Civilian Contrators

I frequently go to the Stripes website and read the Letters to the Editor section just to get a feel for what sort of things our troops are thinking and talking about. A few weeks ago, some of the people serving in Iraq started writing about the visits that celebrities make in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mostly, they were complaining that the contractors that are working there with them get in the front of the line to receive "goodies" that the celebrities bring along with them. For example, a pro baseball player might bring along some ball caps from his team. The chief complaint was that these should be reserved for the troops. In any case, there are almost daily letters in the pages of Stripes from our troops and from the contractors. Most, but not all, of the letters from the troops complain about civilian contractors. On the flip side, most, but not all, of the letters from the contractors point out the valuable services they provide for the troops.

Reading this has reminded me of a few of the experiences that I have had working alongside civilians while I was in the navy. Most of the people that I worked with on the waterfront were pretty good people, particularly while I was at Trident Refit Facility, Bangor (prior to the conversion to NRMD).

In fact, the only really bad experiences that I had were with civilians working in Personnel Support. When I transferred to Bangor, I had only 18 months or so remaining on my enlistment contract. My experience on my first boat had turned me against the navy and I was definitely looking forward to getting out of the club. Although my experiences on my second boat later changed my mind about the navy, my first day on Bangor only served to reinforce the anti-navy feelings that had been nurtured in me during my first sea tour.

The first person on the base that I talked to was a civilian at PSD. I sat down at his desk and he handed me a pile of paperwork and a pen and pointed to a table across the room for me to sit at and fill it out. Not a "Hello" or "Welcome Aboard", just a stack of papers, a pen, and a finger extended across the room. While I was filling out paperwork, I came across one that was a voluntary extension of service. I did not fill this out. I finished all of the other papers and took them back to him. He thumbed through them and noticed that I had not willingly signed away another 6 months of my life.

He put the voluntary extension in front of me and told me that I needed to fill this out. Those were the first words that he spoke to me. I refused. He said I can't refuse because I had accepted orders that required a 24 month commitment. I said I won't do it. He said I had to. I said that he wanted me to fill out a voluntary extension and that if I HAD to fill it out, it was INVOLUNTARY.

Next, he threatened to send me back to my previous command. I told him to go ahead and do that if he wanted to. Of course, I knew at the time that I had been one of the last five people to leave my last boat after we decommissioned it. I didn't think he would be successful in sending me back. I was right. He contacted me a few weeks later and told me that he would send me to another fast attack. I told him to go ahead and do that if he wanted to. In the end, I was assigned to the Trident submarine that I was supposed to be assigned to and no mention of an extension of service came up until more than a year later, when I decided to reenlist.

This left me with a pretty bad feeling about civilians working in support roles. Another bad one that happened at Bangor was actually just a few weeks before the one that I just described. I was on the crew that accompanied the boat that we had decommissioned from Mare Island Naval Shipyard to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. No facilities were available for us to sleep that evening so we were taken out to Bangor to get put up in the barracks there.

We got there at about 11 p.m. with strict orders to be checked out of the room and waiting for the COB at 5 a.m. to take us to PSNS in the morning. I went to my room, put the sheets on the bed and slept until about 4 a.m. Then I got up, took a shower, shaved, got dressed and went to check out of the room. The room that I had been put up in was occupied by a sailor that was permanently stationed at Bangor and it was pretty dirty. Toilet and shower were filthy, junk laying all over the room, big dust-bunnies lurking in the corners, and generally dirty. When I went to check out, they took my information and asked me to have a seat, along with all of the other sailors from my boat. They came back in a few minutes with a large list of items that we needed to complete before we could check out. My list included scrubbing the toilet, scrubbing the shower, sweeping and waxing the deck, cleaning up all the junk the other guy left in the room, making his rack with clean sheets, and other stuff to bring the room up to satisfactory conditions. All of the guys from my boat were given similar lists.

We wasted about two hours that morning arguing with the clerks working at the desk. Our thoughts were that we had spent less than six hours in the rooms and they could kiss our collective asses if they thought we were going to do their cleaning for them. Our COB came in and gave us some support, but it was not enough to release us. After we were about two hours late to the boat at PSNS, the Captain came in, found out what was going on, and extricated us from the situation.

