I work at a large retail store in a small town, so I don’t often get a lot said to me that surprise me. My friend has come in to buy something and ends up talking to me. An elderly woman walks up to us.

Me: “Hello, ma’am, can I help you?”

Customer: *Points to my friend* “Why is she wearing a [Superhero] shirt? That’s for men.

Friend: “Because I read [Superhero]’s comics, and I like him.”

Customer: “But you’re a woman! I demand you go change your shirt to something more suitable!”

My friend and I exchange a confused look.

Customer: *Looks to me* “Well? Can’t you have her removed until she changes her shirt?”

Me: *Surprised* “Um… no, ma’am, I can’t. If we could do that, we would have a lot of teenage girls removed every day for dressing inappropriately.”

Customer: “But she is dressed inappropriately!”

Friend: “I’m in a T-shirt and jeans. If you want to complain about someone being dressed ‘inappropriately,’ I think you should turn your attention to that group of girls over there showing off their cleavage.”

The customer gets mad and storms off.

Me: “What the h*** was that?”

Friend: *Shrugs* “Beats me.”

My friend and I — both women — decide to have a day out shopping while her husband takes their daughter for the day. It’s our first venture out without her daughter, so we decide to go to a locally-owned restaurant. It’s a small area, and I work in a very busy convenience store. At least half the town knows me, including the owner of the restaurant, which is why we decide to try it out.

We’re sat by the hostess and given menus. It’s not a busy section, but it’s not empty, either. The waiter comes out to take our drink orders, and he looks upset by something. I don’t think anything of it and go back to looking at the menu.

Neither of us notices at first because we’re chatting and trying to decide what to get, but after a while, I begin to realize he hasn’t come back to take our orders. He’s not even come back to give us our drinks. We look around and see people who we know were seated after us already eating. We really don’t understand, and I’m pretty confused by it.

I go to find our waiter or a hostess, but instead, I see the owner coming in. He recognizes me at once.

Owner: “Oh, hey there! You’re the [Convenience Store] girl! How are you enjoying it? I told you it’s good, didn’t I?”

Me: “Uh… I wouldn’t know. Did something happen to our waiter? Did he get sick or something?”

Owner: “What do you mean?”

Me: “We haven’t even gotten our drinks yet. We’ve sat for like… ten minutes? Fifteen? He took our orders, looked mad at something, and then hasn’t been back. There are people around us already eating who were sat after us.”

Owner: “What? I’ll go see what’s wrong.”

I go back to the table, where our drinks still haven’t appeared. She’s getting angry and I’m still wondering what’s going on. Shortly after, the owner shows up to take our orders, bring us our drinks, and bring the bill. He’s also the one to take the payment.

Me: “So, what happened? Did he get sick or something?”

Owner: “Don’t worry about it; we’ve got it taken care of. You both have a nice night, and I hope this didn’t ruin your date!”

That’s when we realized that the waiter was refusing to wait on us because he thought my friend and I were lesbians on a date. At least I got a good laugh out of it after. I still haven’t gone back, though.

My job involves addressing people on the street and inviting them to try out food products. I’m talking to a woman who would like to try one such product, which has a few extra selection criteria, including income.

Me: “Are you the primary income-earner in your household?”

Woman: “No.”

Me: “All right, then what is your partner’s highest completed education?”

Woman: “A trade school.”

Me: “Okay, and what is his or her current job?”

Woman: “Do I look like a lesbian?!”

Me: “I beg your pardon?”

Woman: “Why did you say, ‘his or her’? I’m married to a man!”

Me: “Well, ma’am, I didn’t know that when I asked the question, and I didn’t want to presume.”

Woman: “I’m not a lesbian.”

Me: “Noted. Now then, what is your husband’s job?”

Woman: “Do a lot of gay people participate?”

Me: “I don’t ask respondents about their sexual orientation, so I can’t give you an exact number. But yes, gay people do participate sometimes.”

Woman: “Oh. Then I think I’ll just move along. I mean, I don’t mind if people are lesbians, but I’m not one.”

She walks away. A bit further down the street, a female coworker approaches her.

Coworker: “Good afternoon, ma’am. Would you like to participate—”

Woman: “I’M NOT A LESBIAN!”

Related:
A Rather Queer Interview Technique

I work for a well-known dollar store. I am a cashier and can’t process returns without a manager’s help. I’m heavily into screamo, death metal, dubstep, and the like, but I look mousy and unassuming, with glasses and a bun. A black man, whom I have never seen before, comes in with a CD.

Customer: “I’d like to return this.”

He sets down an oldies country CD with Dwight Yoakam on it.

Customer: “I grabbed the wrong one.”

Knowing my manager is very busy, I decide to try to do an even exchange, since all of our CDs have the same barcode.

Me: “Well, sir, what CD did you mean to get?”

Customer: “This is your people’s music!”

Me: “Uh, what?”

Customer: “You know. White people. I’m black. I grabbed the wrong CD. It’s very misleading.”

I look at the cover.

Me: “Considering this has nothing but ‘my people’ on it, plus it says, ‘Country Music Legends,’ on it, and it is the only country music CD on the rack next to all of these African American artists, I find that hard to believe.”

Customer: “Just get your manager, girl!”

I shrug and go get her. She asks for a description of the customer, peeks over a shelf, and sighs.

Manager: “That man came in last night and bought that CD. I asked him three times if he really wanted that CD, and he told me to not be racist.”

Me: “He just told me that because I’m white, it’s my type of music.”

Manager: “He’s done this too many times. I think he’s burning the CDs and then returning them for the money.”

He eventually slipped up and admitted that’s exactly what he was doing. He was banned from the store.

In the mid-1990s, “diversity” became an important buzzword in our company. As used by human resources, it meant that having persons of varying backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities together lead to better solutions in groupthink situations. The team I supervised, however, almost never made group decisions. Instead, we all acted as individual contractors, working alone on technical problems for clients. Diversity to me meant hiring the person who had the best demonstrated technical abilities and being sensitive to cultural differences when interacting with them one on one. It did not mean going out of my way to ensure that we all looked different.

As a supervisor, I had to attend a Diversity class. The problem was that getting the instructors to define the word was like nailing jello to a wall; it kept changing all the time. After repeatedly telling us that Diversity was more than counting noses and that it was deeper than that, I gave them an example. In a previous job, I had been in a small group with two other workers. One of us was a Catholic from mid-America suburbia, one was a Jew from a large rust belt city, and one was a Protestant from a small town in rural New England. I called this group diverse by their definition, but suddenly, things changed and the fact of our all being white males trumped the rest.

The fun part came when we were asked to describe what made us diverse individually. We were in the central valley in California, so there were a lot of stories about Latino immigration, working on farms, and the like. Then, it was my turn.

I am a glow-in-the-dark straight white male WASP. My father’s family traces back to the Mayflower — at least nine lineal ancestors on the boat — and other migrations from England and Scotland in the 1600s and 1700s. I was raised in an upper-middle-class household and went to exclusive private schools for high school and college. I went over this in detail. 

Surprisingly, that wasn’t what they were looking for.