A friend of mine from Japan has been in the states about ten years now. Though her English vocabulary is better than many native speakers I know, she still has a pretty thick accent; sometimes it is hard to understand her cadence and structure-- particularly over the phone.

A while back I gave her a call, and our chit-chat led into a discussion of the Japanese version of Windows 2000, which allows her to switch back and forth between languages-- in addition to lots of other cool stuff. We were talking about how her Thinkpad had dual character sets on the keyboard when the conversation shifted into problems she was having with some dude named Bruce Green.

I had never heard of him before, but let her continue... Apparently, this guy would show up uninvited, and start messing with her. When she told me that Bruce Green appeared late one night in the middle of her preparation of a deliverable and caused her to actually lose something she had been working on by his interruptions, my male instincts kicked in and I said "Okay-- I don't know who this Bruce Green is, but you tell him that if he keeps on messing with you, he'll have to deal with me!"

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