Misperceptions about Louisiana

Most people think Louisiana is New Orleans, surrounded by a huge swamp.

I had some of my business school classmates in the northeast fully convinced that I had to take an airboat to school.

Never underestimate how naive and presumptive northeasterners can be. This is despite the fact that they assume Southerners are the closeminded and unworldly ones.

Oh, they saw me wearing an LSU shirt and asked me did I play football there... I had them convinced I played strong safety and was number 30 and our free safety was #21 and they called us Area 51. Quite a few of them believed me -- then I said "oh, i'm just kidding, I played baseball though".

During Katrina, I moved out of state, they assumed we all wore overalls and pirogued to school.

Biggest misperception about Louisiana is that it could be a decent place to live.

ohhh sick burn

the OTs very own Oscar Wilde

This is somewhat of a long CSB. My wife was an RN. While I was in graduate school, she worked in the Intensive Care Unit at BR General.

After she was there for a few months, the hospital junked all the monitoring equipment in the ICU and replaced it with state-of-the-art monitors. They then sent my wife and another nurse to Florida for two weeks to become familiar with the new equipment.

After graduating, I took a job in Michigan, and my wife worked at the local hospital in the Coronary Care Unit. My wife was appalled to see that the equipment in the Michigan hospital was the same as BR General had junked two years previously.

One day, a middle-aged man who had suffered a heart attack was admitted to the CCU under my wife’s care. She always talked to her patients to keep them calm. He commented on her Southern accent (actually a Cajun accent – she’s from St. Landry Parish) and asked her where she had trained. She told him Baptist Hospital in New Orleans and that she had worked for several years in Baton Rouge.

He looked around at the monitoring equipment he was being hooked on and commented to my wife, “I bet your hospital in Baton Rouge didn’t have anything like this.”

To which she replied, “No sir, we didn’t have anything like this.”

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During Katrina, I moved out of state, they assumed we all wore overalls and pirogued to school.

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I blame "Swamp People" for the misconceptions about Louisianians.

Coming from an outsider I'll say that I never really had misconceptions about folks from Louisiana I mean I knew enough of them growing up that they weren't really any different than my family that was from East Texas

I will say that the generosity of the people at a tailgate or when the neighbors having a cookout it really is one of the more charming and sincere things about folks from Louisiana
their generosity and hospitality which is sorely needed just in my neighborhood the more friendly neighbors are either folks from Louisiana or the Mexicans

The white people pretty much keep to themselves