Funny Boston accent story

      I spent three years in the early 90s in the US Army, with my Basic Training in Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. People from all over the country converged on the post, bringing their accents with them, of course.

     Being raised in the heart of the Midwest and only traveling occasionally to Chicago for family purposes, my exposure to accents and dialects was rather limited, as you might imagine. Watching movies and TV was really my only experience with the diversity of American English language outside my 500 mile corridor I occasionally traveled as a child.

     One of the very first things any new soldier did was learn where everybody else came from. Since nearly everybody was fresh out of high school, we also discussed class sizes to see who came from the smallest or the largest. I was certainly on the smaller end of the scale, BTW. Oddly, being from the Midwest, some people thought it funny to ask if I drove a combine to school.

     Anyway, one of the soldiers near me was from the Boston area and had the accent to prove it. We all got a kick of how he spoke and he seemed to take it in stride, I guess. One day, he and others were talking about something during our downtime but I was not paying attention. By then, we all knew where we everybody was from and apparently the discussion was about horses, at least briefly. The Boston soldier called out to me and asked, me being from a Midwest state, if we had any "hosses" there. 

     Like I said, I was not paying attention to the conversion among the handful of soldiers in the room so I thought for a few seconds and replied with: Yeah, we have hosses, but I only know of one but his real name is ____ ____" (name omitted since not important). Keep in mind it was the Boston guy who asked me this and I did not know the context of the question. In my small town, there was one guy known to others as "Hoss". I don't know if I learned his real name until several years into my childhood, even though he lived about six houses from me but everybody just called him "Hoss". 

     Everybody in the group looked at me with a confused stare until one other person said (in a decidedly non-Boston accent) "Uh... I think he meant "horses". 

Funny NIN story

     As you know, I am a big fan of Nine Inch Nails and have been since 1990 when I first heard Head Like a Hole on the radio. When I left the Army in 1993, I lived for a year or so in my hometown with my parents and started working at my current employer just after New Years, 1994. I spent a couple years in one position then got accepted to another position in another building nearby. 

     While living at home, I would go to the nearby city for whatever reasons and while walking in the primary mall one day, I saw a man about 50 yards ahead of me with a black leather jacket adorned with a large, white NIN logo on the lower half of the jacket's back. He was obviously at least as big a fan, probably more so since I was not one to wear any NIN gear at the time. I thought it was cool but did not think much of it at the time. A few weeks later, maybe months, I apparently saw him again but at a Blockbuster Video. Again, I said nothing.

     When I started my first day at my new position, I was wearing a NIN t-shirt from the Self Destruct Tour in 1995. I think it looked like this. During one of the breaks, a guy came up to me and asked if I was a NIN fan. I said yes, of course, and he said he was, as well. I think we chatted very briefly then parted ways since he worked in a different part of the building than me at the time.

     When the shift ended at midnight, he called me over to his car and I recognized the woman in the passenger seat was a woman I saw working there that night but had no idea they were together. We talked more NIN stuff and I told him of seeing a person in town twice who had a black leather jacket with a large NIN logo on the back and thought it was very cool to see such a fan. His reply was, as he reached to pick something up from his back seat.... "You mean THIS jacket?"

     I WAS FLOORED!!! He was the guy wearing the jacket! We became friends, of course, but we lost track of each other when I moved away for a couple of years in 1999. No need to elaborate beyond that but how fun was that story, huh?