Tuesday 9 August 2011

The Toast Incident

The apartments that I was staying in while I was in Suwon, Korea had a buffet breakfast for the residents. It was fairly basic but quite nice. If you wanted toast they had sliced bread ready and a toaster. If you put the bread in the toaster and went back to your table, quite often a staff member brought it to you.

One day while sitting eating my breakfast, one of the staff members brought me two slices of toast. This was great, except for the fact that I had not put any bread in the toaster and was not expecting any toast! Thinking that they had just made a mistake and brought me someone else's toast, I tried to explain this to the waiter.

Unfortunately he could not understand my English and it was beyond my limited Korean. I tried to just say "forget it", but this was to no avail either and in no time at all there were two other staff members trying to understand what the "problem" was. In the end I managed to tell them there was no problem, but they never understood what the fuss was about.

I felt really bad though, the waiter had just tried to be helpful and I had, inadvertently, caused this completely trivial event to seem like a major incident.

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