Several years later, I found the support to be much better. When I checked into a boat at Pearl Harbor, a civilian clerk was fantastic. Minimal paperwork, friendly attitude, calls to the barracks to ensure that I was put up in the barracks, information about the area and off-base housing, and no pay problems. I don't know if I was just unlucky the first time, if the difference between me being an E-5 and E-6 was that big (I doubt it as E-6 is nothing special), or just that customer service was being taken much more seriously.

In the end, I am generally supportive of civilian in support positions. I just want them to remember that a civilian doesn't outrank a military member, no matter how low on the totem pole that enlisted guy is. I want them to treat military members with respect and would expect the military members to reciprocate.

Bad Flights

I generally avoid flying when possible. I don't have a fear of flying or anything like that. I just find that flying is almost always an unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, there are times when flying is the only practical way to travel due to time constraints or location. When I lived in Guam and Hawaii, I felt that flying was the only practical way to get someplace else, unless I wanted to travel by nuclear submarine.

It seems like nearly all the flights I take are delayed. Whenever I read statistics about on-time flights, they always say it is somewhere in the mid-eighty percent range. I must be incredibly unlucky when it comes to flights being delayed or there is a lot of lying going on. I find that arriving on time is a rare exception, not the norm.

I also don't like the way that some flight attendants treat passengers. I do feel kind of sorry for flight attendants and I know they are there primarily for passenger safety and to enforce rules, but there are a few of them out there that really seem to go out of their way to be rude to passengers. Most flight attendants are pretty nice and treat passengers well, but if you ever get stuck on a flight when a flight attendant is having a bad day, it can be a miserable experience. This has not happened to me very often. Very few flight attendants have treated me poorly, but when it does happen, it sucks.

I just read this article about an absolutely terrible flight from Mexico City to Seattle. The flight was diverted to Portland because of heavy fog in Seattle. After flying for six hours, the plane landed in Portland. Then the airplane sat on the tarmac. And sat. And sat. For four hours, they sat there. Then, they turned around and flew back to Mexico City. What had started as a six hour flight turned into a sixteen hour flight. Then the passengers had to spend the night at the airport in Mexico City and fly to Seattle the next day.

While in Portland, with no food and having been sitting on the tarmac in Portland for hours with no opportunity to deplane, the passengers started to get angry. They couldn't get off the plane because they had to clear customs. Luckily, the Portland Airport Police had a solution. They came on the plane and told the passengers to sit down and shut up or they could choose to be arrested instead!

Great Job, Portland Airport Police!!! You guys are heroes.

Some Portland Airport Firefighters took pity on the passengers and bought them Big Macs from McDonalds. At least these guys took some initiative to help the situation instead of being a bunch of jerks like the police.

Portland is an international airport. They should have custom agents that can come in and let the people get off the plane in Portland. The people then could have taken a short flight to Seattle, or hopped on an Amtrak train, or taken a bus. Lots of ways to get from Portland to Seattle. Instead, they flew all the way back to Mexico City and then spent a night in an airport, then flew to Seattle the next day.

At the very least, you would think an international airport would have a place where the arriving passengers could have been let off the plane to use the bathroom and relax while they were waiting for the situation to be resolved instead of keeping them trapped on the airplane with no food.

Portland Airport officials manned up and took responsibility for the problem.

No they didn't.

They passed the buck.

A spokesperson for the Portland International Airport told KGW that PDX cannot comment on the customs situation because it was a federal issue.

I guess this is just one more item to add to the list of reasons I don't like to fly.

Living Without T.V.

Well, kind of like living without television. I will be moving in about four months and I am giving some pretty serious thought to not subscribing to any television provider after I move. Right now, I have Time Warner Cable. Most of the time, when I have time to watch television, I find myself aimlessly flipping through channels and finding nothing that I really want to watch. I find it difficult to believe how there can be so little stuff that is interesting to watch when there are so many channels available.

Don't get me wrong. There are several shows that I enjoy watching. They are just on at times that are sometimes inconvenient to watch. If I have to miss an episode, it can be difficult to get caught up with what is going on. My favorite shows include the following:

Heroes, 24, Lost, Scrubs, Monk, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Burn Notice, Law & Order

Other than the shows listed above, the only things that I watch are news and sports. I enjoy watching the local Northwest Cable News.

