Time for me to piss ‘n’ moan a bit, and as is so often the case, this is drawn for just everyday life. Specifically, the most recent Saturday.
Let’s dial back the clock a number of decades and consider young Tim. I was strange in a lot of ways. Most kids like sports. I had absolutely zero interest in either playing them or watching them. Most kids liked guns and hunting. Precisely zero interest from me. I’d prefer to hold any animal than shoot it. Most kids like listening to hard rock. I was more of a Gilbert & Sullivan young lad. So, yeah, not at all normal, which I guess is why the moniker “fag” was proffered on more than one occasion.
Things have changed, however, and I’d like to push it back to the present to examine this.
My mission was a simple one: get my wife’s iPhone upgraded. We use AT&T, so normally we go to the AT&T store to do this kind of thing. We drove over there together, got out of the car, and headed into the store.
There to greet us was, to my eyes, an extremely unusual looking person. He – and he absolutely was born a “he” – – possessed these characteristics:
- He probably weighed over 300 pounds;
- He had huge, fake eyelashes;
- He was wearing a dress;
- He had extremely long fake fingernails with many colors;
- He had earrings;
- He was wearing a lot of makeup
Now let me stop right here and tell you I could not care less what a person does in their private life. Honestly, as little as I care about humans outside my own family, it doesn’t matter one bit to me. Zilch. Plus, I am a fierce individualist, and I project that onto everyone else, no matter how different they are from me.
But good God almighty, I’m just there to buy a goddamned phone. Do I seriously have to be subjected to this visual circus? Do this person’s life choices have to be shoved right into my face? It’s not like I came in there wearing a giant t-shirt with the word BREEDER on it and had a bunch of embroidered red arrows pointing at my crotch. My appearance would draw the attention of precisely no one. This person’s appearance would have been notable at even a gay pride parade.
I tried to go about my business, wanting to get this over swiftly. My brain monitored my words closely enough to avoid the use of any pronouns, because whenever I wanted to tell my wife, who was browsing a nearby kiosk, what this giant gastropod just said, I would want to say something like, “He says a phone with a terabyte isn’t in stock” but I managed to instead utter, “They don’t have a phone with that much memory in stock.”
In other words, I was able to make my conversation completely passive or arm’s-length, thus avoiding hurting this chap’s feelings. I sincerely did not want to make this situation any more awkward than it already was. Plus, I was really, really averting my eyes, just for my own sake.
Anyway, they didn’t have what my wife wanted, so I was relieved to leave the AT&T store and their super-diverse customer-facing representative and drive a mile to the Apple store on University Avenue. Once we got there, we found they had what we wanted, so I started milling about the store to kill time.
As I did, I saw a fellow on the other side of the table who was acting a little bit off but was dressed fairly normally. That is, until he strolled away from the table, and I saw he was wearing a skirt. Added to which, his legs were shaved so smooth you could swipe a tissue over them if you were so inclined and, at the end, have an undamaged tissue.
I’m not quite sure what compelled this otherwise fairly regular looking guy to be strolling around with perfectly shaved legs and a short skirt, but let’s just collectively thank the gods that be that Tim Knight hasn’t elected to also make this choice.
The migration from the old phone to the new one was going to take some time, so I made myself comfortable for the wait. In the past, when I wanted to check out our AT&T account and the devices within it, I would use a laptop.
It occurred to me that their mobile app was probably a much better way to go about this, so I installed it, logged into my account, and went to the Services page to get information about each of the lines on our account.
Upon examining my account details, I was presented with this:
Every single device – – EVERY. SINGLE. ONE – – was represented by some soul sistah with big-ass hair. Why? Why on EARTH? Is this supposed to represent me? Or my family?
How come every time I look at any kind of graphic representing a human being, it has to be someone that is a gender different than mine, a race different than mine, and hair different than mine? Is this supposed to be some kind of payback? It’s ridiculous.
If a black woman like one of those pictured above logged into her phone, and all the icons were of Tim Knight, how do you think she would feel? Well, yeah, confused, but you know what I mean.
I mean, for the love of God, why not just use this, if you have to use anything at all?
Or, since the presentation is related to cell phones, and not humans, why not THIS?
But, nope, Tim Knight and all of his family are all soul sisters, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.
It wasn’t any different when I logged onto my Schwab account and was presented with this which, again, I assume should represent me, the Charles Schwab account holder:
Guys, please tell me – – am I, in fact, a black woman? Because the world sure thinks so.
And, on the very same day, I wanted to check out some test results from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and was presented with this login page. At least it’s a fella this time.
And why did the web designer create this? Because, y’know, Palo Alto is almost entirely populated by black folks, so this is a logical choice. The home page doesn’t change, by the way, The above graphic is a fixed image, timeless and eternal.
I’m not asking for things to be whitewashed. Or blackwashed. It’s just happening way, way, way too often for me to think it’s some kind of weird accident, and maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but it really gets my goat.
Thus, I guess I have come full circle. Once I was a freak. Then I was the most normal guy on two legs. And now I’m back to being a freak again. Because I couldn’t go from one hour to the next on Saturday and not be bewildered at what I saw.
One day, I hope, these culture wars will completely end, because I’m kinda losing my mind with it. Seriously.
