Do You Know the Way to San Jose...

So, I traveled to California for work last week – San Jose, to be exact, to attend a mobile learning conference. The conference was great. I spent my days in little, windowless rooms of learning, soaking up as much information as I could, and my evenings wandering around downtown San Jose, which offers a very interesting mix of shiny new glass buildings and scruffy, smelly pan-handlers.

The hotel, itself, was very nice. I had a lovely view of the pool, there was a beautiful spa where I indulged in a relaxing massage after a long day of air travel, and my bathroom had a telephone in it. I find that last detail to be very intriguing, especially in this day and age, when we all have cell phones. The phone was mounted right next to the toilet and I couldn’t help but wonder who is making calls while sitting there? What is so important that your call cannot wait a few more minutes? And who is using a hotel land-line phone these days? The only thing you really use it for is to ask for a wake-up call or to order room service. So, either people sit down for a bio-break and suddenly, realizing how tired they are, decide that they must at that very moment, call the front desk to request a wake-up call, or they are sitting there thinking, “Hmm, I’d really like a burger and some fries – Might as well call room service and order it up right now!” Or, is the hotel just extremely worried that you might fall from your perch, injuring yourself, and need a phone mounted just high enough to not be able to reach from the floor, to call for help?

I always find it interesting to go to places like California or meet people from areas of the country that are incredibly happy with and proud of where they live. If you meet someone from California they will almost always say something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s a wonderful place. I just love it there.” I’m from Buffalo, and we don’t say things like that. Now, I’ve lived in a few different places – Rochester is great, I really do enjoy living here, Atlanta is a fun place to visit and spend some time, but I was born and raised in Buffalo, and when you start out in Buffalo, you’re always from Buffalo, no matter how many years you’ve lived somewhere else. The thing is that no one proudly proclaims that they are from Buffalo. They look down and dejectedly mutter, “I’m from Buffalo,” and wait for one of three inevitable responses: Oh, you get a lot of snow up there, I love buffalo wings, or how about them Bills?  And we’ll grouse and complain about Buffalo, rejecting it as a boring, politically disastrous little city, but the second someone else has a negative word to say about it, we will defend the honor of our homeland like a proud, angry lion. We will gallantly proclaim ourselves Bills fans, despite our four consecutive Super Bowl losses and the following two decades of painfully bad seasons. We will adorn our cars in Sabres decals and still shake an angry fist when one anyone yells, “No goal!” And we will insist that buffalo wings in any other part of the country are not real wings at all. 

We are a proud people – but only when defending the city we always dreamed of leaving. 

Of course, visiting and living in other parts of the country, I and many other Western New Yorkers eventually realize that our area is not so bad. Sure, our winters can be freezing cold and snowy, but when you look at other areas with wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, suddenly a little (or a lot) of snow doesn't seem so bad. Our biggest problem tends to be fighting each other for snacking supplies at the grocery store only to find out that the big storm they predicted side stepped us and hit New York City instead.