LJI S11 Week 8 - My True North
"It's always been done this way."
I'd been hired as a unit manager at Murdoch Center, a home for children with severe developmental delays. I had a BA in psych and seven years of experience working in group homes, but every suggestion I made, either to my staff or to my supervisors, was met with a withering look and the same phrase:
"It's always been done this way."
"But what if we just tried..."
"It's always been done this way."
I quit that job after just six months.
I should have seen this coming. Shortly before I left upstate New York to move to North Carolina, my father mailed me a document that would have been one of those things people email-forwarded to each other or posted on Facebook, if such things had existed in 1993.
Things To Know Before Moving To North Carolina
1. Cooking burgers and hot dogs on a grill isn't "barbecue" - it's "grilling out." Barbecue is pork, slow-cooked all day, pulled apart or chopped, and doused with a sauce made of vinegar and peppers.
2. Not a fan of college basketball? Just wait - you will be!!
3. Y'all is always plural.
4. "Bless your heart" isn't a good thing. It's a nice-southern-lady way of saying "wow, you're a goddamn idiot" or possibly "fuck you."
5. "Iced tea" is not a thing - tea is either hot, sweet, or unsweet. If you ask for sweet tea expect it to contain so much sugar it's actually thick.
(And so on - I can't believe I could have thrown that list away, but I searched today and couldn't find it.)
Once I got here, I discovered some of my own too:
- Referring to my "sneakers" got me strange looks. It still irritates me that locals refer to every type of athletic footwear as "tennis shoes."
- "She was real ugly to me" isn't a statement about someone's looks - it means they were mean or nasty. (At least, what I used to think of as nasty - unkind, unpleasant. Since moving south I've discovered it means dirty, unclean, or disgusting, so "she's so nasty" means something different than it used to as well.)
- "Might could" is grammatically correct.
- Even the potential for snow is sufficient excuse to leave work, drive to the grocery store, and empty the shelves of bread, water, and milk.
I adjusted, slowly - I've learned to love pork barbecue and happily take the day off work if the weather report forecasts snow - but even after 25 years locals can tell I'm not truly one of them.
I still prefer bagels to biscuits, and desperately miss good NY deli which simply doesn't exist here. I'm considered brusque or even rude (for example, when someone comes into my office at work, I ask how I can help them instead of chatting about how their kids/grandkids/dogs are doing.) I don't break out my winter coat until temps are below 40. I'm the last to leave the office when snowflakes start to fall.
And I still, even after all these years (and working at UNC), don't give a rats ass about college basketball - and I never will. (Go Canes!)