Reverse culture shock

Why do you want to go to an overseas country for your vacation? It's full of foreigners!

Mic (my lecturer's British friend)

(Mic's only kidding in the quote above, not being xenophobic or anything.)

My friend profar is Oregon now on a work assignment. He left earlier this month to help his company to develop something that will hopefully make them richer than they are now.

In this week's Human Resource class, we learned about something called reverse culture shock. It is when a worker upon returning to his native country experiences difficulty adjusting to his local country's environment. This can happen to anyone, especially when the country is undergoing rapid growth.

My lecturer gave an example of when she came back from Scotland, she was annoyed by the unprofessionalism showed by the local bank staff and cashiers, how they took their own sweet time to do their job and how they overtly showed annoyance when they have to move from where they were sitting in order to fulfill a customer's request. She was used to the efficiency level of the Scotish workforce that it annoyed her a whole lot for some time.

But my friend, the engineer of the class, has a different theory about reverse culture shock. He argues that 'reverse culture shock' is experienced by the local people, not the foreigner. According to him, when a foreigner comes to America and turns out to be more American than the Americans themselves, the shock that the Americans feel when they see the highly Americanised foreigner is what 'reverse culture shock' is.

I hope you, profar, are not causing the Oregonians any 'reverse culture shock', dude.