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DINNER TABLE NEIGHBOUR

One of the two Japanese people I have ever seen raise their voice was an irate customer representative (Angry-san) who was furious at a manufacturing oversight.

After intense negotiations to remedy the issue, we decided to take the customer's team out for a nice dinner to try and smooth the waters and improve the relationship. Luckily for me, my colleagues thought it would be a fantastic idea to seat me between Angry-san and his colleague who spoke extremely limited English, whereas their side of the dinner table had the happy, reasonable team members.

As luck would have it, Angry-san simmered right down with me as his dinner neighbour, showing me his phone's fishing app and also how his "buddy" had changed. I thought he had made a new friend but I was mistaken. He meant "body" and detailed his weight loss and heath kick journey over the course of an hour or so, which included getting off the train three stops early to build more walking into his routine.

The dinner came to a close with Angry-san jovial and happy, until my colleagues at the reasonable end of the table had the bright idea of asking how long everyone's commute home would be. Angry-san sternly replied that it took him almost two hours to get home, but only I knew about the 45 minutes of walking that was included. So my colleagues decided to split the hefty cost of a cab to save him some commuting time, and I let them do so. If only they had listened to the story of his changing "buddy", they would have known better!