A Visit to City Hall
And now for a little story I've been meaning to tell for a while.
Back last fall, when Kendell and I were looking at apartments in Jersey City to buy, I was advised by a coworker to go to Jersey City City Hall to look through their records of recent apartment sales so I could see what the going rate was.
I wonder if this coworker was pulling my chain, because when I got to City Hall, I found the records were in a laughably unhelpful state. The documents were organized in the most irrelevant-to-a-homebuyer way: by street number, irrespective of street. Most of them were in large binders, but others were piled randomly in cardboard boxes. (I eventually discovered, through the same coworker, the website Zillow.com, which was exactly what I needed all along. And it's free, too.)
A very cheerful city employee helped guide me through the boxes. As soon as I saw them, I knew my errand was pointless, and I'm sure he'd known the same all along. He was nice and at least let me look at some stuff on his computer about the condo we were interested in (and ended up buying), which didn't tell me much of anything I didn't already know, but at least made me feel I hadn't come all the way there from Manhattan over my lunch hour for nothing.
His main job wasn't to help dopes like me; he was a housing safety inspector. He was a short, pudgy white guy in his thirties with a Joisey accent. Like I said, he was very cheerful and friendly, and asked me about myself. I told him I was moving from Manhattan, to which he replied, "You know, dey say Jersey City is da Sixth Borough!"
[Incidentally, although everyone jokingly refers to Jersey accents as "Joisey accents", I've never actually heard any locals say "Joisey". And Jersey accents don't sound any different to me from New York accents. Finally, "Joisey" is something that, from what I've read, only a Brooklynite, circa 1850-1950, would ever have said.]
He asked if I was from New York, and I said I wasn't, I was from North Carolina. My experience of the locals over the past five years has been that New Yorkers are satisfied with that as an answer, and haven't heard of any towns in North Carolina anyway. But this guy surprised me by asking which town I was from, and where I'd gone to college.
To the latter I said "UNC Chapel Hill" (I never just say "Carolina" anymore), getting ready to tack on my usual helpful explanatory note of "It's where Michael Jordan went to college!" But before I could, that's when he really surprised me by interjecting with:
"So you must bleed Tah Heel bloo!"
It turned out that all his friends had gone to NC for college. I almost, unthinkingly, said to him, "Haha, yeah, we make fun of Duke as being the University of New Jersey at Durham!" Fortunately, I realized in time how difficult it would have been to explain that joke. "Well, ah, you see, we hate Duke, and as Southerners, we hate the North, and New Jersey represents to us the absolute nadir of the North, so we like to hold it against Duke that they, um, have so many New Jerseyans..."
Not that I'm really a Southerner by any stretch of the imagination. And it's funny for me to think that I'll probably end up living most of my life in New Jersey. I've already started "representing" (only half in jest) whenever a Manhattanite coworker decides to dump on the Garden State.
Back last fall, when Kendell and I were looking at apartments in Jersey City to buy, I was advised by a coworker to go to Jersey City City Hall to look through their records of recent apartment sales so I could see what the going rate was.
I wonder if this coworker was pulling my chain, because when I got to City Hall, I found the records were in a laughably unhelpful state. The documents were organized in the most irrelevant-to-a-homebuyer way: by street number, irrespective of street. Most of them were in large binders, but others were piled randomly in cardboard boxes. (I eventually discovered, through the same coworker, the website Zillow.com, which was exactly what I needed all along. And it's free, too.)
A very cheerful city employee helped guide me through the boxes. As soon as I saw them, I knew my errand was pointless, and I'm sure he'd known the same all along. He was nice and at least let me look at some stuff on his computer about the condo we were interested in (and ended up buying), which didn't tell me much of anything I didn't already know, but at least made me feel I hadn't come all the way there from Manhattan over my lunch hour for nothing.
His main job wasn't to help dopes like me; he was a housing safety inspector. He was a short, pudgy white guy in his thirties with a Joisey accent. Like I said, he was very cheerful and friendly, and asked me about myself. I told him I was moving from Manhattan, to which he replied, "You know, dey say Jersey City is da Sixth Borough!"
[Incidentally, although everyone jokingly refers to Jersey accents as "Joisey accents", I've never actually heard any locals say "Joisey". And Jersey accents don't sound any different to me from New York accents. Finally, "Joisey" is something that, from what I've read, only a Brooklynite, circa 1850-1950, would ever have said.]
He asked if I was from New York, and I said I wasn't, I was from North Carolina. My experience of the locals over the past five years has been that New Yorkers are satisfied with that as an answer, and haven't heard of any towns in North Carolina anyway. But this guy surprised me by asking which town I was from, and where I'd gone to college.
To the latter I said "UNC Chapel Hill" (I never just say "Carolina" anymore), getting ready to tack on my usual helpful explanatory note of "It's where Michael Jordan went to college!" But before I could, that's when he really surprised me by interjecting with:
"So you must bleed Tah Heel bloo!"
It turned out that all his friends had gone to NC for college. I almost, unthinkingly, said to him, "Haha, yeah, we make fun of Duke as being the University of New Jersey at Durham!" Fortunately, I realized in time how difficult it would have been to explain that joke. "Well, ah, you see, we hate Duke, and as Southerners, we hate the North, and New Jersey represents to us the absolute nadir of the North, so we like to hold it against Duke that they, um, have so many New Jerseyans..."
Not that I'm really a Southerner by any stretch of the imagination. And it's funny for me to think that I'll probably end up living most of my life in New Jersey. I've already started "representing" (only half in jest) whenever a Manhattanite coworker decides to dump on the Garden State.