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.
Escaping the Cape, professionally at least, has been a great relief. I hadn’t realized until now how depressing it’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’t lived here forever or who hasn’t been “annointed” by someone in their favor.
I call it the Townie syndrome, and it permeates every social and business interaction on Cape Cod, whether you’re dealing with the school districts, retail clerks or small business owners.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a concerned, good-doing kind of citizen and neighbor. It only matters if you’re not a much-hated “washashore”, or if you have some sort of connection to people who have lived here a very long time.
It might matter if you’re wealthy – people here are more crass and materialistic than even residents of Beverly Hills or Orange County, at least the ones I’ve met.
The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is not get my “bread” 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 – unlike the typical Cape Codder, many of whom come from backgrounds that would hardly qualify them for the Social Register.
Maybe 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 – “sand fleas”, for instance.