Thursday, September 28, 2006

hos by any other name

Dog commented on the whole business of name-discrimination based on what are perceived to be black or white names etc. I'd like to follow up with a personal anecdote.

A few months ago, I emailed a guy off Craigslist for tickets to a show. It was 2 pm, the show was at 8, so this guy had 6 hours to sell them. His ad said he had wanted to go but now he couldn't so he was selling at face value. Great. So I emailed him, and included my number in the email. An hour and a half went by without any response.

Just for the heck of it, I asked a friend of mine with a rather more 'pleasant-sounding' name to send another email. Lo and behold, within 10 minutes he received a phone call, and within 45 minutes we had the tickets.

Which means if I had been the only one who contacted him, he would probably still not have sold them to me. He would rather lose 160 bucks than talk to someone with a funny name.

Name discrimination is alive and well.

Asshole.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

you shouldn't have bought the tickets man - what were they for incidently?

- Omar