Cross Racial Impairment

I lied yesterday. I can't rant about recruiters today because I actually dealt with a fairly decent one this evening - a recruiter in Vancouver who just wanted to have a chat about what I was looking for over the phone. Of course, it's early days yet, but if he turns out to be nice, I'm going to tell Keith that's because Canadians are just nicer, even when they work in a vile industry.

Instead I'll share a story on cross-racial impairment. I first learned about it in Psychology 100 - it refers to a tendency for members of one race to perform better at distinguishing between faces of their own race than faces of other races. I hope no one finds this offensive but I actually find this to be true. So I don't really get offended when people do it to me.  That's why I was not mad when the following happened to me yesterday.

I went up to the canteen at 1:30pm, having had a very long meeting which overran. This rarely happens (my team and I leave for lunch at 12:07 on the dot, to avoid the queues forming in the canteen), due to careful management of my diary to avoid having meetings between 12 and 1. The canteen was fairly deserted by then, and therefore there was plenty of time for the guy making my pasta to make idle chit chat with me because there was no one behind me in the queue for him to serve. So there I am, patiently waiting for my pasta, when Pasta Cook changes the topic to how hard working he is (per him) to say to me: "You know, I thought someone else that came in earlier was you. She looked JUST like you. And I was very confused, because she did not order the mushroom ravioli. You always have the ravioli (this is true) and she did not. And you always come up here at 1:30 (this is not true at all) and she came earlier! How funny! You look just like her!" I respond with polite laughter and try to get out of there as soon as I can.

Conclusion: I need to change my food choices up a bit so that Pasta Cook guy doesn't think of me as Chinese Ravioli Girl.