Thursday, May 03, 2007

A bad meeting gets worse...

“It’s not that I’m racist,” he says, “I just don’t like spades.”

I immediately make a joke to try to circumvent his inevitable excruciating racist diatribe,

“So how do you do your gardening?”

The puzzled look in his eyes suggests I might just as well have said the same thing in Russian; he doesn’t get it, it didn’t work.

“No…” he says, “sorry, not spades, I mean blacks.”

Fuck I think, here we go again…

3 comments:

spleenal said...

I think there's a line in the importance of being Earnest when one rich upper class woman says something like "I'm glad to say. I call a spade a spade."
The other woman then says "I'm glad to say. I've never seen a spade."
I think the literal meaning of the word Spade was in use here. I doubt strongly that Oscar Wilde was been racist. Because he was a poof wasn't he.

Ship Creak said...

I hear rather too much "i'm not saying XYZ, but...".

Admittedly, it's often me, but there you go.

Sniffy said...

I qualify my diatribes against people by admitting that I'm a misanthrope.