Sunday, August 22, 2010

Cookies

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, drinking some coffee that's left over from the batch I made this morning, and munching on one of the chocolate pepper cookies I made a few days ago. It reminds me of a story that Douglas Adams likes to tell.

He was taking a train somewhere, and arrived early enough so that he had some time to kill. He went into a coffee shop, bought a cup of coffee, some cookies in a packet, and a newspaper. He put them down on an empty table and went to get something. When he returned, a man was sitting on the other side of the table. Adams thought nothing of it. A moment later, the man casually reached out, opened the packet, and took a cookie. Adams said that being British, he had no idea how to respond, so he ignored it. After a moment, he took a cookie. The man glanced at him, but then looked away. So there they sat, him reading his paper, drinking coffee, and each working through the packet of cookies. When the packet was empty, the other man left. Adams still had no idea what had just happened, but it was time for his train, so he tossed his trash into a bin, grabbed the sections of the paper -- and there, under the last section, was his packet of cookies, unopened.

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