This paper explores the intersection between two very different contexts - domestic life and the workplace - and the membrane which lies between them. This membrane is manifest in the practices through which participants come to treat certain of their identities as salient for the present interaction. This is explored through close examination of a conversation, the beginning of which happens to offer a kind of ‘natural laboratory’: the failure by a husband to recognise his wife’s voice when she calls him at work affords us the opportunity to see how each manages the talk as being, respectively, ‘workplace’ or ‘domestic’
