping is required. As the two hose types are not interchangeable, it is best not to use the term when ordering hose.

One more thing, make sure you get some gaffer tape** to go with your bagging. It inevitably springs leaks, which can be stopped (or at least stopped from showering passers-by) with a hoop of tape around the hose.

What other site terms which don't appear in dictionaries can you offer?

** AKA duct tape, duck tape etc....