Page - 64 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

64 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Agata Stanisz | Tractor unit acoustemology The drivers also read Polish newspapers whenever they have access to the Internet, they com- municate with their Polish friends on social networking sites. This is the reason why the cate- gory that describes such a way of life is multilocalness, which scholars such as Vincent Kauf- mann (2005, 119-135) or Johanna Rolshoven (2008, 17-25) interpret as a strategy necessary to contextualize the activities undertaken by mobile actors. The practice of locating themselves in mobile places makes those drivers become creators of localness in numerous localizations in the conditions of flow and mobility. National identification of tractor unit drivers in the spaces of mobility takes place, as men- tioned before, in a multisensory way. Mutual recognition does not only depend on visuality because European drivers wear similar clothes, and the cars and semitrailers assigned to them are registered in different European countries. In the international and multilingual working conditions experienced by the drivers, even language loses its quality to identify somebody in a definite way. You can recognize your people by the smell of the food they are heating, the type of beer they are drinking or the music they are listening to. Cultural intimacy comes to light not only during pauses and while waiting, but also when the drivers are fulfilling their respon- sibilities. They are not just passive machine operators whose task is to transport about 40 tons of all types of goods. They are also responsible for taking care of the load: placing it safely in the semitrailer, securing it against movement and then making sure it is safely unloaded. They also need to pay attention to whether the distribution of the goods is properly documented, they often have to negotiate with forwarding offices or on customs borders. Nationality is the key element in those negotiations. Polish drivers use a specific language, a type of jargon created on the basis of the vocabulary connected with forwarding, logistics and physical work. This jargon is a blend of the official languages spoken in the countries where the drivers travel with their goods. In the case of the company whose cars I was travelling in, these countries were Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Norway. The voca- bulary acquired by the Polish drivers oftentimes turns out to be insufficient when bureaucracy comes into play. This is when office employees who are Poles, have Polish, or at least Russian or Ukrainian, origin (linguistic similarities), become the key personae, and such people can be encountered in the most surprising places. This type of intimacy significantly facilitates not only the work of the Polish drivers, but also the speed of the flow of goods in Europe if we take into consideration that most drivers working in Europe are Poles. Owing to this intimacy, some strict rules governing many forwarding companies, factories, wholesale warehouses or proces- sing plants, are broken, for example, working hours, times when goods can be received into the warehouse, lunch break hours. In the context of the drivers’ everyday work, the machine sounds are the most intensive, inevitable and permanent. There are fluctuating whirring of the engine depending on the engi- ne revs, suppressed sounds from the inside of the cab and the semitrailer, sounds of un(loading), blinking of the turn-signal, sounds of forklifts, passing cars, trains, humming and hissing of fac- tories, steel plants, the noise of ferries, turbines, airplanes, the buzzing of the truck fridge, facto- ry coolers, clumping, rumbling, clomping, whistling, whooshing, whizzing, zipping, knocking, pattering, cracking, crunching, horning, tooting, beeping, recharging batteries, sound of the air-conditioning, cranes or pile drivers.