Complain Like a Real SouthCoast Local With These 25 Topic Starters

Yesterday I snuck out to grab some beach time after work and what I thought would be a nice quiet day mostly became me listening to lots of other people complain. Obviously, the universe didn’t get the memo that I snuck out of the house to hear less complaining, not more of it.

But I get it, you’re with friends and venting, as friends do. Yet some of the complaining was so eye-rolling that it made me realize how lucky we are, in a weird way, to have some of these things to even complain about.

Imagine visiting here from some landlocked state like Pennsylvania, enjoying a trip to the beach, and hearing a conversation that included one beach having too much loud music, one beach that makes you pay for parking, a beach that has too many rocks, and a beach that is always a bit cooler than the other beaches. We live in a coastal town and good beaches and bad beaches are just part of our landscape.

Since the chatting made it hard to concentrate on the book I had brought, I started to scroll through my phone and caught the story of a New Bedford woman who has been arrested three times in 10 days. There was a lot of complaining about that one, and rightfully so. Most people think the judges in our area are too lenient, and this story just added a lot of fuel to that fire.

If someone moved here from far away and was trying to fit in or break the ice during an awkward silence, I would definitely recommend throwing out a few of these popular, polarizing local topics.

If there’s one thing people love to do, it's complain. Why not bait the water with some of our favorite local things to complain about and really get the conversation going?