Fort Meade

Home of NSA and CYBERCOM, where 'what do you do for work?' is answered with a long pause, a subject change, and the kind of vague hand-wave that makes everyone at the party assume you're either a spy or a contractor — and in this zip code, there's a 50/50 chance they're right. Fort Meade sits in the Maryland dead zone between DC and Baltimore, close to everything interesting and exciting about nothing in its immediate vicinity — the base is surrounded by strip malls and sadness that serve as a geographic buffer between the nation's most powerful intelligence apparatus and the nearest Chipotle. The BW Parkway commute will radicalize you against civil engineering, the Maryland drivers will radicalize you against everything else, and the merging lanes are where hope goes to idle and die. Your clearance is worth more than your degree, your car, and your marriage combined — it's the most valuable thing you own and the one thing you can't put on a resume. The on-post Dunkin' line is somehow a national security bottleneck. The Arundel Mills Mall is your social life. The mission, if you can know about it, is legitimately some of the most important work in the DoD.