Nothing as relates to this thread, but my comment was about your post, not the entire thread.
You said “race is weird like that”, but actually it’s not the result of race being weird but of the issue not being “race”.
Fair enough. I suppose it’s not something I’m usually keeping an eye out for, and it could certainly be different elsewhere in the US.
hijack/
Personally, I’d love to meet a Roma and learn more about their religion and lifestyle. And, yes, I’ve heard and read all the stereotypcial crap about Gypsies. I give it as much credence as I give to the stereotypical crap I’ve heard about men, women, gays, straights, bis, Jews, Lutherans and every single other “group;” that is, none whatsoever.
/end hijack
What I’ve been reading in the responses above has been stories about past encounters and daily dealings with problematic people from years ago who are now simply bad examples left behind in the mires of history. One could read those tales and think such despicable politically-incorrect attitudes and behaviors had been ever-so-slowly-but-surely exorcised from our society.
Until you meet my coworker.
Shawn is Archie Bunker and Debbie Downer and Scott Walker and Ted Cruz all rolled into one and topped with Sarah Palin’s and Christine ODonnel’s insightful brilliance.
One of the managers who had been part of the company’s founding management had actually started with the company at 17 and had been with the company through marriage, divorce, remarriage, and the birth of two children. She mentioned to Shawn that she was still with the company and seeing her eldest (a daughter) graduate from high school and head off to college. When Shawn asked what the daughter planned to study, she said the girl was considering International Business or Women’s Studies. Shawn blurted out that he thought Women’s Studies was the most useless major, along with Environmental-so-called-science, and any college that included such curriculum thereby made their degrees especially useless. [His degree is from Bob Jones University, the bastion of research and rigor among universities.]
Shawn overheard a coworker saying his son was taking his girlfriend to Disneyland, so Shawn chimed in, “I used to like to go, years ago, but I can’t stand it any more.”
“Oh,” I asked, “because you’ve got four kids and a wife and every ticket costs over a hundred bucks now?”
“And food and drinks cost extra.” our coworker added.
“Well, that too.” he nodded, sparing me the chance to point out that he’d taken his entire family to Hawaii for a week last winter. Then he half-explained, “It’s just that they’ve gotten so weird lately.”
“You mean the selfie-stick ban?” I asked.
“Or the Star Wars inundation?” The other coworker chimed in, “That’s why my son is taking his girlfriend…”
“No, it’s…” he spun around in his chair, clearly checking to see who was sitting nearby before whispering, “It’s like a Mecca for gays now! I mean, they have a Gay Day there – I’m sure it’s not published on their calendar, but it’s apparently a thing among gays to all go on certain days.”
“You mean like your brother-in-law did.” I recalled Shawn mentioning the event several years ago.
“Yeah.” Shawn nodded, “And I’ve never set foot on their park since.”
Several of our IT developers are from India and most (but not all) of them are vegetarian. When salmonella and e. coli contaminations in spinach, lettuce, and other crops in the past years caused massive product recalls, Shawn would print out news articles and post them in the lunch room. There was a conspicuous lack of a print-out when the news broke about many of those contaminations tracing back to fertilizer made from pig-droppings.
We hired a guy named Ricardo to help us with our helpdesk calls and other tasks, including a badly needed reorganization of our storage room with all of its spare monitors and keyboards and gadgets piled everywhere. Shawn took every opportunity to discuss the tensions that were rising in nearby Los Angeles at the time amongst police and people of Latin-American heritage; how horrible they were for renting houses with six people to a room and buying third-generation cars for cash rather than financing new cars, all because “they just don’t know any better.” Ricardo would generally respond to such quips by going downstairs to continue organizing the server room.
The tensions in Los Angeles dissipated so Shawn shifted his rants to claims that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had no qualifications or any business trying to assume any kind of leadership position. One could argue that those rants stemmed from the Mayor’s Democratic Party affiliation rather than his race, but that’s not really a better -ism to display.
