Regional Variations in the USA

For those of you who enjoy Light Bright’s spelling errors, I missed another egregious one when looking over her dictation: “sever” for “severe.” Then again, who among us has not had a sever allergy attack? You know, one where you are sneezing so hard that your head is in danger of being severed from your body. Light Bright also came up with some alternate spellings for the fungus Alternaria (appropriate, I suppose); my favorite was Alertnaria, presumably a fungus that feeds on caffeine. And this is the person they are grooming to replace me when I leave? Funny… they said they had problems with my lack of accuracy. They also said I do not anticipate needs, so they hope to replace me with someone who ordered a cake for a going-away party and didn’t think to have a message put on it. No “Good luck, Coworker!” No “We’ll miss you!” Just a blank cake. (It’s almost a Cake Wreck, only more of a Cake Orderer Wreck.)

The other day my coworker with the best stories stopped in, and he was regaling us with tales of interviewing at other institutions. He said only at Davis (in California) did they talk about deep things while wining and dining him; in Miami they did more whining with the dining as they talked about how they all wanted to get out of there, and somewhere else in California they all talked about how far they lived from the institution. Somewhere down south he was shocked by their blatant racism. My favorite story was when he visited an institution which will remain anonymous in New England, and the director kept asking him if he was OK with working with “Them.” My coworker finally asked who “They” were.

“You know!” said the director. “THEM!”
“Them who?”
“You know! The…. Jews!”

And this was in the 80’s! Who knew? This gentleman, who is originally from a South American country, and was born before his middle name (Adolfo) had any bad connotations, concluded that the Midwest is where people are best-educated and least prejudiced. As someone who has spent all but the first two years of my life in the Midwest, I will happily concur with that assessment.

Famous Hat