A woman at the airport waiting to catch her flight bought herself a bag of
cookies, settled in a chair in the airport lounge and began to read her book.
Suddenly she noticed the man beside her helping himself with cookies from
the cookie bag between them. Not wanting to make a scene, she read on, ate
cookies, and watched the clock. As the daring “cookie thief” kept on eating
the cookies she got more irritated and said to herself, “If I wasn’t so nice, I’d
blacken his eye!” With each cookie she took, he took one too. When only one
was left, she wondered what he would do. Then with a smile on his face and
a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half. He offered her
half, and he ate the other. She snatched it from him and thought, “Oh brother,
this guy has some nerve, and he’s also so rude, why, he didn’t even show any
gratitude!” She sighed with relief when her flight was called. She gathered her
belongings and headed for the gate, refusing to look at the ungrateful “thief.”
She boarded the plane and sank in her seat, then reached in her baggage to
fetch her book, and what she saw made her gasp with surprise. For there in
front of her eyes was her bag of cookies. Then it dawned on her that the
cookies she ate in the lounge was the man’s and not hers, that the man was
not a thief but a friend who tried to share, that she was the rude one, the
ungrateful one, the thief.
The cookie thief story reminds us, that it often happens that the one pointing the accusing finger turns out to be the guilty one, that the complainant sometimes turns out to be the offending party. In the cookie story, the woman believed she was such a wonderful person to put up with the rudeness and ingratitude of the man sitting beside her. In the end she discovered that she was the rude and ungrateful one and the man was wonderfully friendly? Well, because it is easier to hear the other person than it is to hear yourself snoring.