{"id":587,"date":"2006-01-20T10:05:37","date_gmt":"2006-01-20T15:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/wp\/?p=587"},"modified":"2006-01-20T10:05:37","modified_gmt":"2006-01-20T15:05:37","slug":"townie-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/?p=587","title":{"rendered":"Townie Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was lucky enough to get a contract with a company in Boston, a very good company in fact, with a long-standing and distinguished reputation in web development and design.<\/p><p><!--more--><br \/>\nEscaping the Cape, professionally at least, has been a great relief.  I hadn&#8217;t realized until now how depressing it&#8217;s been to attempt to do business here, and I finally figured out why:  the locals harbor a relentless hostility to anyone who either hasn&#8217;t lived here forever or who hasn&#8217;t been &#8220;annointed&#8221; by someone in their favor.<br \/>\nI call it the Townie syndrome, and it permeates every social and business interaction on Cape Cod, whether you&#8217;re dealing with the school districts, retail clerks or small business owners.<br \/>\nIt doesn&#8217;t matter if you&#8217;re a concerned, good-doing kind of citizen and neighbor.  It only matters if you&#8217;re not a much-hated &#8220;washashore&#8221;, or if you have some sort of connection to people who have lived here a very long time.<br \/>\nIt might matter if you&#8217;re wealthy &#8211; people here are more crass and materialistic than even residents of Beverly Hills or Orange County, at least the ones I&#8217;ve met.<br \/>\nThe conclusion I&#8217;ve drawn from this is not get my &#8220;bread&#8221; where I rest my head.  Living in Mashpee is pleasant enough, so long as my contacts are limited to family and friends, who are all nice, smart people &#8211; unlike the typical Cape Codder, many of whom come from backgrounds that would hardly qualify them for the Social Register.<br \/>\nMaybe we washashores should invent a derogatory term of our own to describe the petty bureaucrats, heads of local organizations and even neighbors with a bug up their behinds about outsiders &#8211; &#8220;sand fleas&#8221;, for instance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was lucky enough to get a contract with a company in Boston, a very good company in fact, with a long-standing and distinguished reputation in web development and design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hendersonbrook.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}