Ricardo was replaced by a young man who had grown up in Barbados. Gladius was sent to us by a recruiter, but our coworker knew his brother well from jobs with previous companies. My coworker and I had high hopes for Gladius, based on his brother’s good reputation. Shawn, though, had his issues. Since the Fergusen issues were hot in the news, Shawn began talking about “those people” down in Los Angeles – except he was now talking about “Blacks” and their inability to hold jobs, stay off drugs, refrain from stealing, or give their children normal-sounding names.
None of Shawn’s ravings were ever uttered in the presence of our team leader; Shawn knew better than to make that kind of mistake, but that might not have been a good thing. When our team leader was discussing an addition to our security system, he facetiously commented, “So if Gladius decided to walk off with a dozen of our old PC’s, they could be tracked by…” and Gladius didn’t seem to notice the comment at all. But then he was out sick for the next two days and, on the third, called our team leader to say he had found another job. And the hardest part was that he had apparently told HR that he 'just couldn’t work with" our team leader.
The latest in our string of replacements for that position is a guy with French and Vietnamese ancestry. I think Shawn has had too few encounters with anyone from Viet Nam to have developed a stereotype and, besides, the guy grew up in France.
Even today, Shawn proudly brags that he has been a ScoutMaster for the BSA (Boy Scouts of America) for over a decade. We’ve followed his ongoing narratives about disorganized parents and administrative hassles along with how much he loves the annual popcorn sales and pancake breakfasts and camp outs and badge-earning lessons. But a few weeks ago Shawn noted that he had submitted his letter-of-resignation and wouldn’t be “wrangling kids” when school starts up again this year. What was the tipping point? Shawn tendered his resignation the same day the news broke [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/07/26/the-boy-scouts-are-slated-to-lift-ban-on-openly-gay-adult-leaders/] – remember Post 88 of our discussions [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=18553666#post18553666] at the end of July?
Since he sits right next to me, I couldn’t help but overhear Shawn giving network advice to his friend in Ohio. Yes, he confirmed, it is possible to use this to monitor everybody’s credentials as well as their traffic and, since it’s your network it’s not illegal, though it’s kind of shady and there’s no real reason to do it “-- but, hey, Gay Marriage is legal now, so obviously everyone can do whatever the hell they want.”
—G!
Reverse discrimination:
Female Coworker: “They’re doing this to me because I’m a woman!”
*half the company is female, steps forward to say she’s wrong."
Her again: “Wait, no it’s because I’m black! Yes I meant they do it to me because I’m black!”
*half the company is also non-white with a few blacks, say she’s wrong."
Her: “I have depression! I have depression!”
Methinks Shawn is a bit closeted himself. :dubious:
Another one I just remembered. I worked for a small distributor of hydraulic hose and fittings. The owners were branching out into making wiring harnesses for a customer and bought a shitload of equipment to put terminals onto the ends of the wires. They had us warehouse and delivery drivers doing it at first. The VP/owner was watching us and said “This is too tedious for men, we’re going to get some women to do it.”
I worked briefly at a travel reservations call center right after college. In the break room, a bunch of us were sitting around making typical small talk about stupid customers, sports, happy hour spots, etc. All of a sudden, one of the employees abruptly changed the conversation. “What the faggots don’t understand is that it’s an exit, not an entrance.”
I went back to my desk quickly.
We had this old curmudgeon in our IT department who helped build a lot of the internal systems and knew them backwards and forwards. These systems had been in use for 10 years or so and there had been a lot of turnover. Basically he felt invincible to the point of not censoring himself.
One of his crowning moments was when a bunch of us went to Singapore to discuss an upcoming release and a number of changes that had to be made for foreign markets like taxes, distribution, data rules. And he pipes up, “And the marketing info!”
Some of us looked confused because the specs were the same no matter which country they were from, while the language might be different. we asked, “You mean localization of the titles?” (Normally we never localize the title of the software, it stays in English as it’s trademarked)
His reply was a boisterous, “No the pictures! They don’t want ROUND EYES selling 'em software down here!”. about 4/5 of the meeting room were people from our Asian and South East Asian subsidiaries. The room just fell silent as we all looked at him, and the guy running the meeting just said “uh… ok Dave*” and then we moved on.
*not his real name
That was not the last of his outbursts but one of the most memorable.