Hiroko's Hitokoto

To repair my favorite shoes, I went to Ginza last Sunday. That was a big mistake. Although they didn't have a "Hokosha-Tengoku" (where the roads are closed to cars), the street was still packed with people, and the stores were running outside stalls, making hard to move past on the sidewalks. I was curious and asked the police why they didn't have the Hokosha-Tengoku. The reason was that there are too many trucks needing to make deliveries on Sundays -- apparently because the crowds buy more stuff, the stores need to bring the goods in with more trucks. At the time I thought the explanation sounded reasonable, but in the 4 hours I was there, I only saw two Kimura-ya Bakery trucks. If I owned a store, I would be counting the trucks and telling the police to get their act together. Surely the tens of thousands of pedestrians spending money to buoy up the Japanese economy should have priority over 2 trucks!

Recently we have started receiving some very strange phone calls at the office from some mobile phone users. One of the convenient functions of a cell phone is that it remembers a caller's number. But it's only convenient if the person making the first call gets the number right. So when the cell phone owner calls us back, a conversation something like the following happens, ..."Good morning, LINC Media here." "Ummm, did you call me?" "It's LINC Media here, who is this please?" "My name's Suzuki. Did you call me?" "This is LINC Media, can we help you?" "No, I just want to know why you called." "I'm sorry sir, let me see who might have called you [10 minutes go by as the LINC Media receptionist calls every extension asking if anyone is trying to reach a Suzuki-san.]" "Hello, hello?" "I'm sorry sir, we can't find who was trying to call you, would you like to leave a message?....