ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the middle and main part, during which the physical tasks of the 'bed and body work' are performed. It provides an example that shows how the participants use non-task talk to temporarily break out of the narrowly defined institutional frame, and how they manage to get back in. The chapter discusses how the physical activities generate a number of verbalisations, here called task talk, that serve to assure a coordinated performance of the care tasks. One structural problem of non-task talk sequences is that they are vulnerable to being cancelled by task talk at virtually any interactional moment. Both care worker and care recipient seem to share an overall understanding that task talk overrules non-task talk, and they frequently show an awareness of the problem by designing their verbal returns to a task in a minimally intrusive way.
