Ben Roy

I have a regular meeting with a few local Internet entrepreneurs, every 4-6 weeks or so, usually for dinner and drinks. The last time we met was the second week of December.

For the previous two meetings we'd gotten together at Boston's, which if you don't know is a chain pizza place. Our meeting last Wednesday was the third time we'd been there in about four months.

As it happens, the server for the section we were sitting in was the same young woman we'd had previously. Towards the end of the meal, she was at our table and asked if we worked together. Amidst a bit of shrugging we said 'kind of', to which she replied that she thought so because we always came in together.

In fact, she'd noticed that we "came in every Wednesday." She went on to ask about our work, said that she was interested in marketing, talked about her school, etc. But I was stuck back at her statement. Three visits in four months hardly seemed easy to confuse with every Wednesday.

The funny thing was that when we left, she said goodbye and that she'd see us next week. I took that to mean that she hadn't just been generalizing when she made the original statement, but that somehow she perceived that we were there much more often than we actually had been.

I want to feel like I learned something important about making an impression. It has to be useful to understand how we created that impression, why she believed that we were there so often. Surely there are are profitable ways to employ that trick, whatever it is.

But I haven't managed to ferret it out yet. Is it because we were a bigger party? Because we stayed for longer than the average table? Were we more engaging, more friendly, or tip better than others?

For now I'm resigned to squirrel away the awareness that perception or memory can be bent to such a degree, and continue to ponder the how and why.