I came across a humorous “You Know You’re From Silicon Valley When…” by following a link from Bryn. And since I’m not really from here, I’m going to go off and find ones for Texas and New York.
However, if you don’t live here and want to know about the experience, do read below. It accurately reflects my experience since moving here nine months ago.
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You Know You’re From Silicon Valley When… |
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Your combined household income is $140,000 and you can’t afford shoes for the kids. You think anything slower than DSL is barbaric, but can’t get it in your neighborhood. You know what DSL stands for. You and your spouse almost come to blows deciding to hit Peet’s or Starbucks. You think that American food includes sushi, naan, pho, pesto and pad thai. You met your neighbors once. When asked about your commute you answer in time, not distance. Even though you work 80 hours per week on a computer, for relaxation you read your email and peruse eBay. You have worked at the same job for a year and people call you an ‘old-timer’. The T-shirts you value most were for products that never made it to market. You can name four different programming languages and you are not a programmer. You remember the names of the three closest cheap sushi joints, the location of all the Fry’s in the area and which companies your friends work for that are going public in the next year, but don’t know the name of the mayor. Standing in line at Starbucks you wonder why the employees don’t call a head hunter. You work 6 miles from your home and spend two hours a day commuting and $40 a week on gas. Winter is when your lawn grows too fast and summer is when it dies. The median price of a house is $500,000…for 1200 sq. ft. with no yard because it’s a town house You live on some of the richest farm land in the world but most of what you eat comes from South America on a boat. Your best friend lives across town but you hardly ever see each other because after your commute you’re too pooped to spend another hour driving to their home. You have a master’s degree in engineering but half the people in your department either didn’t go to college or have history degrees, except if you have a master’s from Stanford, in which case everyone in your department has a master’s degree from Stanford. You cringe when you see people in suits at your office, wondering if someone in management will make you stop wearing bunny slippers. You plan your vacation so that you don’t have to drive back from the airport in commute hours. You don’t go to sporting events unless you are given tickets by your employer. You could sell your home and live like a king in 99% of the rest of the world, but don’t because it would be difficult to move back. You have at least three computers at home. You own at least one domain on the Internet, probably several. You think it’s normal to see chip-design software or relational databases advertised on freeway billboards. You know that California isn’t just one big beach. You know that not everyone in California surfs. You know there’s lots of skiing in California. You know your rotating outage block number at home and at work, and listen for them whenever there are rolling blackouts. If someone refers to “SunnytogaDeAnzavale Road”, you laugh and know what they’re talking about. You take your out-of-town friends to see the techie gadgets at Fry’s. But you don’t let them buy anything. You know how to recognize re-sealed returned electronics at Fry’s. You don’t ask the staff any questions at Fry’s. You know they hire idiots and pass the savings on to you. You watch dot-com boomers go back to the states they came from, and the traffic gets better by the month. But you are home so you’re not moving. You own a Sport Utility Vehicle and have never taken it off-road. You wouldn’t know what to do if you tried. Same with all your friends. You don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re a road hazard when you visit the mountains. You think the horn and middle finger are essential driving tools. You think bicycles don’t belong on the road. You think any car ahead of you doesn’t belong on the road. Your out-of-state friends are impressed at how much money you make… until you tell them how much you pay for housing. You know that a “fixer-upper” home could cost a half-million dollars. You do a “California stop” at stop signs. And you think it’s only Californians who call them that. You aren’t bothered much by earthquakes because you’re ready for them. But the thought of tornadoes and hurricanes terrifies you. You clearly remember where you were when the Loma Prieta quake hit. You know several funny stories about swimming pools in the quake. You can’t recognize a thunderstorm without seeing lightning first. You cringe when a Southern Californian refers to highways like “the 101”. It’s just “101”. No “the”. You call low clouds “fog” even if they’re hundreds of feet off the ground. At least once you have gone to San Francisco for the day wearing shorts and a t-shirt because it was a warm clear day in San Jose. And you froze your little *@#!% off in the fog, drizzle and wind. You say you’re from Silicon Valley because no one knows where San Jose is. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Silicon Valley. |
Here’s the one for Austin:
ULES FOR LIVING IN AUSTIN
1. First you must understand that Austin is not Texas, but Austin is in the
heart of Texas. The rest of Texas is defined by two zones-the vaguely
scary, inbred country regions, and the extremely scary, urban, conservative
mega-cities. In Austin, we respect both zones (they are, after all, in the
great state of Texas), but we really don’t have much in common with them.
You may hear us speak disparagingly of other parts of Texas, but you are
not allowed to do the same. The only thing we hate more than people from
Houston coming to Austin and trying to turn Austin into Houston is people
from outside of Texas coming to Austin and insulting our state.
2. You should also understand that it is hot and humid as hell for at least
3 months out of the year. People in Austin know this, and they don’t
understand people who complain about it. The day lasts 24 hours. There are
7 days in a week. It’s hot outside. None of these things are worth
mentioning or complaining about.
3. Austin has some peculiar conventions when it comes to traffic. First, if
there is anything that could potentially distract Austin drivers, they stop
dead in the middle of the road. If they see the scene of an accident on the
other side of the highway, they stop. If they see rain, they stop. If
there is snow, they stop and start sacrificing goats. Get used to stopping
on highways. At the same time, you should get over the idea that drivers in
Austin will stop at other, more appropriate times. Austin drivers will not
even slow down for a pedestrian, even if that pedestrian is clinging for
life to the front grill of their Suburban Land Yacht. They also will not
stop to talk on their cell phones, and they damn sure will not stop for a
red light that is less than 10 seconds old. And, of course in Austin, as in
the entire state of Texas, it is against the law to use a turn signal. A
turn signal may distract other drivers, causing them to stop in the middle
of the road, so it is best to not advertise your intentions to turn or
change lanes.
