Well I know that it was mine... Just like the word, understanding the concept of ethnomethodology can be challenging. To me, the whole concept of unconsciously making sense of everything around me is really interesting. Before this week, I had never considered how uncomfortable situations that seem to have to 'sense' attached to them are for us as individuals.
We are brought up to assign some sort of sense to every situation we encounter, or as Garfinkel puts it, to "treat social facts as interactional accomplishments" and we are able to do this by applying haeccaity (thing-ness), documentary methods of interpretation (the reinforcement of ideas, and thus 'sense', through unscripted actions) and congruency of the system of relevances (being on the same page as the person with who you're interacting) to situations and appropriate them to our lives.
Another particularly interesting (well to me anyway) aspect of ethnomethodology is the idea of breaching experiments and strategically putting other individuals in social situations that they can't make sense of in order to view their reactions. It made me think back to all the times I have encountered people on public transport who were acting "nonsensically". I'm sure everyone has a CityRail (or Gong free shuttle bus?) weirdo story and can relate to how uncomfortable not knowing why a particular individual is doing or saying something can be. This interested me immensely and made me think back to all the uncomfortable interactive times had on public transport.
Who knew that the guy wearing a Chicken Twisties packet as a beanie on the South Coast line had such an important part to play in ethnomethodology?
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