Three Days In the South Is Like - Three Days In the South

This week - I flew into Charlotte, NC in order to drive to Greenville, SC to stay before I went to my meeting in Alpharetta, GA. I love the south! I had to get three of the top southern states into one trip!
On Wednesday morning I flew from Chicago to Charlotte, a great “little” airport. Its actually fairly large, but I love the lay out and everything it has to offer. From Jamba Juice to Tequilas at Tequilera to good old southern BBQ – you can get it all in the Charlotte airport. Oh – the one thing that the Charlotte airport don’t have is Chick-Fil-A…. That just be wrong in the deep south!
So this is what makes me smile every time I first exit the plane at Charlotte. I love going into the washrooms just to see the smiling bathroom attendants! You got it! Every bathroom has this full stock of everything from lotion to mouthwash to tampons and there’s always a smiling southern woman to stock the supplies of cotton balls and q-tips and shoe polish and bbq sauce and grits… oops, that’s outside the bathroom….
Anyways – my first stop, as usual, this trip was the ladies room. As soon as I entered I was greeted by an elderly black woman (whatever if its not pc, but that’s what she was) was sang out “He—ll--o there sweetie! My name is Miss May and welcome to the Charlotte airport ladies room! “ There was another family of women that was following me in and so I quickly took a stall and just stood in there listening to her continue her song “I am here for you! I hope you will let me know if there is anything that you need! Are you staying in Charlotte? I hope you have a wonderful time! He—ll---o – my name is Miss May!” What I loved even more was listening to all the other polite, genteel southern ladies chirp back “W-ell! Hello Miss May! I am Helen! Thank you so much for welcoming me! This is a lovely bathroom!” Seriously! Those southern ladies are so pleasant and polite! It was the funniest thing and I just kind of hung out to listen to it for about 5 minutes until I figured my bladder would explode unless I did what I came in to do.
Verner was my bus driver to the rental car lot and he regaled me with tales of Charlotte and impending weather and then wonderfully told me that my car class was not available so I needed to either upgrade for free or take a smaller car at a price reduction. I chose the smaller Ford Focus and happily adjusted the seat and pushed on the Sirrius satellite radio that comes standard in almost every car now! I’m addicted to BBC1 at home (station 11 on Sirrius) and so its nice to travel and still get my station anywhere I go. “Its luvly” as my British friends would say.
It was hard not to bounce in my seat to the snappy music as I observed the temperature reader thing in the car panel progressively go up as I drove from Charlotte to Greenville. 53, 55, 56, 58, 60…. “It was luvly…” Especially after I had just flown in from the snowy, bleak cold of the Midwest. It was spring in the south! Well, at least for today!
I got to Greenville and stopped quickly at Wal-Mart (which was doing a blood drive and so they had a big "Blood Vessel" parked outside!) to pick up dinner for the evening as I was having the newphews, John and Joe, come to dinner at Aunt June’s house. I got their mom’s speciality – frozen Stouffers family size… and whipped together a slightly burnt devil’s food cake. (When asking my sister what the boys liked for dessert, she went to the other phone she was holding where she was talking to my brother-in-law, and he relayed that Joe liked chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. When asking what the boys liked to drink, I was told “Joe likes Barqs root beer. Apparently Joe is the vociferous one and no one really knows what John is thinking… I took a gamble that he’d be good with the chcocalate cake, but something told me he’d like the orange crush – which he drank about 4 bottles of the 6 – good guess!).
The boys came over around 5 and brought their laundry and just hung around chatting and eating guac and chips until dinner was ready. We finished dinner off and wound up watching a disgusting episode of Man V Food on the Food Network – all of his greats like eating hot wings and 7 lbs of hamburger in 45 minutes…. It made us feel better about all the food we had just consumed as it was nowhere near his volume!



Remember the scope thing that I was talking about the other week – well, Thursday was d-day when I had to

present my in-service to a sales force of 45. I drove over to Alpharetta in the morning. Alphar


etta is about 10 miles outside of Atlanta in a pretty up and coming little area. The shopping and restaurants were all trendy looking southern boutiquey things and the houses were ginormous two stories with columns and huge, fenced in back yards that had hills leading down to some wooded creek. Kudsu sprang up in huge patched here and there and BMWs and Land Rover

