#you can't mishear that as ''street'' easily

[secondbeatsongs]

hey real talk, in s14e04 of Taskmaster, did Greg seriously say "I'm not straight enough to appreciate rap", or am I somehow mishearing this?

[agent-bash]

I could've sworn you answered a question like this before and sorry if you have I scoured through and couldn't find it. I'm interested in how they label the buildings on Chicago Fire. They seem to use the alphabet, the nato alphabet, and directions. Is there a rhyme or reason for the change? Which, in your opinion is better? and how do they decide what to label everything?

Yeah, Chicago Fire doesn't seem consistent in what they use. I'm always very confused when they use directionals, I've never run into that anywhere, but I know how they would work it, I think.

In my experience, NATO is the most common. You just can't really mishear with the NATO alphabet, and that's the point of it. If you say B, C, D out loud to yourself right now, you'll hear how similar they sound. Add in noise and chaos, static on radios, etc. and they're too easy to mix up. But Bravo, Charlie, Delta, not so much. They sound very different, it's very clear.

How we labelled does vary depending on the shape and orientation of the building. Houses are easier because they're usually oriented with a street-facing entrance. A clear front of the house that can't be mistaken, even if, say, the main entrance the family uses is a side door. Doesn't matter. That clear front of the house is typically the Alpha side, and then it goes out clockwise from there. So the side immediately to your left upon entrance is the Bravo side, the rear of the house is Charlie, and the right of the house is Delta. Easy-Peasy, Then say something goes down in the Alpha-Delta corner of the house; all firefighters know where to go.

Something like a factory, though, can be different. They don't necessarily orientate to a street like houses do, or they have multiple sides that could be easily labelled the Alpha side. In those situations, the first company on the scene dictates orientation. Let's use Firehouse 51 as an example. Truck 81 gets there first. They will pull up to one side, and Kidd would put something out over the radio like this: "This is Truck 81, pulling up and making an entrance on the Alpha side of the building." Then everyone else orientates off of where Truck 81 is being the Alpha side. And the same pattern, clockwise from there, follows.

Using Directionals is limiting for one. Say if you're building has more than four sides. In NATO, we'd add an Echo side, a Foxtrot side; as many sides as we need to have an entire alphabet at our disposal and if a building has more than 26 sides, well then we'd probably use numbers. DIrectionals only have 4. I'd also imagine East and West would lead to some confusion. They do naturally, but we're used to moving to the left; compasses, you move to the right. And at least my dyslexic ass, following all the patterns that we're taught, really wants to label my left as East, even though I know left is West. But just like A(lpha) is followed by B(ravo), North is immediately followed by saying East. Couple that with the movements we're taught and now my brain hurts. So...I do hope this helped Nonny, now I'm gonna go look at Compass until things make sense.