I think I need to add a new trigger phrase to my proposed Celestial Autodubber: “I know this sounds really racist, but I’m not . . . .”

Actually, BBC personality Sam Manson, you are.

Mason: “I know this sounds really racist, but I’m not being – please, don’t send anyone like, you know what I mean. An English person would be great, a female would be better.”

Operator: “We would class that as being racist. We can’t penalise the Asian drivers and just send an English one.”

Mason: “You’ve managed it before.”

Operator: “Right, OK. I don’t agree with it personally.”

Mason: “It’s not your 14-year-old girl who’s, you know, is it?” Operator: “Yes, but that’s racist to say you don’t want an Asian driver.”

Mason: “If it were me I wouldn’t care if it had two heads, but it’s my little girl we are talking about.”

The BBC, of course, is the bastion of all that is Right-Thinking and Progressive and Just in the media. So if some lout on the phone has the temerity to suggest that a BBC personality is being a racist prick, there can only be one reason: the phone jockey is low class.

After asking the woman on the phone to pass the call on to a supervisor, she finally adds: “I work at the BBC. I’m far from racist and that uneducated woman has no right to call me one.

So let’s review. Sam Manson is (1) a racist, for ordering a taxi driver by ethnicity, (2) a shitty mother, for encouraging racism in her daughter, (3) obnoxiously superior and entitled even for a BBC journalist, and (4) breathtakingly clueless, for doing all of the above over the phone and then citing her employment at the BBC as reason her scummy little whim should be obeyed.

I’m sure this will draw a few “OMG teh political correctness! Whatever happened to free speech!” whines, but those need not detain us. I generally enjoy the freedom to be a dick over the phone. But if I indulge myself in dickery over the phone in a context in which my dickery is likely to be recorded, and if I cite my employment by WidgetCo as a reason that my dickery is appropriate, then I should anticipate that WidgetCo will show me the door, as WidgetCo (1) doesn’t want to be associated with entitled dickery, and (2) doesn’t want to employ people so clearly lacking common sense, out of reasonable fear that next week they will try to microwave their cell phone or scream expensive racial invective at a secretary for forgetting coffee or something.

Sam Manson, you are made of FAIL.

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