Yeah, I've known quite a few of them.
On the way home this evening I stopped at a service station’s food mart for a snack/groceries. There were a number of people waiting at the counter and there were two clerks behind it: a skinny Ethiopian dude, and a big Afghan/Pakistani dude. It was about 6:00 p.m. Some of the people were waiting to pay for gas or food, but others were holding up the line.
On the right, there were two guys hurling abuse at the big Afghani clerk about getting cash back from their scratch-off lottery tickets. The clerk refused to give them money and would not back down, and one of the pair started yelling at him, flailed his arms around a bit, left the store, came back in and yelled some more. I thought the situation would become violent, but they eventually left.
On the left, a smug-looking fat guy tried to buy gas with a $20 or $50 bill, which the skinny Ethiopian clerk recognized as counterfeit. He asked the guy why he was trying to pass counterfeit money, printed out a slip of paper and gave it to him. The man looked at the paper and stood off to the side.
Another older guy came in, tall and fat, to redeem (not buy) a handful of lottery scratch-off tickets.
The rest of us who were just there to buy gas or food completed our transactions quickly and left.
I thanked God that things didn’t deteriorate in there. I felt sorry for the clerks, who faced the public without a barrier of bulletproof glass to deal with them. (This is North Oakland, after all.)
Guess the races of the people I mentioned?