I planned to take my daughter to a Gruffalo puppet show, but a friend phoned the roving circus and they said “No reservations. You can come earlier to buy your tickets.”

He hangs up the phone, explains the situation to me, and walks over to his son. In turn, I walk to my daughter and explain that we may be unable to watch a puppet show after all. We will try, but we may not get tickets.

Of course, she’s disappointed at this sudden change. She starts to cry in disappointment and I start cursing the event company and how people do things here in this country.

So stupid! There’s no online booking system, fine. But no reservation even via the phone? Why in god’s name are things so backwards here?

My friend arrived early with his son to get tickets for all of us. He manages to get them and my daughter is happy once again.

We arrive at the show tent and take our seats. My friend hands us our tickets, gestures a slicing motion across the middle of the tent, and says, “That half is for reservation. This half is for people who buy at the cashier.”

It is a lightbulb moment. It seems like they didn’t want to sell all their tickets via phone because they wanted to ensure that visitors could purchase tickets if they visited in person. That seems a logical (and quite humane) way of conducting show business. I feel like a fool.

I wonder how many times I’ve committed this folly and never got the chance to learn that I did in the first place. Honestly, probably many! But I’m not sure that assuming every decision or non-decision has a reasonable justification behind it is a good conclusion either.

Maybe the best we can do is to criticise gently, knowing that there’s always a chance we may be the fool. At least this way we won’t be shouting fools!