I’ve been troubled by something I heard in conversation yesterday. It’s really bothering me, and I’m wondering if I had an obligation to register my discomfort or disapproval of the comment. Or not, as this was at work, and a complaint might be raised about me.

Here’s the deal: I was talking to a client about hotel accomodations for that night, somewhere in the southeastern US in an area not far from where Katrina and Rita raised a little hell a few weeks back. Hotel availability in the area is really, really hard to come by, and every time I get a call from someone looking for a place to stay in the area, I groan inwardly. So the client and I were discussing the various, rather limited choices that were open to him and whether they followed his company’s travel policy.

One choice was very, very cheap, and the other choice was kind of expensive and a little “above policy.” Several times during the call, the traveler mentioned that one or another property probably still had “FEMA refugees” staying there, as apparently a lot of people have been put up at hotels in outlying areas. Okay, I finally found the two choices after the guy rejected a couple of others on the grounds they’d be full of noisy, discontented people (or so I thought).

Then when I offered the cheaper hotel as being within policy, he rejected it outright, saying “I don’t want to stay in a hotel with anybody from the Ninth Ward.”

Uh….okay. My stunned silence was about all the criticism I could afford to levy, seeing as our calls are recorded and sometimes monitored “live.” So after a short pause, I booked him at the other place.

I thought about saying “Actually, I go to church with somebody whose grandfather is from there,” but that would have (probably) been a lie. So I let it be and booked the guy and got him the hell off my line. And it’s been bugging me ever since: should I have said something, or was I right to give tacit approval of that statement by my silence?