profiling and other F-ed up things

I went looking this morning for apartments around town, trying to find a place for less than a thousand dollars USD.

I went to one rental office and noticed that the landlord was browsing through MySpace.

After applying to be considered for housing, I was curious what laws California or the county have or don't have wrt discrimination in housing on the basis of X, Y, or Z, but haven't yet found a clarifying web page (but am sure one ought to exist).

I also tried to find my potential landlord's profile on MySpace -- no luck -- but I started to wonder whether or not my prospective landlord MySpace'd me, and if she did, would it be legal for her to discriminate based on what she saw on my MySpace profile?

I don't know, but I know that later in the day, tonight, I was profiled at a certain electronics store here in the Valley. I'll call it F*, for the sake of (non-)anonymity. If you've ever been around here, you probably know what store I'm talking about, but I won't explicitly specify the store or location right now.

I had gone to F* yesterday to browse around for electrical equipment I could use for traveling. I walked briskly around the store -- I suppose I might stick out as a New Yorker in these parts -- and walked slowly around a few aisles.

Tonight, I went back. Elsewhere in the States, I bought a wireless laser mouse and a retractable laptop lock, and went to F* looking for a retractable networking cable and a portable surge protector.

I passed by the surge protector aisle, figuring I'd spend more time there trying to figure out which one might work the best, past the televisions and halfway through the appliance section in the back.

I walked briskly once more -- born and raised in New York, remember -- through the space between a prospective customer and a portly white man.

Hi, he said to me.

I continued walking. Isn't this F* I thought? I thought I had read about how F* associates are not supposed to help you out.

Hi, he might have said to me again.

Hi, I might have weakly replied.

Why is this guy following me, I thought. I walked quickly and he matched my pace.

I didn't want to talk to him -- my speed and body language made that clear -- and yet he continued to talk to me.

"You're about five ten?" he asked.

I did not reply. He looked me up and down.

About 5'10" right? he asked again.

I didn't know, then, why he was asking me that. I just wanted my retractable cable before the store closed...

"I guess," I said.

I still didn't want to talk to him. Sure, I may be a supermodel height soon-to-be California Girl, but...

"I saw you in the store yesterday," he said. "What are you looking for?"

Err... why the hell does he care?

"A retractable networking cable."

"A what?"

I tried to explain what "retractable" meant. He didn't understand.

"You mean it winds up?" he asked.

"Uh, not really. You pull it and it retracts."

I still didn't want to talk to him, but he was following aside me and asking me these questions along the way. Are sales associates really supposed to do this?

He asked the associate in computing where the "retractable network cables" were. Aisle 34 or so.

He walked, no escorted me, to that aisle, and he trailed as I looked for the cable.

"You know what it looks like? You'll know when you see it?" he asked.

Uh, yeah.

I didn't see it right away. F* is a friggin big store for electronics, after all.

After that he left. After that, I found the not-so-mythical retractable networking (ethernet, specifically) cable. Looks like they only carried two models, and, being retractable, the packaging does not take up much space in a store that probably carries more cat-N cables for more N than you can name.

I was pleased he left me. 5'10" -- what, does that make me a criminal? The only reason an associate would care to ask about my height was if

1. he wanted to scare me into not "five finger discount"ing some random piece of merchandise
2. I need to buy some piece of technology that doesn't work if I'm too tall or short (some wacky gaming interface gear?)
3. he wants to date me
4. he's never seen a supermodel height California Girl like me at F* and wants a story to tell the other associates at the watercooler

I don't know about you, but reason one is the only one I could think of until I started writing this piece and wanted to come up with other reasons that could explain the associate's question or his suspicious attitude.

At first, I wasn't going to care. I was just going to take the retractable cable that I found to Mr. Appliance Associate and say, hey, guess what, this is a "retractable" cable. You see, when you give it a pull, it "retracts".

I went back to the washers and the dryers and the 'fridgerator section and looked for portly white associate. I looked and looked, and asked an associate, but he was not around just then.

I talked to another associate, my voice wavering slightly, and asked him if he could tell me F*'s policy on profiling or otherwise treating its customers. We talked for a bit, and he offered to have me talk to the assistant store manager. Okay, I said.

We went to the front, and I told the associate more about what had happened. I hadn't planned on raising that much of a ruckus, but I thought about it, and if I'm going to try to build technology for social justice, how can I try to bring about a larger change if I can't try to effect a smaller change in my own "world" nearby?

As I told the assistant store manager about what had happened, trying not to get, well, more emotional than would be functional given the situation, he told me that his wife would have just walked out of the store. I think many people would have, but I decided to speak up and see what happens. After all, I'll be here at least four or five years, if not forty or fifty years, and as far as I know there's no store like F* for miles.

So, I told the assistant store manager, I'll probably be around.

I asked him about store policies about profiling or customer treatment, but he remained vague about the details. I suppose it could just be that F* doesn't have that much explicitly written in terms of policy wrt discrimination, profiling, or customer treatment in general. After all, I don't think F* is a huge corporation like the ones I've worked for before, where I learned to read policies carefully -- defensively reading the letter of "the law" so to speak -- and where complaints took the form of formal letters.

So, what happened? The story is not over yet. As it was near closing time, I told the assistant store manager that I'd come back tomorrow -- after all I still needed to buy some hardware -- after he had time to talk to Portly White Associate and get his "side" of the "story".

Is this a firable offense? I wasn't sure, but then I thought about it, and, hey, shouldn't it be?!

I'll be frequenting the store, I think, over the summer, as I try to work on some exploratory prototypes for the hardware / software / form factor interface technologies that I've been designing in my head, that I think about but don't write much about here. And after that, if my non-profits or other corporations need hardware, won't I just stop by F* to pick up a server rack or two? And after after that, if I leave school and come back, or just hang around the Bay, won't I be coming to F* for years if not decades to come?

Yes, I think, and stores and their associates should be accountable for their actions and the way they act on their profiling or their prejudices.

I can see at least two sides to "profiling". There's the side that says you need to protect your valuables, that you need to prejudge before you can quickly judge, that you'll save more money and make more money if you "profile" positively and negatively... There's the side that says, how does it feel to be a C-classed E-identified ethnicity that gets followed around or a Z-classed X-identified or identifiable "stereotype" that never gets bothered at all?

I told the assistant store manager that I understand the need for profiling -- when I think about it I think it may be too idealistic to end all profiling right now -- but the question then becomes, how do you act on those "profiles," those "assumptions," those stereotypical "hypotheses"? Tread carefully there...

I'm still a shaken now, can you tell from the way I write? I'll return tomorrow, and, if they do tell me that F* will take a certain action that makes sense to me, I think I'm going to have to "prove" my buying power in a positive way, rather than giving up on the place as someone else might have done.

I could just buy everything online, but perhaps F* will be the place where I walk the aisles in the summer for HCI-nspiration, perhaps it will be the place where I buy racks and racks of commodity computing power to try and change the world a little bit, and I think I'd rather imagine that, more optimistic future for myself and F* and the larger world that we will likely share.