I was at the annual Christmas dinner at work, and when I declined the pork people assumed I was Jewish (I simply loathe the stuff).
Except for one guy, who instead assumed I was an atheist for some reason, and gave me a book called “God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists.” That rather presumptuous act lowered his standings in my eyes quite a bit.
Now that is quite confusing.
Atheists don’t like pork?
Help me out here, John.
At a party I went to in college, a couple of guys asked in the usual oblique way whether I had any drugs for sale. Apparently, I looked like a drug dealer.
I also have a very international-looking face. I’ve been mistaken for being Irish, French, Italian, Saudi Arabian, Jewish, and Puerto Rican. I have some French and Irish ancestry, but no clue where the other stuff comes from.
The oddest compliment I’ve ever gotten is kind of related. A guy here in Japan once came up to me and said in English, “You look like a Greek statue.” No, he wasn’t hitting on me. He said that my overall look — curly hair, high-bridged nose, strong brow — looked like a classical sculpture or bust. Weird, I’d never thought that about myself.
I must look very German, whatever that means.
One particular day in Brazil, two different strangers asked me the random question “o senhor é alemão?” (are you German?), instead of the expected (and correct) assumption that I was a gringo.
A few years back, I flew to India on Lufthansa. At one point I woke up to hear a flight attendant speaking to me about the menu, but I was so groggy it seemed like I was having trouble hearing what she was saying. Instead of asking, like she did for others, she had simply launched into German, leaving me quite puzzled. I speak no German.
Some commonly-held misconceptions about me according to co-workers and acquaintances:
No single person has gone for all of those at once, but I’ve had all of them multiple times from multiple people.
I’m pretty much what you expect looking at me…
Except, for some reason, some people who know of me but haven’t really met me think I am shy/introverted.
I remember when I was teaching college near Yellowstone and applied for a summer position through the college to monitor/teach the summer program there - the one for the students working in the park for the summer. Toward the end they were saying that they chose me but had concerns with my ability to go up to new people and talk because I seemed shy.
REALLY? I’ve worked here for 3 years and you think I am SHY? Thankfully a couple other profs that knew me were in the meeting and they couldn’t stop laughing.
My username here is gender neutral, so for some reason I get called dude, or guy, or by some other masculine word or reference.
Mine too.
It’s hard to get more neutral than mine, but a few posters over the years have assumed I was female. I don’t know how they got that idea, but I don’t really see assuming a gender is particularly strange when faced with a neutral name and no other real clues.
For a strange assumption about me–a coworker once assumed that I (a software engineer) could diagnose the cause of his wife’s sudden blood pressure issues. His exact words were “You’ll probably know what could cause this…”
As it happened, he was right, more or less. (I correctly guessed that she had a potassium imbalance, and since it didn’t seem to be diet-related, that she should definitely see a doctor and probably ask about kidney function tests.) But it was still weird.
A neighbor of mine up the street just expressed his complete and utter shock upon my telling him that I have been teaching college part-time for ages. (FYI, there are thousands upon thousands more PT profs than FT ones.)
He said he’d thought I was “the rich girl on the block.” 
I told him I’m trying to get into health occupations. That really threw him.
I have two little vertical frown lines between my eyebrows, so people are always assuming I’m angry about something. This doesn’t bother me too much . . . until they tell me to smile. Then I’m really angry.
People tend to assume I’m a “family guy,” with wife and kids. It never occurs to them that not all gay guys are young and skinny and hot.
And when I’m out with my partner, who is 20 years younger, they assume I’m his father. (I look young for my age, but so does he.) This also doesn’t bother me too much . . . until they start hitting on him.
Just got another hit on my strange “whitest gringo who doesn’t appear American” thing…
I was picking my coffee up at the drive through at my local Dunking’ Donuts and while the girl was running my card she looked at me and said “Excuse me… Are you … from here?”
“huh?”
“Are you … American?”
She seemed disappointed when I said I was. She has a European look and accent, so maybe she figured I was German like everyone else assumes.
I get the exact opposite. I guess it’s because I’ll start conversations with relative strangers seemingly with ease. What they don’t get is that it takes an enormous amount of work for me to do so.
There was one time when I was standing in line with a bunch of other Dopers. A woman walked up and asked if we were in line. Then she asked me specifically “Do you speak English?” Um, yeah, we went on a date once, remember?
