If I say I encounter prejudice every day it isn’t hyperbole or exaggeration; it comes with the “territory.” “Red flags” are instantly raised inside the ignorant of mind because your apparent “ethnicity” identifies you as not being a “real” American, and you don’t have the same “right” to “innocent until proven guilty.” This includes deliberate rudeness, microaggression, presumptions that you are shoplifter, car prowler, sexual pervert or someone who—thanks to media and film stereotypes—is seen as naturally “wired” to being “bad,” and someone people have to keep an eye on at all times. Oh, wait: did I forget to mention drug dealer? I don't suppose you need to ask how many times I've been asked by complete strangers if I had any pot and meth on me to sell.
For me, last Friday was a typical
day in the life. In the morning I was walking with a gym bag to the local laundromat,
and on the way I passed an unoccupied retail space which had a pane of glass
shattered. A few hours later I was walking back when I observed a white man
with some tools on his way to join another white man who was fixing the window.
He was glaring at me with the evil eye. Did he think that one of “my kind” was
responsible for it, because isn’t that what Trump and Fox News keeps telling people
like him, that we are all “bad hombres”? Around this neck of the woods, it was
almost certainly the work of a white vagrant with mental issues and a mean
streak. Besides, during the “protests” last year in Seattle, vandalism was
almost entirely the work of whites and blacks; yet for some people, if you mix
white and black together, they come out “brown,” so just blame all the “brown”
people. 1
But that was just the start of
the day. I have a very large collection of video discs, unfortunately made
easier to acquire by the existence of Amazon. To make life more convenient I
copy most of them to external hard drives, and store the hard discs at a rented
space at a U-Haul “supercenter.” Depending on how many discs I purchased, I go
there once a week to either drop the latest acquisitions off, or dig around
looking for an old out-of-print title that is too expensive to replace, and
that can take hours of digging. On this day I was just “dropping,” and it took
just the time to unlock the roll-up gate, toss a bag inside, and shut it. That
was it. But as I was relocking the gate, the alarm suddenly went off. I,
unfortunately, was used to this. Normally the alarm should only go off if you
had not slid your security access card in the machine at the entrance, which I
never forget to do. But there is a security camera installed near my unit, and
depending on how paranoid the bigot is who is monitoring the camera, I can
always count on the alarm to go off at some point. Usually it only stays on for
30 seconds and shuts off just to let me know that someone has their “eye” on me,
but this time it stayed on until I walked out of camera range.
That usually would have been the
end of it, except that when I stopped by a water fountain in front lobby area,
another alarm went off, so loud it was literally ear-splitting. There was an
eye-level camera just a few feet away from where I was standing where the alarm
mechanism was also located. I was the only person in sight, so I knew I was
being targeted for harassment and abuse; I turned around and looked directly at
the camera and gave whoever the bigoted asshole was a Nazi salute, and the
alarm continued until the moment I walked outside. I had to use my access card
again to “sign out.” This person could monitor when I accessed my unit, so why
the abusive behavior unless it was a racist reaction? I considered whether I
should go to the front office to confront the person who did this, or file a
complaint with the main office; I’ll do the latter.
Unfortunately, the day wasn’t
over yet. Later I went to a 7-Eleven to purchase a few items, including the
largest size fountain drink they had, which is the “Double Gulp” double extra
large, which is priced at $2.09 plus tax. But this store didn’t have
any of those, just the “Super Big Gulp” extra large, which was $1.79 plus tax.
As you can see in the image below, there is a considerable size difference
between them:
So I had to settle for the “Super
Big Gulp,” and put it on the counter along with a few other items. As they were
being rung up, I observed on the purchase screen the following:
“Db XLFountainCup 2.09”
With a mind already on the
lookout for every instance of negativity, my outrage sprung into action: I
pointed out to the Indian clerk that she had charged me the “Double Gulp” price
for the “Super Big Gulp” size. She insisted that the price was “correct”
because that was what was scanned. I pointed out the cup size that was written
on the cup itself, and that the scan price on this cup size had been wrongly imputed.
But with a bunch of people crowded around, she apparently felt under personal
attack and resorted to rudeness and denial. I told her I wasn’t coming back
there again, and she said fine, they have a “lot” of customers. Yeah, like
people don’t have “options” for 7-Elevens a five-minute drive or less away:
It didn’t matter, since I tended
to “boycott” this particular location anyways. I had gone there for a decade
almost every day when the employees were members of the local community. The
people who worked there even bothered to know your name if you were a “regular.”
But that all changed when the location was shutdown, the old building removed
and replaced. The “new” franchise owner and employees were of course South Asian,
just like all the rest. Now, you can say “What’s the big deal about being
overcharged 30 cents?” Well, that is certainly what people who are cheating
customers want you to think. But consider: how many of these size cups are sold
every day? 100? Multiply that by 365 and that comes out to almost $11,000 a
year. You think that is the only item “accidentally” priced higher than it is supposed
to be? I mean, that is theft and
cheating customers—and everyone is
being treated like they are just some dumb “Mexican” who supposedly can’t read
English or count.
Maybe because I made such a fuss,
the scan will be changed to the correct price, but a complaint filed with the
company is still in order. I mean, somebody has to watch these people, too. You just don’t know who to trust these days. I
was in a different convenience store yesterday when I observed what appeared to
be Southeast Asian male wearing a hoodie come in; while I was looking in the
refrigerator section, I heard the clerk shout at someone, and turning around I
saw the guy in hoodie walking out with a fountain drink without paying for it.
I observed to the clerk if you can’t trust a “model minority,” who can you
trust?
No comments:
Post a Comment