All Look Same in Office

By Dyske    June 9th, 2011

Great execution and production. In my 20s, I worked on the trading floor of a British bank where there was another Asian guy named Sonny. A white guy named Steve used to call me Sonny and I just went along with it, and let him call me Sonny. One day, another trader who was sitting near him noticed and said, “Wait, did you just call him ‘Sonny’? That’s not Sonny, that’s Dyske.” He apologized profusedly but I thought it was pretty funny. At the Christmas party that year, the head trader got all the Asian men on the stage and asked Steve to point to Sonny. It was pretty funny.

5 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:

    September 10th, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    It’s called “other race effect”. It’s a running joke among black people that whiteys have a hard time telling us apart. It also works both ways. Asians have the same hard time with non-Asians.

  2. so-kitty says:

    December 6th, 2011 at 7:39 am

    so good

  3. Isaac says:

    April 11th, 2012 at 4:10 pm

    Awesome site.

    I just bombed the first two exams and will not subject myself to the others. I really tried. I did this because I am recently a fan of Korean TV i.e. Jumong, Goong, Moon Embracing the Sun on Hulu, and have been wondering if it is actually possible to distinguish Chinese, Korean and Japanese faces, i.e. for someone who knew a lot of people from each nationality. I am not that person, but I thought it would be an advantage that I have seen a lot of Korean TV and watch the HK World News frequently.

    I have my answer.

    But I am educated, and realize that people moved around a lot between China and Korea and even Japan so there is a lot of mixing, just like in Europe. Really, this is a test about arbitrary political boundaries scooping up the descendants of civilizations that spent the past millenia trading, fighting and blending with each other. I see that the average on my two tests is about 7. Roughly 1/3, so I’d be just as well off guessing blindly.

    I should make up a test for my ancestry: German, French, English. England will stand in for Japan.

  4. Fried Sushi says:

    April 16th, 2012 at 4:19 pm

    Good one.

    So, was Steve able to point out Sonny?

  5. Anonymous says:

    February 13th, 2013 at 4:41 pm

    My Japanese aunt thinks all white people look the same. She got a balding man with a mustache confused with a thick, curly haired man with no facial hair at all.