I know, I know, I'm trying to stay away! But this had to be enshrined because of the sheer ridiculousness of it.

My husband got a job as many of you already know. Not a fantastic opportunity type job, but something to get him off of his ass and outside the house at least.

He started Tuesday. On Thursday he comes home and tells the saddest of tales. Evidently the guys at work were curious as to what nationality Shawn was (we won't even go into the "nationality-vs-race" discussion here). There had apparently been some discussion of the new guy and one guy (short straw?) was persuaded to ask Shawn about it. Or maybe he just didn't understand the proper etiquette for talking about someone behind their back.

So he asked Shawn what nationality he was. And Shawn told him that he was Korean. To which the other guy replied "Oh, we were wondering because we thought you might be half black".

Hu?

Now you expect people to get confused about Shawn's race. You expect that because he's Asian and it can be hard to differentiate Chinese from Japanese from Korean. Not that they actually all look the same but people just generally don't look deep enough to notice the differences. And we have occasionally run into people who think Filipino or Laotian or something which is an even farther stretch. But black?

This has to be the first time my husband has ever been mistaken for a brother!

Really this may say something about the caliber of men who work in landscaping...

At this point Shawn realized he was dealing with an idiot. So he told the guy he was also German. The guy says "Hey, I'm German, what's your last name?" Shawn told him and the guy agreed it was definitely German. LOL He failed to mention the ADOPTION part of that situation.

The sad part is that when they thought he might be half black they were all prepared to be racist against him. But since he's now half German in their minds (and something called Korean, which I'm sure they think is another work for Chinese) they're cool with that.

*sigh*