I moved to Iowa almost a year ago and have fallen in love with it. The scenery is beautiful. I love my new house and neighborhood. My job and coworkers are great. And I’ve had a lot of fun discovering my new city. Some things did take getting used to, though. And one of those things, as crazy as it might sound, is how nice everyone is. Seriously.
It’s common to hear that people in the Midwest are nice, but Iowans are in a whole different category. I lived in Indiana for 10 years—smack dab in the middle of the Midwest—and had never experienced anything like this.
Servers at restaurants were always enthusiastically friendly. Cashiers and baggers at the grocery store asked how my day was going in a genuine way I hadn’t ever heard before. Even employees at fast-food restaurants were cheerful.
It was kind of nice. But a little disconcerting at times. What’s their angle, I thought? My cynicism didn’t really know how to process the behavior. After one particular encounter with a friendly employee at Arby’s who answered my “Thank you” with a “My pleasure,” I worriedly searched the Internet to make sure Arby’s hadn’t been bought out by Chick-fil-A.*
After I confirmed they hadn’t, it finally hit me what was going on: These people were actually just being friendly. Huh.
I mentioned this fascinating behavior to my aunt who lives in San Francisco. She said a friend of hers who had moved to Iowa City from San Francisco told her the same thing. A native New Yorker, her friend said it took some getting used to, but she eventually dubbed the behavior “Iowa nice,” a kind of friendliness you don’t find anywhere else.
I started to get used to it. In fact, I even started to like it. People don’t shove you as much in large crowds. They let you go ahead of them in lines. Car horns are rarely ever heard, even in traffic.
I came to find, though, that “Iowa Nice” can have its downsides. There’s nothing worse than coming to a four-way stop sign in Iowa at approximately the same time as people at the three other sides of it. Person 1 waves to Person 2 to go, but Person 2 waves to Person 3 to go, who himself is in the process of waving at you to go. You think Person 1 got there first, so you wave at her to go ahead.
And. It. Just. Keeps. Happening.
You go.
No, you go.
Thank you, but that’s OK. You go.
No, really. It’s fine. You go.
It’s the genial hand gesturing that doesn’t end.
But I’m an impatient driver, so what usually happens is I speed through the intersection in shame while avoiding eye contact with the others. For the love of god, I have places to be.
Out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes see looks of surprise. Definitely not from Iowa, I imagine them thinking.
Nope, I think. Definitely not “Iowa nice.”
* Chick-fil-A employees have to say “My pleasure” every time someone says “Thank you.” Before Chick-fil-A started being such a douche publicly and I actually patronized the restaurant, I would sometimes go there and say “Thank you” a crazy number of times during my transaction just to see if they’d actually say “My pleasure” every single time in response. For the most part, they actually did.
The Procrastinating Writer 