Boyfriend cancels date when he can’t get time off from work, but his awesome girlfriend figures out how to bring the strawberry patch to him.
Japan’s work culture, which demands long hours and frequent overtime, also often makes it hard to get vacation days approved. That can make things unpleasant not just for overworked employees themselves, but for their loved ones as well.
For example, Japanese Twitter user @rikujimasukuman, who went through a dry spell of 24 years without a girlfriend, finally has a special lady in his life. Visits to picturesque fruit farms are a popular date plan in Japan, and so recently @rikujimasukuman promised to take a day off from work and go strawberry picking with his girlfriend.
Unfortunately, as the date got closer, @rikujimasukuman got busier and busier at work, and eventually it became apparent that he wasn’t going to be able to get the time off. That’s when his girlfriend decided that if he didn’t have time to go strawberry picking, she’d bring the strawberry-picking to his apartment instead.
Without warning, @rikujimasukuman’s girlfriend hung a clothes-drying rack, the kind often hung on Japanese balconies, on the curtain rod in his apartment. Then, she took out a pack of strawberries and clipped their stems, one by one, in the attached clothespins.
“OK, now we can pick strawberries!” she announced when she was done.
A few online commenters thought she might have been doing this out of passive aggressive frustration, but @rikujimasukuman assures them that wasn’t the case at all, and that she just wanted the two of them to experience a taste of what it’d be like to go on a full-fledged strawberry-picking date. Once that was cleared up, online comments were entirely sweet, without even a hint of the sourness sometimes present in strawberries.
“You have a wonderful girlfriend!”
“When you finally do get the chance, make sure you take her to a real strawberry patch.”
“So clever and cute! Take good care of her.”
“Just marry her already.”
Perhaps the most poignant comment of all came from one Twitter user who said, “It’s not what you do or where you go, but who you’re with that matters.” Obviously, if all you want is strawberries, you don’t have to go all the way to the farm; they’re available at any grocery store. The whole point of the planned date was to do something fun together, and though @rikujimasukuman’s work schedule forced a change in plans, odds are he and his girlfriend will always remember their at-home strawberry-picking date.
Still, with all the attention his tweet is getting, hopefully his bosses will eventually hear about it and give him a day off.
Source: Twitter/@rikujimasukuman via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso
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