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What happens if one treats social identity as a flexible resource in conversational interaction? Close attention to the sequencing of talk suggests that speakers' identities are much more subtle than simple pre‐given category labels suggest, and that they change rapidly as a function of the ephemeral (but socially consequential) demands of the situation. Were a psychologist to have sampled the interaction only at one given point, they would have seen a participant using, or being attributed with, only one identity; but we show that speakers use, and attribute each other with, a variety of different identities as their business progresses. In so doing, the speakers can be seen not only to avow contradictory identities but also to invoke both group distinctiveness and similarity—and neither of these strategies are easy to square with social psychological theories of identity. We put what we find in this particular case study into …