CNN, MSNBC, FOX news...these channels are all a bunch of crap. All of these channels are so wrapped up in their own agendas, they fail to report news that I find interesting. They are just 24 hours of Conservative Talk (FOX), 24 hours of Liberal Talk (MSNBC), or 24 hours of watching them patting themselves on the back (CNN). Still, I do enjoy watching Northwest Cable News. They have a lot of local interest stories on and they do cover major national and international news.

I also enjoy pro baseball, pro and college football, and college basketball. Still, every year that goes by, I enjoy them less. I find it much more difficult to stay solidly behind a team when there are so few players that stay with a franchise for their careers. It seems that after watching a player develop for a few years or several years, they get traded and you watch someone else come in to play.

Another thing that ticks me off is the negotiations between networks and providers. I missed every NFC regular season and playoff games for an entire season here because of a dispute between FOX and Time Warner Cable. FOX wanted more money and Time Warner refused. Both of them appealed to customers. Two years later, I am still pissed at both of them. My parents just lost ABC (I think) on Dish Network because of the same crap. Anyway, it pisses me off.

I don't think that the sports and news are of high enough quality to keep me hooked up. I have been looking at various websites for each network, and, with the exception of Law & Order, I can keep up with the current season of every show that I enjoy by watching them online. In fact, watching shows over the internet tends to be more enjoyable because there are so few commercials to deal with. There are also a fair number of current and old television shows available at hulu.com. It is not a huge selection, but I can generally find something to watch there as opposed to the aimless channel surfing that I find myself doing with my cable service.

Using the internet to watch my favorite shows also means that I won't accidentally find myself listening to some dude talking about how his book is going to explain how to clean out years of gross, sticky, slimy crap out of my colon while I am eating breakfast. No more erectile dysfunction, KY Jelly, or male enhancement commercials either.

Northwest Cable News also runs most of their video online. That takes care of the news as far as I am concerned. I get most of my news by reading news stories on the internet anyway.

Sports will be the most difficult thing to keep up on. Of course, as I said before, I am not as big a fan of sports as I used to be. I think I can get my fill of sports by listening to the broadcast on the radio and maybe going to a friend's house or a bar if I really have to watch a game.

I figure that between what I can watch online and renting movies from Netflix, I should be pretty well off without enriching one of our cable or satellite television providers. Luckily, I live alone and don't have to worry about an entire family huddling around a computer screen to watch a television show.

Circuit City Closing

Looks like Circuit City is closing its doors for good.

Circuit City, once a bellwether American retailer, is going out of business for good, stripping the nation of its second-largest consumer electronics chain.

Read more from the New York Times

I have to say that I am not surprised, but it is sad to see so many people losing their jobs. Circuit City has more than 30,000 employees. Some of them will probably find new jobs, but most of them will likely end up as another statistic in the next round of unemployment figures.

I have never liked the way that Circuit City ran their business. Read my previous post on the subject. I thought they put way too much emphasis on selling extended warranties and not enough on customer service. I also thought that their upper-level management treated their employees poorly.

I hope the cretins that ran this company into the ground find themselves unemployed for a long time to come, but I fear that won't happen. They will be hired on someplace else because of the "valuable executive experience" that they have. The majority of the deckplate level workers will probably have difficulty finding a good job because their experience is in retail sales, a sector that is being destroyed by the current economic conditions in the United States.

For people that are wondering about their extended warranties, this is what was posted on the Circuit City website.

I purchased an extended warranty (Circuit City Advantage Plan). Will that still be honored?
Yes, absolutely. Our Advantage Plan service is handled through dedicated service companies not affiliated with Circuit City, ensuring that there will be no disruption in your ability to get service for your covered products.

Link to Circuit City Help: General Information

The CEO also addressed this issue in a letter written last month:

Circuit City Advantage Protection Plans^® are offered by a third-party company and are not impacted by transitions in Circuit City's business.

Link to CEO's Letter

A Good Barber is Hard to Find

I was married until 1996. While I was married and even after I was divorced, my wife would give me haircuts. She wasn't a professional but she always did a pretty good job on my hair. After I moved to Hawaii at the end of 1996, I just went to the Navy Exchange for haircuts. I was never particularly happy with the haircuts I got there. They would always ask me how I wanted my haircut and then would proceed to cut it however the heck they wanted to cut it. It never turned out particularly well. I would have uneven sideburns and a few places that were cut shorter or left longer than the surrounding areas.

