A Blunder

A company president, a client, came all the way from Niigata to my office to pay his courteous respects.

Since it was a reunion after a long time, our pent-up talk came into bloom, and by the time I noticed, four hours had passed and it was dusk. When I invited him to dinner if he had the time, he said the Shinkansen departure was near, so I offered him, as a small parting gift, two or three delicious-looking cookies that had been sitting on the office table, saying, “Please have these in the train on your way home.”

At which the president grinned and gazed at me: “Say—aren’t these cookies the very ones I brought you?” Ah, I’d done it! Since we were on easy terms we could both roar with laughter, but had this been a first-time customer, it might have become a pale-faced situation of the utmost rudeness. Even something done with good intentions can, if you’re not careful, backfire—it became a fine place of learning for careless, scatterbrained me.