Back in the 1980s, when I was a salaryman working in Tokyo, I arranged an appointment for a meeting between visiting executives from my company and the chairman of NHK (the Japanese equivalent of the BBC).   Somehow, we bungled the location of the meeting:  I thought it was at their engineering laboratories out in the suburbs, while my NHK contact assumed we were meeting at network headquarters in Shibuya.  The result:  I stood up one of the two or three most powerful figures in the Japanese broadcasting world.  He was livid, I later heard.  I spent the next several days writing exquisitely humble letters of apology to everyone I could think of, even though I was pretty sure that the fault lay with my contact at NHK. 

    It provides some comfort even today, twenty years later, when I learn that others can make similar mistakes.   Witness this little Chicago brouhaha, in which world-famous musicians and a legendary institution stumble into a mutually embarrassing miscommunication.   Somewhere down in the bowels of Symphony Center, an underpaid underling is now writing deeply apologetic letters to send off in all directions, all the while grumbling that it isn't his/her fault.

   As for that NHK chairman, he later had to resign in disgrace after his own miscommunication troubles:  he was caught lying in parliamentary testimony.  Karma, no doubt.