Eventually, I found a hairdresser in town. I always had pretty good luck after I decided to get my haircut out in town for the next 10 years. One of my favorite things was that they would always wash my hair when they finished. I thought it was kind of silly for a dude to get his hair washed after a haircut until I actually tried it, then I realized I didn't have annoying little hairs falling down my shirt all day. I was hooked.

I had some difficulty finding a barber or hairstylist in Pullman that I like. There are lots of college students filling jobs nearly everywhere and that means a high turnover for the employees. The first place that I went to here, the girl asked if I wanted her to shampoo my hair. I said that I would and she handed me a towel and asked me to walk to the sink. I told her that I wanted it shampooed after she cut my hair and not before.

She had a slightly stunned look on her face and was staring at me like I had a dick growing out of my head.

I asked "Why are you staring at me like I have a dick growing out of my head?"

She said "WHAT???"

I said "You are staring at me. Why are you staring at me? Is there a penis growing out of my head?"

I left shortly after this exchange without the shampoo and haircut. She didn't appear very comfortable around me and probably would not have given me a very good haircut.

I probably should have said something more polite like "Why are you staring at me like I have lobster crawling out of my ears?", but it just kind of slipped out and once I said it, it wouldn't come back.

Stylists and barbers always try to engage me in conversation, but I try to avoid it. I reply enough so that they don't think I am rude, but I really don't like talking to them. The reason that I don't like talking to them dates back to the second barber I had here in Pullman. He spent the entire time complaining.

He had graduated from WSU with a degree in Journalism but was unable to find a job in his chosen profession. His parents wouldn't let him move back home. He whined the entire time about how unfair life was. I made the mistake of replying to him a few times, so I guess that I asked for it. I kind of wanted to tell him to shut up, but I was worried about pissing him off while he was cutting my hair. I didn't want it to look like it had been cut by a blind chimpanzee.

I get a pretty basic haircut. I tell the person cutting my hair to go around the sides and back with a Number 1 and to cut the top finger-length, and then to blend it together. A Number 1 clipper cuts very, very close to the skin so the hair cuts very short. It took me a little while to figure out the finger length thing. When I was describing how long I wanted the hair on the top of my head cut, I held my fingertips close together and said that I wanted it about that long. She asked if I meant finger-length. My first thought was that my finger was a lot longer than I wanted my hair. Turns out, finger length means that they hold your hair between their index and middle finger with their hand flat against your head and then cut it flush to their fingers. I guess it would be more accurately described as finger-width, but I just call it what they do and it seems to get the job done.

I just got a haircut today from yet another barber. He was the "new guy". I didn't know he was the new guy when I came in, but I figured it out pretty quick.

When I sat down in the chair, he asked "Are you getting an eyebrow wax?"

Now, I don't know exactly what an eyebrow wax consists of. Everything that I know about hair and wax was what I learned from watching 40 Year Old Virgin. I was pretty sure that I didn't want any sort of wax.

One of the stylists working at the next chair said "No, the eyebrow wax is for this guy."

He looked confused for a second, then asked if I wanted a haircut. I told him to cut the sides and back with a Number 1, finger-length on top, and then to blend it together. "No Problem", he said. He went to work with the clippers. Large chunks of hair began to fall from the sides and back of my hair, which is expected.

The next thing that happened was unexpected.

He turned the clippers off and said "Man, I don't think I can finish this without screwing it up!"

My head whipped around as did the heads of the stylists working on either side of him.

One of the stylists admonished him. "Don't EVER say that in front of a customer. Just ask one of us for help."

Then she turned to me and said "I'll finish it up if he can't do it."

As it turned out, he was able to do a pretty good job until he got to the part where he was blending the top with the sides. He asked one of the girls if he could use her "blending-comb" to finish up.

She said, "Sure, but it's a piece of crap."

In the end, a different stylist finished up and I guess it turned out okay. But I don't think I will ask Bryan to cut my hair next time I go back.

Twig: My Parent's Marley

My mom and dad have a dog named Twig. They got him long after all of us kids left home and Twig is their baby now. They spoil him shamelessly with food scraps and he can get kind of annoying at supper time (and at lunch and at breakfast). Other than that, he is a pretty well behaved dog and a pleasure to be around. He is kind of getting up there in age and appears to be losing his hearing. Still, he is very happy.

