This happened to my friend. She is white, but she was born and raised in Haiti. As a result, she grew up mostly seeing black people and her parents were the only white people she knew. When she was about three, her parents took her on a trip to the States to visit family.

Seeing a lot of white people freaked out the three-year-old girl, and she clung to her mother. One day, while they were at the grocery store, my friend saw a black cashier. She ran to the cashier and hugged her. The cashier was confused, especially after my friend started to speak Haitian Creole to her. Her mom had to explain that she grew up in Haiti and wasn’t used to people in the States yet.

When they got back to the house, my friend’s mom explained that there are a lot of white people in the States but she doesn’t have to be scared of them, and not all black people speak Haitian Creole.

(I’m a Mexican tourist in London. I’m in a store, talking to myself in Spanish, when a store clerk hears me.)

Clerk: “Great… another [slur].”

(This particular slur is a derisive term for Mexican immigrants into the USA that assumes that they arrived illegally to the States by swimming across the Grande River.)

Me: “I… What?!”

Clerk: “I used to live in Texas, and we got a lot of you [slur]s there. I didn’t think there were also [slur]s in England. Just because you can swim doesn’t mean we have to take you in!”

Me: “Well… there are, unfortunately, some immigrants who try to get into the US by swimming across the Grande River. But the ‘border’ between Mexico and the UK is the freaking Atlantic Ocean. I can’t even begin to imagine why you’d think I swam across an entire ocean to get here.”

(The clerk just stood there, confused.)

(This happens in late August in China. I’ve noticed a girl from Peru is wearing winter clothes in the scorching heat of northern China’s summer.)

Me: “[Girl]? Sorry to ask, but why are you always wearing such thick clothes? It’s almost 40°C every day, even at night.”

Girl: “I know… but this is all I have. My teachers said winter is really cold here, so I brought the warmest winter clothes I could find in Peru. If winter is 40°C, I don’t even want to imagine how summer will be.”

Me: “I also heard that winter is really cold here, but autumn hasn’t even begun yet, let alone winter.”

Girl: “Don’t be silly. Winter begins in late June and…”

Me: *interrupting her* “Yes, in the southern hemisphere. China is in the northern hemisphere, and winter begins in December.”

Girl: “Wait… What?”

Me: “You said you went to Europe last December. Didn’t you notice it was cold instead of warm? Wasn’t it snowing?”

Girl: “Yeah… but I thought the weather is like that in Europe. Cold all year round.”

(A girl in her 20s who has been to different countries around Europe and North and South America didn’t know and hadn’t noticed that seasons are different in the southern and northern hemispheres. Unfortunately for her, all she had brought to China were winter clothes, and she had planned to ask home for money in December to buy summer clothes. Her first two weeks in China were very miserable for her.)

(I work in a clothing store that does custom prints and embroideries. We also sell patches of flags with the country’s names next to them. Although most of them are countries, we have one design that is the Confederate flag, with “REBEL” written next to it.)

Customer #1: “Look, they have country flags!”

Customer #2: “Brazil, Canada, Chile, China… Wow, that’s a lot. But what kind of country is ‘Ree-bell’? I’ve never heard of that one before.”

Customer #1: “I think that’s one of the Mexican countries.”

Customer #2: “Yeah, I think you’re right. It does sound a bit Mexican.” *poorly imitating a Hispanic accent* “Rrree-bell! Arriba!”

(Dear God, why?)

I was only around for about half of this occurrence, but I later learned the full story from my manager. My manager received a call from a customer asking if we had a certain item. We did, so the customer requested that the manager ship it to her, which is a service we offer. Now here’s where things get tricky: the customer had a loyalty account with us, so we had her address in our system, but she wanted this item sent to a different address. We are located in Washington state; the address she wanted it shipped to was in California.

Normally, this would be no problem, but when the manager tried to enter the California address, she got an error message saying the address was wrong. She double- and triple-checked her spelling against the note she took when she was on the phone with the customer, but she was still not able to put the address through.

She switched registers, as we’d been having trouble with them on and off for the past week or so and usually any problems could be solved by starting over at a different register. No such luck this time.

She called the customer back, confirmed the address, and tried again. Three times. She spelled out every word in the address, enunciating as clearly as she possibly could, to make sure she’d written it all down correctly. The customer confirmed that it was correct. The register still didn’t take it, saying that it was incorrect. It had now been a good half-hour since my manager had taken the first call.

This is about where I come in, because she asks me for help. She has me watch her while she tries, yet again, to order the item and ship it to this person. She does everything exactly correctly; I have no idea what’s wrong. We try spelling out, “North,” instead of just typing, “N,” and we try spelling out, “Drive,” instead of abbreviating it. Nothing works.

I have to step away for a minute to help another customer, and by the time I’m done, my manager has just gotten off the phone with the customer yet again. In desperation, the customer has given my manager her daughter’s address and asked us to ship it there, instead. It still doesn’t work.

Finally, even though technically we’re not allowed to have our phones out on the sales floor with us, my manager goes and gets her phone and types the address into Google Maps, just to see what happens. That’s when we find the problem. She had written the city down as “Los Alpos,” when it is, in fact, “Los Altos.”

At this point, it has been at least 45 minutes of repeatedly calling the customer back, trying to figure out what was wrong with the address. Not once has the customer corrected the spelling of the city name.

When she finally finishes the transaction, my manager jokes, “That was my last transaction of the day. I’m not doing any more. I refuse.”