A message at midnight

A woman in Port Said crochets handbags at home and sells them through her page. One night a message arrives from a customer whose bag came smaller than she expected. It is long, and it is not polite.

There are two ways to read a message like that, and the words for them almost rhyme. She can be furious or she can be curious. It is hard to be both at the same moment. Anger has already decided what happened and is busy defending. Curiosity has not decided anything yet.

The furious reply points out that the measurements were written under the photo. It is accurate. It also ends the conversation, and the customer, and probably the customer's friends.

The curious reply asks what size she had pictured, and what she meant to carry in it, and what in the photo gave her that idea. It finds out that the photo shows the bag on a plain table with nothing beside it for scale. It finds out that two other buyers felt the same and simply never ordered again. The next week the photos show the bag on a shoulder, with a phone and a set of keys inside, and the disappointed messages slow down.

Nothing about the message is different in the two versions. The words on the screen are identical. The only choice is which feeling gets to write back.

The angry one feels better for an evening. The curious one is the only one that tells her something about her own work.