He has a few idiosyncrasies that add some depth to his personality. He hates changes. He is used to having the house the way that it always has been. My father got a small space heater last winter that he breaks out when it gets cold. When my dad breaks out the heater, Twig will go through pains to avoid the heater. He obviously doesn't trust it at all. If the heater is sitting out in the living room, he will squeeze between the coffee table and the couch and scramble over three sets of legs rather than walk in front of the heater.

When my parents changed his brand of dog food, he started a new ritual before he eats. He will stand in front of his dog dish for about two or three minutes barking at his food. Once he has barked his food into submission, he seems pretty content to eat it.

He also has a fear of cameras. Every time you point a camera at him, even a cell phone camera, he runs away. I have no idea what caused this phobia to develop, but it was a struggle to finally get a reasonably good picture of him. For some reason, he allowed me to take a couple of pictures of him the last time that I was home.

A few years ago, my parents had new linoleum installed in the kitchen. One of the things that Twig used to get a great deal of enjoyment from was coming in the kitchen when my dad was cooking bacon and licking up the grease that splattered on the floor. That was with the old linoleum. Now that there is new linoleum, he is afraid to set foot on the kitchen floor. You can put one of his favorite treats on the kitchen floor and he will sit and stare at it, but he is afraid to venture out any farther than his two front paws. If it is a really great treat, he will scratch at the floor with his front paws as if trying to pull the treat towards him. It is pretty funny to watch. When he wants to go outside, he has to cross a small patch of the kitchen floor and then go through two doors to get out. He has to see that both doors are open before he crosses the patch of the linoleum. Once both doors are open, he runs as fast as he can across the floor and outside.

My favorite story about Twig is the result of a traumatic situation that he went through. Every time that my mom or my dad would hop in the car to go someplace, Twig would want to go along. If it was a short trip, they would usually indulge him and he would happily sit on the passenger seat and look out the windows while they were driving.

One day, after getting his hair cut, my mom was bringing Twig back home. They were driving down the highway at 55 mph. A car which had been sitting on the shoulder of the road decided he wanted to do a U-turn and turned directly in front of my mom. She slammed into the side of the guys car at 55 mph. It was a pretty bad wreck with air bag deployment and both cars were totaled. Luckily, other than some minor burns from the airbags, there were no significant injuries.

Twig was pretty shaken up by the accident. A few days later, my mom got in the car to go to the espresso stand and get a latte. Twig loved this ride in particular because he always got a doggie biscuit from the lady at the espresso stand. Now he was refusing to get in the car. My parents figured that his car riding days were probably over.

The next day, my dad got in the car to run a few errands. Twig started barking at him and my dad opened the door. Twig jumped right in the car and took a ride with dad. Turns out, he was perfectly happy to ride with my dad wherever he went, but he would not dare to get in the car when my mom was driving. Apparently, the lesson that Twig learned was that he couldn't trust a woman driver. This accident happened several years ago. After a few years of avoiding my mom's driving, Twig relented and is again riding in the car when my mom drives.

Twig is definitely an oddball, but I know my parents wouldn't trade him for anything in the world.

Washington Floods and Pictures

I just got back home from visiting my parents. You may have seen on the news over the last few days that Washington has been hit rather hard with flooding. My parents live near some of the hardest hit areas. Thankfully, while the town that they live in was surrounded by flood waters, the town itself came through pretty well. We were just cut off for a day or so. We had to take a fairly long detour around the flooding today so that they could drop me off at the airport this morning.

They are calling this "Historic" flooding and "Record" flooding. They used to call these sorts of floods "Hundred Year Flood" and "Five Hundred Year Flood", but since we have had several of them over the last few decades, I guess they decided to stop calling them that. In this case, we had about 7 feet of snow fall in the mountains over the course of a week. This was followed by a rain storm from Hawaii that brought warm air and huge rainfalls. Some areas of western Washington had 10 inches of rain fall in a single day.

The liberal media, liberal scientists, liberal engineers, and all the other members of the so-called Reality Based Community blame the floods and land slides on over-development in the areas that used to be flood plains, too much tree clear-cutting, and climate change. I haven't heard too many conservative theories on why the flooding has been so much worse, so I assume the conservatives blame the flooding and land slides on excessive corporate tax rates, over-regulation of the free market, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore. I guess the good folks of the Westboro Baptist Church probably blame it on the two lesbians that were kissing at a Seattle Mariners game at Safeco Field last year.

