We scheduled our trip down the Keys so as to avoid the human embarrassments that attend Spring Break. We sought spectacular sunsets, coral reefs, beachside conversation.
We came for the waters. We were misled.
We didn’t know that the Florida colleges let out their students a week early, so that they will be unimpeded in their quest to begin getting happy as soon as they arise from the previous night’s debauchery.
It should be called Happy Shift.
At Tokyo’s Narita Airport, Mr. Mizutani shook my hand, bowed slightly and said, “Kotora-san, you have safe trip home.”
“Why,” I asked Mr. Mizutani, “do you pronounce my name Kotora? My name isn’t COAT-ler. It’s COT-ler. Why don’t you call me Katora?”
Mizutani took a deep breath and smiled broadly. “Kotora good name. Ko mean small. Tora mean tiger. Small tiger. Good name.” His expression became serious. “Katora not such good name. Tora still mean tiger, but ka mean mosquito. Striped mosquito in Asia give people dengue fever. They die. You not be Katora.”
Lynx, bobcat, caracal, alley cat, small tiger…I was smiling as the plane took off.
Near the end of my stay, to thank me for my efforts, six Japanese executives took me to dinner at a very upscale Tokyo restaurant. I had read guidebooks that highlighted cultural differences and how Americans abroad should behave, but nothing had prepared me for this. Continue reading “Japanese Lessons-Part 2”
In the early 70’s, as assistant to the president and product manager for a small, NYSE-listed business machines company, I traveled to Tokyo to teach our Japanese affiliate how to sell our new product, the world’s first high-speed, commercial fax machine. I was 27.
My introductory talk was to 60 men, all of whom leaned forward in their chairs, taking notes of my wise words…and everything else I said, too. Continue reading “Japanese Lessons-Part 1”
Today my four-year-old Mac G4 laptop began acting its age.
Groups of pixels jittered chaotically in horizontal regiments, sometimes covering the screen. Then, without anodyne application, the problem would disappear. And just as unpredictably, reappear. Further investigation revealed that these video measles increased or decreased as a function of manual pressure exerted on the case.
What I had was a screw loose…an intermittent error…notoriously hard to put right.
When I was in my 20s, I worked with an engineer who had a method for fixing such problems.
For any electronic device with an intermittent problem…
1) Measure the length, height, and width.
2) Add them together and multiply by two.
3) Hold the device that distance above a hard surface.
4) Drop.
5) Now the problem will no longer be intermittent.
Laptop, heal thyself!
Or else.
The odor of skunk is very different up close than it is far away. A wee bit-o-skunk is sharp and somewhat lemony…stinky, definitely apprehendable, but not outrageously offensive. Full-skunk, however, clouding thickly outward from the furry hotness of a thoroughly swacked pet dog, is an altogether different experience. It holds back for an instant, then slashes across your senses, hitting much further back, more on the reptilian neurons, with a cutting edge that noses in like the sound “chank-chank” composted with hot lye. There’s no meat to this stench. Nothing rotted. It is knife-edge, bluish-green, maybe bluish-gray, and you cannot stay with it long before gakking.
Continue reading “Mephitis Mephitis”