An 8Asians reader sent along this latest Staple commercial highlighting their services for their Tech Support Center, and of course, the IT guy is Asian. I think I have commented before that in my past business travels to technology industry trade shows where I’ve done “booth duty,” I’ve been asked if I was the software engineer or developer working on that particular product. Usually, my past company (and I imagine many similar other companies) did not send software engineers or developers to consumer focused trade shows, so such a question always kind of bothered me.
But I guess I would be just as guilty asking a blond bombshell in a similar situation if she was in marketing or a “booth babe” (in more polite terms). Best Buy had a commercial a while ago had a pretty funny tv ad on their Geek Squad which I thought did a great job of highlighting their tech services with a diverse group of “geeks.” Yes, a lot of Asian Americans are in tech-related roles, but there are many who are not. So it would be great if we could see more that were not in such stereotypical roles. But I’m glad that the Staples tech guy was at least a fairly tall and fairly handsome looking actor rather than a pencil neck geek.
