Okay, so I have been debating whether to talk about this here or not. And eventually, pent-up outrage won and I AM going to talk about it.
Was it just me or did every one of you feel the world was going slightly insane in the days that proved to be the run-up to the Corona crisis? For me, personally, the days were a nightmare no matter where I was – at my customer relations job (99 per cent of the people I interacted with were mean to me for no apparent reason), at my service industry gig (you can tell a great deal about people simply from the way they behave around a buffet – maybe more on this later), and at my rented accommodation where my 82-year-old British landlord had the usual racist comments coming, pretending not to know that they were racist. Okay, I have gone and used the R-word. That’s sufficient intro. I’ll jump straight in.
I was doing my job as usual during one of my shifts, keeping an eye on items on display in one of the smaller display areas. A woman walks in and starts getting a bit too close to the items on display and I tell her, extremely politely, to ‘please maintain a safe distance’ from aforementioned items. She doesn’t react immediately.
However, after a few seconds of staring intently at everything on display, she comes up to me and casually asks, “So is there a specific logic to the selection of items in this area?” I am not too certain exactly what the point of her question is and respond, yes, the items in the collection had been chosen in a certain way and it was the decision of the concerned department. She persists then saying, no, every item there is by an American creator except for one created by a Mexican person. I point out immediately that even among the other items, there were a couple of items by a German creator. She comments casually, “Yes, but they are all white.”
There was that one split second when our eyes made contact, mine giving away that I was asking myself if she did say what I thought she said, and hers giving away that she knew I was thinking what I was thinking. It was an ugly moment – one of the ugliest I have experienced at this job and there have been quite a few. But I couldn’t afford to get in trouble – I couldn’t afford a repeat of the ‘Mom’ incident (Refer to post: Mom, interrupted).
I quietly informed her I could call my supervisor on the radio and that she would be happy to address the visitor’s concern. Her reaction was swift. She waved off my offer, said nothing and dashed out of the display space. To wherever she intended to repeat this conversation, I gather.
Gets me thinking - for a place with people from every corner of the world, Los Angeles can be notoriously unfriendly. Most Angelenos seem to be a breed unto themselves - fake, flaky and f***ed-up.
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