A friend of mine was roommates with a gaggle of blond / near-blond ex-sorority gals from a nearby, well-known party school.   The gals were homecoming queens, dated football players, and prowled their native habitat of SF "Marina" bars where they'd regularly extract free drinks from bar patrons.   My friend, of course, had a grand time and the majority of his stories aren't exactly apropos content for my personal blog.  (the Wisdom of Seinfeld clearly worked in his favor by merely being around them a lot)

Almost daily, he'd come home from work, pop open the beers / wine, and watch the gals drink themselves into a stupor and engage in pretty sophmoric antics -- he literally had his own private "Girls Gone Wild" a couple times a week.   

The gals, alas probably confirmed every stereotype that Ivy League elitist snobs have of this particular cohort - carefree, careless, aloof, hedonistic, and perhaps the ultimate source of the decline of Western civilization.   Now I'll be blunt, these gals didn't care to discuss the nuances of the macroeconomy, international affairs, or domestic policy -- when the Liberal Annointed imply the need to move past the American sheep they probably mean these gals.  They knew a helluva lot more about Britney's dating life than the situation in N. Korea.

One anecdote however, is both revealing and rather politically significant, IMHO.  One of the gals was a manager at a nearby, suburban stripmall clothing retailer and my friend had an oppty to visit her at work.  This isn't exactly a glamorous job nor one that me and my professional techie friends were terribly acquainted with - it's sorta unseen as we go about our days geekily building new intellectual property.

When he went into the store, however, he was shocked - simply shocked - to watch her in action.   To say that she managed her staff with a ruthless efficiency would be an understatment.   She had her core stats & biz metrics memorized - $$/hr, shrinkage rates, payroll expense per sale, etc. and was managing in some cases down to the 3rd decimal.   

For ex., she had recently observed that a large % of her customers predominantly spoke Spanish and thus directed her recruiting efforts into neighborhoods with large Latino communities to find new clerks.   While he was at the store, he casually wandered about and watched her deliver a verbal beat down at a store clerk who'd let a clothing shelf lapse into disarray while the employee stood practically frozen in fear of her.

My friend's memorable response - "man this is the gal who was rolling around drunk on our living room floor just last night!"

His roommate was ~26yrs old and was right at the boundary of a phenomena recently described by Michael Barone as Hard America / Soft America - an inquiry which began with the following insightful question -

For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.

Barone argues that it's because of the transition these individuals are forced to endure as they escape the coddling of "Soft America" and enter the cold, harsh, $$-driven world of "Hard America."   Barone observes that for whatever cultural reason, most Americans (including this gal) are quite capable of stepping up when forced to sink or swim.

What I find politically significant here is the indirect verdict for libertarianism - this gal was probably pretty dang incompetent on affairs of the polity / state BUT, in her own little local economic sphere, it turned out that she was actually a rather efficient decision maker.   If she's this competent @ work, then perhaps, if left to her own devices, she'd probably make similarly effective decisions about her healthcare, retirement, and even continuing education - 3 areas that the Left advocates it should instead manage for her.

Additionally, it reminded me that folks like her, working in jobs that don't make the cover of Businessweek are the real backbone of the economy.   Many of us drawn to Geek professions are somewhat willfully ignorant of the constant decision making and rebalancing people like this make in seemingly more pedestrian sectors of the economy - a fact that Truck & Barter vividly note in this behind-the-scenes snippet of a Baja Fresh staff meeting.   The consistent, efficient, and wide-scale execution of jobs like this - retail, fast food, restaurants, logistics, etc. - contribute far more to America than we Ivy League thinktankers both give credit towards and occasionally contribute ourselves.

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