Repair Shop Rock: What We Listen To In The Bay

You’ve got a repair to make. What do you do first?

Coffee, probably. Maybe you fire up Fullbay, too. (Hey, this is the Fullbay blog. We have to plug it a little.)

Then you get to work…or do you?

Is there something missing in our Get-Ready-to-Work checklist? Hmm…you’ve got goggles if you need them, right? And tools — well, duh. But still, something’s missing. What on earth…

Wait. 

Earbuds. Headphones. A stereo. Or maybe just background noise.

That’s right, folks. Today, we’re talking about what diesel professionals listen to when they’re getting to work on a job. While it’s not a topic as consequential as, say, grabbing the right part or wearing protective boots, what you hear while working can certainly impact your mood, if not the quality of the work itself. And besides, we were curious. 

We ended up adding a question to the most recent State of Heavy-Duty Repair survey. What follows is a breakdown of some answers; we haven’t crunched through the data yet, so for now, take this for what it is: a fun list with links to some badass tunes.

CRM WINS THE DAY

Dang it, Fullbay, you might be saying, I thought you were going to be talking about music, not customer relationship management!

We are, we swear! In this case, CRM stands for country-rock-metal.

In this writer’s admittedly haphazard early analysis, country music was by far and away the winner, commanding about 10% of the responses. This was just a generic “country music” response, by the way — other entries named specific artists or songs (“Blue Collar Ain’t Easy” and “Hard Workin’ Man” among them).  

Rock took the second position, with 7.5% of the responses. Specific call-outs included AC/DC (apparently a lot of you are here for “Thunderstruck”) and Guns N’Roses (I would also like to go to “Paradise City”). Some of you are also Journey fans, and now we are obligated to post a link to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” because that is Journey Law.  

Rounding out the CRM of repair shop music was that old standby: heavy metal. Metallica got specific callouts (I too like to fix things while “Enter Sandman” blares in the background), along with Dio, because hey, “Holy Diver” is always a winner. 

INTERESTING CALL-OUTS

Then, of course, there was the person who said they listened to “Cat Country Radio Channel,” and this writer went nuts thinking it was a channel of cats singing country music…sadly, it is in fact a real station featuring songs by human singers. 

(For those of you who are also devastated by the lack of cats singing country, don’t worry — I’ve got you.) 

Other interesting one-offs included “The Red” by Chevelle, sea shanties (can we get a HEYOOO for “Santiana”?!) and “The Sound of Silence,” which could fit into the metal or rock categories depending on what version you crank up. We also saw mentions of Lady Gaga (should we rewrite “Bad Romance” as “Bad Repair”?) and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. 

Plus a smattering of what we’ll classify as “other stuff”: 

• Talk radio/podcasts
• Local news
• Cash registers
• “LOTR soundtrack” (that means Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore and I would absolutely feel badass trying to fix something while all that crazy Khazad Dum stuff was going on). 
• “Euro Dance Music” (I looked this up and apparently “Rhythm is a Dancer” qualifies). 
• Birds chirping
• Christian/gospel
• “Whistle while you work…duh. Who doesn’t do this?”
• “Anything Creed!!!!!!!!!!!” (unless they meant the other Creed?)
• Vin Diesel.

And so on and so forth. 

MUSIC IN THE WORKPLACE: GOOD OR BAD?

Inspired by the survey results, I conducted my own informal poll of the Fullbay workplace to see what they were listening to.

(Editor’s Note: Be honest, Suz.) 

Okay…I checked with three members of the marketing team, myself included.

Their responses ranged from folk music (Capercaillie among them), TV shows/various playlists of pop music/ASMR (depending on level of concentration required), and ambiences and/or heavy metal of all stripes (again, contingent on concentration required). It may be worth noting that at the moment all three of us work from home, and thus can choose our own background adventure, so to speak. With that said, we all recall prior workplaces that were alternately dead silent or featured piped-in music chosen by someone else. 

So, music or background noise of some sort is a must for many. But is it good?

Not to get all sciencey on y’all, but workplace noise is a subject that has gained a lot of attraction in the last decade or so — possibly because piped-in tunes have become a staple of the dreaded open office, and companies want to wring as much productivity out of employees as possible. And really, what is a repair shop if not a giant open office with lots of cool machinery?

We have not looked at all the studies out there, nor are we going to try, and the ones we did look at focused on background music rather than noise as a whole (so cutting out podcasts, audiobooks, and so on). 

A lot of them suggest music has benefits…but also drawbacks. 

Gee, Fullbay, you might be saying, what a concise and scientific answer.

Bruh. We’re a diesel blog, not a peer-reviewed journal. 

Basically, there are two schools of thought when it comes to music in the workplace:

• It helps, or…
• It doesn’t help, but it makes us feel good, so we do better work anyway.

This BBC piece states music during work may help “by making us smarter, or by making us feel good, and therefore helping us to plod on with otherwise boring tasks,” while this study explores the latter, suggesting “emotional use has a positive relationship to performance.” 

And then there’s this piece, which features a neuroscientist telling us we’re way less productive when we crank up the tunes and we should probably just turn them off.

(You can pry my music from my cold, dead, decaffeinated hands, bro.)

We did get some responses that would probably agree with the neuroscientist. About 10% of our respondents answered “none” or “music is distracting” or just “no.” Someone else wrote, “Depends on what I’m working on” and another respondent said, “If I have to think, something without words.” 

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO REPAIR SALUTE YOU

Let’s be frank: we’re probably never going to decide as a species, once and for all, that music/noise are good or bad in the workplace. Everyone’s different. Some of us need dead silence to concentrate. Others can’t summon up the will to work without screeching along to obscure Finnish forest metal. In the end, we should all rock out (or not) to whatever works for us, as long as we’re not ticking off our coworkers in the process.

(Aren’t earbuds a great invention?) 

We tip our caps to those of you who chose to share your background noise of choice with us. We’ll return the favor (well, sort of) by sharing our Diesel Connect 2024 playlist with you — it’s got some pretty sweet tunes on it. 

(Really. People commented on it a lot!)

Now turn up the volume and get repairin’!