The question that sorts the room

In Dubai the first question is rarely your name. It is where you are from.

It is asked kindly, most of the time. A taxi driver asks it at the first red light. A neighbour asks it in the lift. The answer arrives and a whole folder opens with it: what you probably eat, which football you follow, how you will bargain, what you will find funny, whether you are one of us.

It is a shortcut, and shortcuts are not stupid. Sorting someone quickly tells us whether we can relax. It spares us the slow work of finding out. In a city where nearly everyone arrived from somewhere else, it can feel like the only way to get through a day full of strangers.

Then the sorting reaches further. The phone in someone's hand, the accent of their English, the shoes, the car. Each becomes a badge we read so that we do not have to listen. We stop meeting people and start filing them.

The cost is easy to miss, because it is made of things that never happened. The driver who trained as an engineer and was never asked about it. The woman in the next building who understood a market better than you did, and whose view you never heard because the folder had already told you what she would think. The generous reading you would have given someone you had not already decided about.

Marketers do the same thing with better software. A segment is a box with a label on it, and it is useful right up to the moment it replaces the customer. After that the label does the listening, and anyone who does not fit it quietly drops out of the picture.

A box is a convenience for whoever is doing the sorting. The person inside it never asked to be there.