People in DC -- the cold shoulder

Ok, let's go from the best part of the city, to the worst.
The people here in my three days have been awful. The security guards/docents/museum staff have been unbelievably surly and unhelpful, everyone on the metro is in an awful rush no matter what time of day, and I've had a smile returned to me from a stranger about zero times. I could go on for quite a while, but one story will suffice.
My brother and I shared a cab from the Baltimore airport to DC because we got into the city late and the train wasn't running. I got in the backseat with another woman and got to talking (being ignorant of the friendliness of DC's true denizens). Turns out she was a beat reporter on education for a national newspaper. I read a New Yorker profile on Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education a while ago and a lot of it had stuck in my mind, so I managed to artfully drop a few key names in education at the start of the conversation which clearly got her interested in the conversation. In fact, the two of us were chatting away quite a storm for a while and I couldn't have been happier about the prospects of meeting people in the city over the next few days. Then, there was a pause in the conversation, and she asked me, "So, I didn't catch it the first time, what do you do?" Uh-oh. Well, couldn't be that bad, I'm a student at Amherst College I told her. The atmosphere in the once cheery cab turned frigid. "oh." The conversation was over, she didn't speak to me for the rest of the cab ride.
Well, that's DC for ya folks. Obviously I shouldn't extrapolate an entire city from my first conversation but considering the following three days were filled with frowns, mumbles, finger flipping (ask Lock) and the most unresponsive series of museum staffers in history, I can't imagine I'm too off the mark. I would welcome being proved wrong because it's a damn shame to have such a low opinion of the nation's capital.