When I was working for the phone company in the 80's, the economy in Louisiana was suffering due the oil business going down. As a result lots of LA folks at the company were being downsized and the phone company was centering a lot of it's regional staff in Birmingham. I took a job in supply chain management (warehousing) supporting 11 warehouses in 9 states. A large percentage of the folks in this regional staff support group were transplants from LA (I called them boat people, or refugees) that came to B'ham to keep a job. We had a grand ole time. They introduced me to the joys of cajun and creole cooking and most of all crawfish. At that time travel and spending budgets for us HQ folks were pretty wide open and we took a lot of trips to inspect the two warehouses in LA. Plus we had some good back yard parties. Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out, but more than once there were 30 or 40 pounds of live crawfish on the back of a truck coming from the warehouse in LA to the warehouse in Bham.
