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Three firemen in an office, drinking coffee, catching up-- and then, one of them, this big bald guy,
gets up to show the others this new helmet that he's just gotten, picks up a box off the floor, and
says, what is that? He makes a face. It stinks, too. He smells his fingers. What is that?
It's pee. This conversation understandably turns to speculation on how the pee might have gotten the
re. "Where'd you find this?" he asks.
The rest of the video, which is entitled "The Incident With the Helmet," goes on for a few minutes e
xplaining why it is not a good idea to pee in your colleague's helmet, even if it's a joke. Like, th
at can make people feel bad, and unwelcome. And the reason the fire department needed a video like t
his was the firefighters were peeing in their co-workers helmets and their drinks, and had been for
years.
This was a re-enactment of an actual incident. Amsterdam firefighters had a kind of macho, frat hous
e culture. And for women who came to work there, or anybody who wasn't white, it was rough in all ki
nds of ways-- pranks, bullying, racist jokes, sexist comments. Women described the environment as al
ienating. One Moroccan-Dutch firefighter said, "What we want is not super special. We just want norm
al behavior, normal treatment of people."
The bosses had problems with them, too. The firefighters would simply ignore certain orders to chang
e the way they worked. Back in 2011, the mayor of Amsterdam commanded them to do some straightforwar
d things, like perform more home inspections, pass out smoke detectors, switch from 24-hour shifts t
o 8-hour shifts. A year passed, and another, and another. After five years-- still nothing. They'd p
retty much blown off his requests..