4. If you park your car in Austin, it will be towed.
5. Getting around Austin requires a bit of training. First of all, it is
relatively easy to go north and south in Austin, but not so easy to get
east or west. And if you are going north or south, the directions will
surely begin with, “Go down MoPac… ’cause you sure as hell don’t want to
mess with I-35.” Of course, this rule is changing as more and more people
crowd onto MoPac, so in the future all instructions will begin with,
“Actually, it’s probably faster to just take Lamar.” Lamar is a road with
no beginning and no end, and everything is “just off” of Lamar, so it is
just a matter of time before it becomes a parking lot similar to I-35 and
MoPac. Eventually, a major flood of Shoal Creek will drown all the people
parked on Lamar. We call this, “thinning the herd. “There is no point going
anywhere during “rush hour,” which runs from 6:00 to 10:00 in the morning
and from 3:00 to 7:00 in the afternoon every work day except Friday (when
rush hour starts on Thursday night and lasts all day). On most days, at
least one driver is distracted by something during rush hour, which means
that everybody has to stop. You should also make a note that Mopac IS Loop
1 — they are one and the same. Similarly, Capital of Texas Hwy is 360, and
Research is 183. 2222 is Northland or Allendale or Koenig, depending on
what part of 2222 you are talking about. 290 is Ben White, but there are
two 290 exits on I-35 * one of which is 2222 (which, as mentioned earlier,
is Northland, Allendale and Koenig). Don’t try to figure it out. Just
accept it. If you question the intelligence behind this naming convention,
people will simply tilt their heads to the right and stare at you. Don’t
ask about why we pronounce street names as we do. Just accept that Manor
Rd. is pronounced May-nor and that Manchaca is pronounced “Man-chalk”. Oh,
and it’s important to know that Guadalupe is pronounced “Gwah-dah-loop”. If
you give it the Spanish pronunciation you’ll just confuse people.
6. Austin is effectively divided into two worlds. The new “tech” people who
live “north” of town (north of 183), and the old “true” Austinites who live
in the “middle” of town (although census data will no doubt reveal that the
true “middle” of Austin is now well north of 183). South of town is hard
to describe, so we’ll pretend it doesn’t exist, and East of town is
embarrassing to describe, so we’ll pretend it doesn’t exist either. North
Austin is a plastic, mass-produced world full of chain restaurants and
movie theaters. The houses are huge, the yards are small, and the treeless
streets have names like “Oak Forest View Circle.” Central Austin, on the
other hand,tends to attract the granola eating, deodorant-shunning, aging
hippie-types. The houses are small and structurally frightening, but they
are no less astonishingly expensive, and the businesses tend to be small,
privately owned specialty shops that don’t sell anything you’d want to buy.
7. There is no dress code in Austin. How you look and what you’re worth
typically have little do to with each other here. In central Austin, it is
quite common to see some scruffy, smelly hippie with dread-locks, tattoos
and piercings driving a new Lexus or Mercedes. People in Austin like to
look weird. The woman you see walking down the drag with the tattoo of a
dragon across her back and the purple hair may be your child’s kindergarten
teacher. Your congressman might be a leather-clad biker. And the girl in
the coffee shop serving you a latte may have a Ph.D. in astrophysics.
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover here. In the extreme, there is Leslie, who
is technically a bearded man, but who likes to hang out downtown in a teddy
and a tiara. Leslie’s nuts, but he personifies Austin, and we’re not going
to get rid of him. Heck, he got about 10% of the vote in the last mayoral
election.
8. Austin has a love-hate relationship with tech companies in general and
Dell in particular. We love being progressive, and the tech companies
represent “the future.” However, they’re boring, sanitized, and they tend
to treat their employees like cattle. Dell is a nasty machine that uses
people like a lubricant, grinding them up and cleaning them out when they
get messy or inconvenient. People in Austin are beginning to have a
sneaking suspicion that Orson Welles was right about everything except the
date.
9. Austinites are largely a bunch of tree-hugging environmentalists. For
example, we’re strangely and frighteningly proud of our bats. In the
summer, the Congress Avenue Bridge is reminiscent of a Hitchcock film, but
Austinites flock down there every night to see the show up close and
personal. We have a statue devoted to the bats, and we named our hockey
team after them (yes, we have a hockey team). The bats rule. As does our
salamander. At one time, money-grubbing developers (Freeport-MacMoRan
mostly) were building irresponsibly along Barton Creek, and because the
bastards (may they rot in hell) couldn’t be bothered with things like
proper sewage drainage, our beloved swimming hole, Barton Springs Pool, was
being polluted with the sewage from Barton Creek Development residents
(a.k.a., “rich scum spoor”). Most of the city council and the Texas
legislature were in the pockets of the festering scumbag developers, so it
was necessary to bring out the big guns-the Barton Creek Salamander, an
endangered species that was being threatened by the development sludge. For
some reason, in Texas it is okay to make your citizens swim in crap, but it
is illegal to make salamanders do so.
10. And of course, there is music. Austin is supposed to be the “music
capital of the world.” We have a shrine for Stevie Ray Vaughn down on Town
Lake (yes, it’s a lake-it looks like a river to you, but it’s a lake); pay
your respects if you come to town. While you’re at it, swing by Threadgills
and pay your respects to the memory of Janis Joplin, and drop by Antone’s
and pay your respects to the memory of Clifford Antone. He’s not dead, but
he’s in a Texas prison on drug trafficking charges, and that may be just as
bad.
bryn here…fun eh
Thanks, Bill! Made me smile.
Hey, Bryn. 🙂