Many years ago, I had built this bench and the boards on its seat had slowly rotted away. Today, while I was raking up the fallen leaves, I replaced them with a few bits of Merbau I had lying around. Proud of my handywork, I showed it to Padma. "What took you so long", was her instant reply.
Which is exactly what my Arab boss said to me more than forty years ago when I telexed him in Jeddah from my office in Greece to proudly tell him that I had just discovered a long-forgotten transaction in which another commodity trader had short-changed him by a million dollars - well, nine-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-and-a-bit dollars which by the time we got it back plus interest had grown to over a million dollars.
His reply, "What took you so long?", wasn't what I had expected, seeing that this was a trade which had not occurred on my watch but well before I had even joined him in April 1982. A "Treuhandgesellschaft" in Switzerland had been in charge of his trades at that time, and they had allowed it to fall between the cracks. Very annoyed, I told him over the phone that I was resigning, and hung up. Hours later, he phoned back to ask if I had calmed down. I told him I had but that I was still leaving.
And so I did, on the 1st of April 1985. The significance of that day only became apparent to me after I had returned to Australia and realised that I had cut off my nose to spite my face. I had allowed my pride and ego get the better of me to give up the best job I have ever had. Not only had I earned the most money I had ever been paid for my work but it had also given me the greatest job satisfaction I had ever enjoyed — until that moment when he had asked me, "What took you so long?"
Two years later, his brothers offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by then I'd grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.
All this came back to me as I sat there on my newly-fixed bench.