s were in every drive way and at every traffic light. Ah – so south!
The Endo company I made my way to was actually in a strip, office plaza, but was a nice office with tons of jovial southern gentlemen all laughing and being southern boyish. The VP and the CFO greeted me and we chatted, discussing my recent trip from Greenville. Whereupon I learned that the CFO grew up in Greenville and one of his best friends started the MBA program at Bob Jones Un. Later, I asked my nephew, who is a business major, if he had heard of this man, who is still teaching at BJ – Joe said with an awed look on his face “Are you serious – he’s the most AMAZING teacher!”
Anyways – after chatting for a while, Will, VP and Mike, CFO led me to the room where the sales meeting was taking place and then chatted with me about a video series they were doing on line for their products. Will had mentioned in an e-mail the day before that he would like for me to do a video spot for their detergent. While we were standing there, Will said, “why don’t we just go and shoot the video now”…. And so proceeded the most horrific half and hour that I’ve ever spent. I told him I didn’t appear on film and that I was in the witness protection program. I told him that I really should leave right then because – I thought – I heard – my mother calling…. I tried everything, but they were determined that I would do wonderfully. And so – they stuck me at this desk with a bottle of detergent and primped and thought about and shuffled all types of props and microphones and all else around me and then, the sweet and patient woman who was filming, videoed me about 100 times as I stumbled through these little spots on the product – which we make – and which I completely forgot what it actually was or did. We’d have to stop every now and again so they could tell me “oh say this” or “oh, say that”. Yes, that’s correct – they would tell me things to say as I didn’t have a script – I was just supposed to talk about the product. It was horrible horrible! But the one up side was that when I got into the room full of sales reps, the presentation seemed like cake. I actually really like doing in-services on care and handling and products and all so I kind of had fun with it and hoped they enjoyed my talking as much as I enjoyed talking to them J
I hung around through another presentation and then chatted with Will and Mark a little more and then took off – well, got on the road. I had to drive 8 miles of “back roads” to get to 85 – this took me exactly an hour! But, I did get back to Greenville in time to meet Joe and Jon and a friend of theirs, as well as Aunt June, for dinner at Mimi’s Café right down the road for Aunt June’s.
Friday morning, I was supposed to try and get to a hospital in the area but it didn’t work out so I got up early and went down the road to Starbucks to work for a few hours. I came back, picked up Aunt June and we went to Greer to try breakfast at Southern Thymes Restaurant – whereupon, we looked at the chintz curtains and the window and the old toothless men sipping coffee on mismatched vinyl chairs and decided to turn around and give Mimi’s some more business. We’re both sure that Southern Thymes probably had out of this work food that would make you tell numerous people later that day “I just had the BEST breakfast”…. But we couldn’t get past the ambiance – or lack thereof.
I spent a few hours over at my cousins before I headed back to Charlottte – and the wonderful bathrooms and bus drivers! I’ll say it again – I just LOVE the south! Oh – by the way – the temperature reading on the way back to the airport was now a dreary 38 – it wasn’t so bad leaving this way.
Oh – by the way – to counteract all the wonderful, goodness of the southerners. We got home to Chicago and because of weather we had to sit out on the runway for a while and wait for our gate – about 15 minutes to be exact. When we did get to “the gate”, it was actually just some stairs leading down. Because we were a smaller aircraft we were parked outside – about ½ mile for the door to the building. It was spitting rain and so most of us who had tagged bags taken at the door sat on the plane a little longer before going out to wait for our bags. Once we got out, the bags still weren’t there so we all kind of huddled in a little mass of about 9 men and 2 women. They finally got the bags out of the cargo hold and brought the cart around to us and, not kidding, the men just lurched forward, pushing past the two women who were standing there. The other woman just kind of looked over at me and I made a comment about “what gentlemen…” She finally got forward and I thought everyone had gone. So I finally stepped forward to reach for my bag on the cart and, not kidding again, this man bounded down the steps and jumped right in front of me and grabbed his bag. I just stepped back and threw my hands up in the air and wanted to yell – anyone else! Please is there any other man on this runway that would like to push me aside! I refrained myself though. And here’s the kicker – when I finally got in the long, snacking line to make out way, through the green outlined path which led from the plane to the building, the guy in front of me had THREE bags! He had a pretty big duffel bag that he was carrying on, plus another plane size suitcase, PLUS a computer bag swung over his shoulder…. AND… the computer bag said ARMY on it…. So – this Army guy not only cheated on his carry on bag allowance, but he also shoved in front of me to get his over stock of carry on bags. I thought they were taught better in the Army….
The moral of this story – I’m not sure if its that northern boys are rude compared to southern boys (I’ve got to presume since they came from Charlotte to Chicago that they’re northern) OR southern boys, once they leave their motherland, become just as rude as the northern boys (that’s if they were actually southern boys from Charlotte who are visiting the north). Either way – boys, remember that the girl you cut in front of is someone’s sister – mother – daughter – wife – granddaughter or some such thing and that if their brother – father – husband – grandfather or some such thing were there – they’d probably beat you up!



















Greenville is the headquarters for BMW - which is
right down the road to from my Aunt,




















The giant peach always marks my spot between Charlotte and Greenville!