"Big fish in a small pond."

It's very, very interesting to see how people react to me here in the college town that I now live in, compared to the city where I used to live. Like, I stopped through the local state rep's office to see about liaise-ing with them over some potential legislation supported by the one civic group that I'm involved in, and they were so open and receptive to ideas and to contributions and to energy, in a way totally unlike the city, where the officials wouldn't necessarily give you the time of day at all, even when you'd expect them to. Similarly, when I contacted several subject specialist university librarians with some suggestions for filling in some odd gaps in their collections, I got responses like right away, and within an hour they said they'd be ordering all 4 of my suggestions. It's like I automatically command respect and people take me seriously, in a way that just didn't happen when I was in the city, even though I'm new and they're probably only going off of first impressions, without even having a sense of me and my track record of accomplishments, which you'd think would make people take me even more seriously. "Big fish in a small pond."