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Gotta agree on the east coast mindset. I have been traveling for a living for 15 years. Not in the manner where you go to some town for a meeting for a few days, but in the manner where I go to many places large and small and work there from weeks to months. I’m a hard core westerner who lives and breathes the desert, am very laid back, and get along with almost any type of person from the ceo’s to the most redneckiest of rednecks in mississippi..but I cannot for the life of me really understand nor relate to many people in the north east. I have never encountered such a collection of uptight people anywhere in the 50 states, 10 canadian provinces, 23 mexican states, nor 31 other countries I have visited and worked in. They baffle me.

Definitely agree.

An interesting story. back in the early 1990's the company I worked for which was HQ'd in Indianapolis bought a plant in New Jersey. This was around the time I was fresh out of college. We did a two week trip to NJ - flew out on Friday afternoon, returned two weeks later. I was instructed to pack a suit and not to bother even pack a pair of blue jeans - we were expected to be dressed nice even on weekends. I broke that rule and wore jeans on the weekend.

Now about the facility. The offices had pretty nice bathrooms while the factory had pretty nasty bathrooms even where the toilet stalls had no doors. There was a sign on the office bathrooms that they were for use by office workers only. At night, they locked the bathrooms. The General Manager (GM) was a piece of work to say it nicely. Our last night there, we went to this very nice restaurant where the menu did not show prices. I ordered lobster, another gentleman in our group ordered fillet mignon. About a couple weeks after we got back from NJ, our manager got called into the CEO's office and got chewed out. The GM complained about how our cowboy mindset was very offensive and not only that, the GM complained that I didn't deserve to order lobster since I was the young one who hasn't paid my dues to Society. The ironic thing, we were told thanks for our hard work and we were more than welcome to order anything off the menu. My manager mentioned about the lobster after his @$$chewing. I was indirectly told b the GM that I needed to know my place. My response back was if the GM felt I didn't deserve the lobster, he should have said it to my face. The ironic thing also since we didn't leave for lunch during the day, they would bring in crappy food for lunch. The other plants, the office workers treated us very well especially in Alabama with their BBQ. These people left a very bad taste in my mouth concerning Northeasterners. The ironic thing, the GM was fired a year later and what I heard, he got into it with the CEO.

The line of work was we were there to get a new computer system installed. Anything you did, you had to get permission even to do the most mundane things. On their software, they insisted their software be different from the other facilities just to be different. Maintaining separate versions of their software was such a pain. It took a lot of time to get the software unified and when they found out, they got very mad. One thing, they thought they were so special. The office manager was a barracuda as well and very hard to deal with.

...but I cannot for the life of me really understand nor relate to many people in the north east.