Wilkes-Barre, PANortheastern, PA, actually... to be extremely specific... Wilkes-Barre (and it's pronounced berry, not barr.) I was delighted to hear Dwight mention a business in Wilkes-Barre last night on The Office. When we did our 4 month stint in PA, Wilkes-Barre is where we went to church, shopped at Wal-Mart, and actually made friends! It was a good 30 minute drive to get there from where we were living. Eric was doing a tool "start-up" for his company in Mountain Top, PA. We'd been living in our Dublin apartment for almost a year and we were trying to figure out how we were ever going to save enough money to buy a house in the Bay Area. We prayed a lot for ideas and one Sunday we fasted that a solution to our problem would present itself. Within a week, Eric's boss offered him a "start up" job back east - it would be temporary, like 3-6 months, but it would look really good on his resume if he did it. Back then, (before the dot-com crash) employees actually had some leverage, so he called him back and said, "I'll do it if I can bring my family with me." They said yes and a few weeks later we were flying to Philidelphia with four large duffle bags and my arsenol of scrapbooking supplies in my carry-on bags (current TSA regulations would prohibit this now!) Wilkes-Barre is somewhat of a bedroom community (in theory) but it's two hours away from New York and Philidelphia. It's also a strange blend of very old and new... there's a mall and a Walmart and I'll never forget the time we went to the public library... the building was so old that the floor was extremely "unlevel" and book shelves were leaning over full of books... being from CA, all I could think was, we'd never survive in here if there was an earthquake! So, none of the surrounding cities (Mtn Top, W-B, Hazelton or Scranton) had anything that resembled corporate housing that could house a family of four. We ended up living in a ski resort condo at Jack Frost Mountain. This is a very well known ski resort in the Poconos. They called them mountains... being from the west, I called them foothills. We were 5 miles from anything... our "corner" market consisted of a post office, a gas station, a video rental store and a market that closed at 8:00 p.m.! We were 30 miles from Walmart, church, the mall and any kind of restaurant. Living on the east coast was an adventure... something I'd always fantasized about when Eric was in college. Something about the heavy greenery and woods and snow in the winter really appealed to me. My time in PA taught me that I'm a true "westerner"... the east coast is so different in so many ways!
The first time I watched The Office, it was in Season 3... for you seasoned fans, it was the episode about the middle management boss and the bird dying... Jim was at the other branch and the entire episode was dedicated to having a funeral for a bird in the parking lot. I came into it 5 minutes late and couldn't "get it" at all... I didn't understand why people thought this show was so funny... it was just plain weird! Then, a good friend of mine loaned me Season 1 on DVD... "watch this," she said, "and if you aren't hooked in 3 episodes, let me know...." Well the DVD sat on my shelf for weeks. Then one day, I was sick and needed to spend some time vegging out, so I popped them in. I was shocked to find out the show was set in Scranton, PA. A place I've actually been to (and a place that most people had never heard of before The Office). So, I'm laying in our guest room bed, sick and tired, and laughing so hard that Eric's popping his head in the door and giving me strange looks. Yes, I was hooked and well before I even got to the 3rd episode!
Die hard fans will recognize the buildings in this photo....The sad thing is this - people in the Scranton area are really like this!!! There are people like Jim who took the job for whatever reason, but have no plans to stick around long term, yet they do just because they don't know where else to go.... There are people like Dwight.... scary, I know.... there are people like Kevin, who are accountants by day and garage band drummers by night.... but I'm not sure there is anyone in the world to match the character of Michael Scott!
