I was talking with a coworker the other day, and we commiserated with each other about the fact that, no matter how long we live here, we will never be "from" here in the eyes of area natives. This seems kind of humorous until you discover that it plays out in some unpleasant ways. Here are a few I've found:
- I can't visit a barber who is from here. They don't want to serve people they don't know.
- Refinancing a car through the credit union here, where we are members, was impossible, and the "native" loan officer was condescending. However, doing it entirely online with a credit union we didn't even have an account at in another state was no problem at all. (For perspective, I am a mid-level, permanent employee at an institution that has been here for over 100 years.)
- People are smugly amused when I don't consider the name on the side of a downtown building to be a sufficient landmark and ask what the address of a place is.
- I've had two primary care physicians quit their local practices and move in less than two years. Turnover of out-of-state people where I work is high. People claim that people from "outside" can't take the winter weather, but I think it's that they can't stand the parochialism.
- I've also left one local doctor's practice because he took me off medication to manage my triglyceride levels and refused to do a lipids panel three months later because he apparently didn't remember that he had taken me off it. My triglycerides were nearly 500 when I finally got them checked elsewhere. His office also botched my refills, leaving me without metformin. This one I'll chalk up to homophobia as well as parochialism; once I recommended that my partner be seen there, things got decidedly chillier.
I really like my work, and I like the people I work with in my section just as much. Not surprisingly, we're all from elsewhere.
