So, I have been in the middle of switching banks and so have been writing checks lately, right? Something I have not done for the past 12 years or so. I have also been working in a less formal environment and so been wearing more business-casual clothes lately. Over the past couple of weeks I have been fueling up my car at a certain gas station in Saratoga Springs and have found it interesting to be asked for my ID. Being a non-smoker, non-drinker, non-check writer, and generally not going to any type of rave or gathering where the clientele were over 21, I am not used to being carded, and it kind of irked me that I had to take out my wallet and prove who I was in order to use a check. This happened two different times over the past two weeks.
This week I needed to dress in my suit and go to my home office, so when I got out at the gas station, I followed procedure and wrote my check, handed it over and reached for my driver's license, and...nothing! The attendant walked off to process my check, with nary a thought of who I might be. There was no eyeing the picture, no hard, searching, squint into my eyes, nothing. I was not carded, and the thought came into my mind that it was because of my appearance; I looked like a clean cut businessman and of course that means I can be trusted.
I thought that this experience may have been an outlier, that it was just a fluke, a coincidence. Twice carded in plain clothes, once not carded in more formal attire...until it happened again. Two days later I was there again, same gas station, same scenario, I reach for the ID, and....rejected! The attendant is off running my check through some new fandangled contraption that makes it act like a debit card. Lucky me.
I thought that this certainly could be no coincidence. We're 2 for 4 here. Now, to level the field a bit, (I know what you are thinking), and no, the station attendant didn't just learn my name. I went to the station at four different times and was served by four different attendants.
Was I the recipient of wardrobe discrimination? Does that even exist? Do humans treat eachother differently and even have a different level of trust for people that are dressed more and less formally? I am certain that we do, but it has been many years since I have felt any type of discrimination or persecution, and so the feeling was new to me. Not since I was a white boy growing up in south Texas or a Mormon youth in inner city New Jersey had I felt any type of discrimination or prejudice, be it positive or negative.
I am fascinated by human beings and how we think, reason, and react to one another. I think that in another life I could have been quite happy as a researcher or even a psychologist. Maybe a high school drama teacher. It is absolutely fascinating to me that as humans we categorize, we prioritize, and we judge based on our own life-experience, which for any one person is going to be fairly limited.
