A chance encounter with Hiroshi Ishii

I was reviewing some old outgoing email this morning, and I found a message I sent last month, regarding a book I had listed for sale on Amazon Marketplace. A few weeks ago, a man named Hiroshi Ishii attempted to place an order for one of my listings, but there was an error processing his payment. He emailed me asking if I could take PayPal, but as a diligent seller, I said we had to complete the transaction on Amazon. He never did, and I eventually sold the book to someone else.

At the time, the name “Hiroshi Ishii” meant nothing to me.

I now know Hiroshi Ishii is a professor at the MIT Media Lab and the author of a seminal paper in Human-Computer Interaction. He’s coming to speak to my Research Topics in HCI class in a couple of weeks.

I should have just sent him the book for free.