Negotiations...

It looks like negotiations with Chile are going to be a long, drawn-out process. We agree on the basics, but sorting out the details could be a dialogue of the deaf, as the French so aptly say. It reminds me of a story a long time ago: we were invited to a wedding in Paris and we gave the happy couple a pair of tickets to a Michel Jonasz concert. I put them on the presents table yet, when I walked past later, couldn't see them any more. Not wanting at the time to ask if they'd already picked them up, I wondered if they'd been filched by one of the guests. After all, a lone envelope on a table full of presents is easy to pinch and conceal...

I asked the groom once or twice in passing via mail after the event if he'd enjoyed the concert (after all, the tickets weren't cheap) but he never referred to it in any of his replies. We moved away and contact was lost until quite recently, when we were back in touch via Plaxo or some such site. I immediately thought of those tickets and wondered whether he'd received them. I didn't care if they hated Michel Jonasz or anything like that; I just wanted to know if they'd got those bloody tickets or not. So I asked him outright. And he never mentioned them in any of his replies. So I still don't know. I have the feeling a couple of my enquiries to the theatre in Santiago are going to suffer a similar fate, but this will only help me in my quest to become a better negotiator.