I don't know all the reasons for the flooding being so much worse than it used to be, but I do know that when you have too much water in too small of an area, the water gets real high real quick.

I have a few pics from the area around Oakville.

Water Over Roadway...Duh!!!



This road was damaged when some wet soil under the road collapsed.



This picture shows the land slide underneath the road.

Small Towns

About a week into my winter break from school, I got tired of looking at the snow in Pullman and hopped on a plane to Seattle. My parents picked me up at the airport and we drove to their house in Oakville, Washington. Normally, I would drive, but there is just too much snow on the ground between Pullman and Oakville. Now I am looking at the snow in Oakville, but at least here it is melting. Unfortunately, I am using a dial-up connection and my patience is already getting short. I was staring at the Dashboard in Blogger for nearly five minutes waiting for the New Post page to load. I guess I am truly spoiled by high-speed internet connections. The editing also seems to be a little screwy. I can't seem to insert spaces between paragraphs. I guess this is the new "roughing it".

Oakville is a pretty small town. If you want to get an idea what sort of town Oakville is, try to picture a one-stoplight town. Got it? Now, take away the stoplight. That's Oakville. There are about 700 people living here.

Oakville experienced a boom a few decades ago when a nuclear power plant was being built near the neighboring town of Satsop. In the late seventies, construction was begun on several nuclear power plants in Washington state. Eventually, because of cost overruns and corruption, the projects were halted and Washington state defaulted on a few billion dollars worth of municipal bonds. The project was named the Washington Public Power Supply System. The project name had the unfortunate acronym WPPSS, or "whoops" as it became known in the media. After the project shut down, the boom was over for Oakville.

Oakville has a few claims to fame, but that is about it. It is home to the last bank in Washington state that was robbed by men on horseback. There was also an incident in which gel fell out of the sky for a period of a few weeks several years ago. Some of the local people think that this was because of some sort of nefarious government experiment being run on the local population. It was even featured on Unsolved Mysteries.

From Wikipedia:

In 1994, over a two-week period in August, a gelatinous substance reportedly
fell from the sky six times. The mysterious goo allegedly contained white blood
cells and several acids from the human stomach, and was reported to infect
anyone it touched with symptoms of exhaustion, breathing problems, heavy
perspiration, fainting, and other flu-like symptoms. Several animals in the area
are reported to have perished because of this.

My parents tell me that it is true that the gelatinous substance did indeed fall from the sky. As for the reports of people getting sick and animals dying, they may not be factual.

Not to be outdone by the fine Governor of Illinois, the Mayor of Oakville has found himself embroiled in a political scandal. The fine mayor had purchased some land just outside of the city limits a few years ago. He bought it with the intention of building four single family houses which he could then sell for a handsome profit. The collapse of the housing bubble has changed his plans.

He still thinks that the land can be used to build housing and turn a profit. However, instead of building single-family houses, he wants to build "fourplexes", which I gather is like a duplex with four units instead of two. Unfortunately, the county has zoned this area for single-family units and the fourplexes cannot be built there. Now, the mayor is leading the charge for the city to expand its limits and annex the land on which he wants to build the fourplexes so that it can be rezoned. If this happens, he will likely realize a tidy profit.

Obviously, some people view the mayor using his office to promote this project as a conflict of interest and abuse of power. The mayor has tried to appease his critics. Whenever the topic of this annexation comes up in city meetings, the mayor takes off his "Mayor of Oakville" hat and puts on his "member of the community" hat. The senior guy on the city council then takes over as the mayor for that portion of the meeting. After they discuss the issue of the property, the mayor once again becomes the mayor.

I guess that it is kind of like in the cop action movies where the cop takes off his badge and says "I'm not a cop tonight." I don't think that is how it really works.

The city council recently held a no-confidence vote against the mayor. The newspaper explained it. Apparently, the vote is to tell the mayor that they don't think he is doing a good job. That's it. There are no repercussions and no binding action has been taken.

Anyway, pretty interesting stuff for a town of 700 people. Politicians act like politicians no matter where you are. I guess that even boring little towns aren't really so boring after all.