Lunching at my desk today, and needing a break from thinking, I was flipping through Fortune Magazine (March 15 issue) and came across a list of the 100 best places to work in the US.  Putting aside both the source and the obvious subjective nature of the premise, I began flipping through the list.

Second and then Eighty-second!  These are the only Massachusetts companies.  (Boston Consulting Group in town, and the Bright Horizons in Watertown;  kudos to them, I mean them no harm.)  But

with all we think we have to offer, how smug we Bostonians are about our culture, our environment, our science, our entrepreneurship–  only two winners??

Looking at some of the higher-listed companies is further deflating.  I can sort of understand San Francisco, and people in Florida and California likely can get nice tans; New York City of course is, well, New York City if you like that sort of thing.

But all those places in Minnesota?  Where IS Minnesota, anyway?  West of Trenton, New Jersey, I am told. (Speaking of New Jersey, that state had FOUR; twice as many as Massachusetts.)

Freeport, Maine?  They get even more snow than Boston (well, usually).  Newark, Delaware?? Give me a break.  I sit on my brother-in-law’s porch in Newark Delaware, in the BUILT-UP part of town, and can see waving fields of grain and numerous cotton tails hopping past, dodging the swooping hawks.  What cosmopolitan person wants to live with bunnies and hawks?

I guess when it comes down to good places to work, Boston is just chopped liver….