Warning to potential visitors and investors: Lubbockites are the most irony challenged people in the world. I am not grousing about this either, visitors and recent arrivals have commented to me about it a number of times.

I first saw this many years ago when I took a retail job right after I moved here. A stray cat wandered into the store. A customer facetiously asked me if it was mine. I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my killer attack cat.” The yokel sneered knowingly and said, “Yeah, right” for all the world as though he thought I expected him to believe the cat was really a. mine and b. dangerous. Saw right through me, didn’t he?

More recently I posted my line about Jesus being a community organizer who attacked entrepreneurs engaged in lawful business. A local liberal, and a doctoral student no less, launched into an impassioned attack on me exactly as though I were a mean, albeit atheistic, conservative attacking Jesus. Intelligent or not, the man was in fact a native Lubbockite.

Other examples abound. My security guard friend told me that a client employee walked off the job, actually quit, when a supervisor cheerfully declared that they were going to start body cavity searches at the door for banned cellphones and other devices. “You ain’t gonna’ do that to me, dammit,” the outraged one declared, “No way.” He huffed away before the stunned supervisor (a recent arrival from New York) could tell him that he was, er, kidding.

The guard himself was listening to complaints about smoking restrictions and commented, “Consider yourselves lucky. Next week you’ll only be able to smoke while standing on one hand in the middle of the street.” A supervisor, no less, sarcastically responded, “I’d like to see you do it,” exactly as though he were seriously suggesting such a thing. No doubt she thought this was a brilliant zinger.

The guard is a native and really should have known better but outsiders should consider themselves warned and behave according. There is nothing so unlikely or silly that locals will not take it at face value and treat it as an excuse for their ever-boiling anger.