Working with a theme here: the post-apocalypse sucks if you like organization.

Betsy is becoming like my brother's wife, a family practice doctor who grew up in Chicago's north suburbs. She is a hardcore Republican and thinks everyone who isn't just like her is somehow deficient. Those kids in inner city schools don't need her tax dollars, they need to work harder and be smarter. At family gatherings all she does is bitch about how stupid everyone in her clinic is, and how all the administrative staff constantly make her life harder. One of my girlfriend's aunts works in the same facility and says my brother's wife has the worst reputation because she expects, honestly expects, everyone to read her mind and serve up whatever would give her the least amount of work possible. As if that's their jobs, to make her life easy.

So Betsy comes from that mold. As a wunderkind in the labs, she was the top of the food chain even as a child--the world needed her to be as great as she could be. Now that she's out in the "real" world, she's pretty much useless as everyone else, although she can't see that. She needs all the high-tech stuff to be operational in order for her smarts to work, even though she is repulsed by the kinds of people who were left behind after the apocalypse. Janitors, garbage collectors, and other public employees who help society run so the privileged class doesn't have to think about it. Only now that system has its back broken.

I read once that in a survival situation, the survivors tend to be the ones who don't waste energy wishing the situation was different but rather play the cards that they were dealt. Betsy spends a good amount of time wishing things were different. But will she survive?

=-BB-=