There’s Maryland and then there’s Maryland. When you were being hassled by rude people in Gaithersburg at Lockheed, I’m pretty sure you were talking to people who were not bred, born, and raised in the Maryland countryside. The people who live in Montgomery County, from Germantown south to DC, are part of the DC complex. Not many of them are natives of the area; a lot of them are very ambitious people who move to the DC suburbs in pursuit of a high-flying career. They’re stressed and exhausted and some of them are not very nice.
But outside of DC and Baltimore, Maryland is full of normal humans. They drive trucks and go to church and wear cammies and have a couple of hounds back in the loadbed. They hunt. They’re active-duty or former military. They fly the flag. They hunt some more. They vote Republican. They spank their kids. They have a Southern sensibility. They’re American. And they’re very nice, for the most part, especially if you don’t seem to be some out-of-town jerk liberal who wants to tell them what to do.
I definitely see the point. And kind of forgot, Maryland was considered a Southern state even though especially in the DC area identifies with the liberal Northeast.
Kind of funny, one of the G-berg high flyers would visit our Colorado office every so often and he will always wear the dark slacks, dress shirt and tie even on Friday and be more formal business casual on weekends. I gave him a hard time that ties and fancy pants are not required in Colorado. I personally wore blue jeans everyday especially working in a lab where from day to day, I would be on the floor doing cables. He didn’t quite like it when I said that to him LOL. On weekends if I had to go into the office, I would go with the shorts, sandals and t-shirt/hoodie and our G-burg counterparts would complain about me dressing too casually and I would respond that I am there on my own time (unpaid OT) and I am there to work, not be a fashion plate or model.
> There’s Maryland and then there’s Maryland. When you were being hassled by rude people in Gaithersburg at Lockheed, I’m pretty sure you were talking to people who were not bred, born, and raised in the Maryland countryside.
> a lot of them are very ambitious people who move to the DC suburbs in pursuit of a high-flying career. They’re stressed and exhausted and some of them are not very nice.