Don't judge a Google card by its cover.

His already curt demeanor became even more abrupt after I had handed him my Google card as method of payment.  He turned the card over in his hand, looking at the logo for a few seconds longer than necessary, saying absolutely nothing more to me.  Bag of goodies set for me on the counter, cashier-dude turned away to busy himself with something new.  I left the shop thinking, Was he exceptionally short with me because he thinks I'm some Mission-gentrifying Google employee ruining 'his' neighborhood, and, by extension, the City?  For the record, I am neither.

Would the neighborhood I am supposedly helping to gentrify also be the very same neighborhood where my grandparents lived on Sanchez and 15th in a crowded apartment with my great-aunt and her family until they were able to afford a place of their own--in the city they were all born and raised in Bernal Heights?  Would that be the city to which my great-grandparents came from other countries and worked in as carpenters, firemen, postmen, municipal railway operators and bottlers?  Would that also be the city in which my great-great-grandfather worked as a carpenter, helping to build it a-new after it had been mostly destroyed by the earthquake-related fires of 1906?  That city?  Would it also be the city in which my parents were raised and from which I was priced out back in the 1990s?

If that's what he thought, then he's a dumb-ass.

Grandpa, Great-Grandma, Grand Uncle--SF, ca. 1930