I got that now and then in NYC. A Minnesota or Wisconsin accent (with Great Lakes vowel shift) sounds Midwestern to New Yorkers, but an Iowa accent (without GLVS) registers as Southern.
I also wore seersucker and white bucks a little too often.
I’ve had the directions in Manhattan thing a couple of times. All I can assume is that in a strange city, I do my best to look like I know where I’m going, even if I don’t.
During my three years in the US, I lost count of the number of times I was asked what part of Ireland I was from. I guess maybe Scottish and Irish accents sound similar to Americans, though they really don’t sound at all alike to me.
When I first started posting online regularly I was in my mid/late 20s, and a lot of people assumed that I was lot older. Not sure why.
That I was an Iranian maid!
I am Canadian, white, with a touch of First Nations.
In there defense, I had a wicked tan, at the time, and was following my friend’s Chinese Mother, around the graveyard, holding an umbrella over her, against the blistering mid day sun. She was speaking in Mandarin to the gravekeepers, and they asked if her maid was Iranian or Sri Lankan? :eek:
People have made tons of assumptions about me due to the fact that I’m a Muslim of Arab background, ranging from silly to outright racist. Here are three that I found particularly amusing:
“Do you have a camel?” from a little kid. No, I don’t have a camel. And camels aren’t that common in Lebanon - it’s not like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or even Syria where there are plenty of camels.
“Does your mum wear a burqa?” from some kid back in 2007, when I first moved to Newcastle. First, my mum doesn’t wear a burqa or any kind of religious headgear, and second, the burqa is not even Arabic - it is mostly worn by women in Afghanistan and a few parts of Pakistan.
“Do you know any Hezbollah members?” from another moron I once knew. I hate Hezbollah, and I’ve never met any members.
I dress like any other Australian, despite looking visibly Middle Eastern, so some people assume that I must be Greek or Italian. One person guessed correctly that I’m Lebanese, but thought I was one of the Christian Lebanese. Seriously, you’d be hard-pressed to find many people outside of the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen wearing traditional Arab clothing.
Although I’ve seen worse. My best friend, who is Turkish, got mistaken for Swedish on the sole basis that he is blond.
That I’m a native New Yorker. (I have literally been asked “Excuse me, are you a native of New York?” in the middle of Manhattan.)
I’m a complete tourist in NYC; I’ve never even visited for longer than a few days. Yet almost every time I visit someone assumes I have local knowledge. Usually (going by accents) it’s a foreigner, but once it was a very American lady who followed me out of Penn Station (me wheeling a suitcase, looking for street signs so I could find my hotel, and looking, I thought, every inch the tourist I was) and began asking me where to find a particular shoe store.
I thought the proliferation of smart phones and map apps might curtail this sort of thing, but my latest trip through NYC (to and from an event upstate) was just a couple of weeks ago, and sure enough, en route to Grand Central Terminal I was stopped by a pair of Japanese tourists: “Excuse me, is this Fifth Avenue?” This on a corner, while actually facing a street sign which could have told him he was pointing at East 42nd Street, assuming he could read English. (The other street was Madison Avenue.)
I pointed him in the right direction, and I usually am able to help people to find Fifth Avenue or 34th Street or whatever, because I may not be a New Yorker but I can figure out the street grid. (I could have helped the shoe store lady if she’d had a street address, but she only had the name of the store.) Just don’t ask me for directions in lower Manhattan, where the grid goes to pieces. And don’t ask me how long it took me to realize that New Jersey is to the west of Manhattan, not on the east as it is here in Philadelphia.
Background: For two of my four years at Georgetown, I shaved my head.
Couple years after graduation, I ran into a Black woman I’d gone there with; we knew each other by sight but that was about it. She took one look at my hair and said “Oh my God, you’re white! Back at Georgetown, I thought you were passing.”
The Black comrade I was hanging out with at the time looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and said “Yeah, I can see it.”
FTR, I’m about as white as Europeans can get.
A lot of people thought I was Australian when I worked in America one summer (I’m British).
For some reason everybody thought that I studied Old Norse in university. This included people who were in the same Old Norse class I was in (or wasn’t, as it happened). I guess they also thought that I was lazy and couldn’t be bothered to come to class…