Yesterday I had a small lesson about preconceptions — the kind that arrive quietly and then leave you smiling at yourself.
I had gone to the post office because I needed some help with my account. I had just received a new card and I needed to recover the original login number that had been given to me long ago. Like many such numbers, it had disappeared somewhere into the fog of memory.
When I arrived, the door of the post office was closed and a handful of people had gathered outside near the cash machine.
“The system’s down,” someone said. “There’s a technical problem.”
“Can you still use the ATM?” I asked.
“That should work,” someone replied, “depending on what you need.”
Among the small group standing there was a young woman with long black hair, dressed casually, talking easily with the others. She looked like someone who had simply come by, like the rest of us, and was waiting to see whether the post office would reopen.
She turned to me kindly and said, “If there’s something you need, I might be able to help.”
I hesitated at first but then decided to explain my problem: I told her I had a new card, but in order to use it properly I needed to recover the original login number that had been given to me when the account was first set up — a number I could no longer remember.
“Oh, I can help you with that,” she said. ‘You want the Codice Conto.
I wondered for a moment how she could possibly know something so specific.
Then she added, quite simply, “Because I’m the postmistress.”
That explained everything!
She walked with me to the ATM and calmly told me which options to choose.
“Choose that one… now option five… and then option two,” she said, looking politely away so that I could enter the information privately.
And just like that, the problem was solved.
We looked at each other and exchanged a small smile — almost a silent giggle. I had assumed she was simply another person waiting outside the post office like the rest of us. In fact, she was the one who knew exactly how everything worked. I thanked her for her help.
Later I realised that this small moment illustrated something psychologists call “thin-slicing.” Thin-slicing is the mind’s habit of making very quick judgments about people or situations from only a small amount of information — a few seconds of observation, a person’s clothes, their age, or the way they are standing.
Our brains do this constantly. It helps us navigate the world quickly. But sometimes those quick judgments turn out to be wrong.
In this case, I had taken a very thin slice of the situation — a young woman standing outside chatting with others — and I had immediately assumed she was simply another customer waiting around.
It was only a tiny moment, but it reminded me how easily we form pictures in our minds about people we don’t yet know and quietly place them into a category.
Sometimes we are right. Sometimes we are not.
Yesterday I was not.
It was a pleasant reminder that the world is more interesting when we try, as much as possible, to see things freshly — to look again before deciding who people are or what role they play.