Carelessness

One day, a man felt like playing the flute, but he didn’t have one. So, he went to a shop to buy himself a flute. In the shop, he spent a long time examining and trying out one flute after another. He blew into each one, felt them from the outside, and even stuck his fingers inside. At one point, he inserted his finger so deeply into a flute that he couldn’t pull it back out. He tugged and tugged, but his finger wouldn’t budge. He yanked with all his might, but his finger only got more firmly stuck. No matter how hard he struggled, his finger wouldn’t move forward or backward. The only way to free his finger was to break the flute. But the flute wasn’t his—it belonged to the shopkeeper. That meant he had to buy it first.

“Excuse me, how much does this flute cost?” he asked the shopkeeper.

The shopkeeper thought to himself:
“This careless man has stuck his finger too deep into my flute and can’t get it out. That means he’ll pay whatever I ask.”

And so, he demanded the price of three flutes for the one.
The buyer didn’t haggle. He paid for the flute and rushed home to smash it with a hammer and free his finger.

He didn’t have to carry his purchase in his hands or his pocket—it was already on his finger. He waved his finger around because it hurt so much.

Suddenly, from behind a tall bamboo fence, he heard the beautiful sound of a flute being played.

He wanted to find out who was playing so well. He even forgot about his aching finger for a moment.

In the fence, he finally found a spot where the bamboo poles had spread apart, leaving a gap between them.

He peeked through the gap with one eye, trying to see what was happening on the other side. But the gap was so narrow that he couldn’t see anything.

So, he pressed his face even harder against the fence. This caused the bamboo poles to spread further apart, and he managed to squeeze his entire head through the gap.

But at that very moment, the beautiful music stopped, and a curtain was drawn on the balcony.

“What a shame! I barely managed to squeeze my head through, and now there’s nothing to see!”
The flute enthusiast remembered his sore finger again and tried to pull his head back. But his head was firmly stuck in the gap. The bamboo poles, which he had pushed apart with his forehead, had now closed back in and clamped around his neck like a collar. He jerked and twisted his head so hard that the fence creaked.

The noise brought the owners of the house running. When they saw a head sticking out of their bamboo fence, they shouted:

“What do you want? Why did you stick your head in here?”
“Excuse me, please,” said the flute lover, “how much does your fence cost? I’d like to take it with me.”

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Carelessness

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