Don't assume that humor travels well. A new member of an Insead department had already gone round study cubes on a couple of occasions carrying a lot of cookies, biscuits or various types of food. Today, I see her walking around empty-handed so I jokingly said: "no food today? Times must be hard."

2 minutes later, she turns up again with a piece of cake for me which she leaves on my desk. I tried to run after her, indicating that this was a joke and that really didn't mean it - that it was extremely kind of her to bring food to people and that was definitely much appreciated and best kept as her initiative. I apologize for sounding so rude and make my case a lot worse! There was this saying about hole digging right? She fled and sounded quite offended at my refusing the gift after making such a fuss for it.

So I accepted the present, decided to never ever joke about food with her in the future - and I will buy her a nice coffee as soon as I can. Not sure I am doing too well on the multi-cultural part of things today...In fact, I have also inadvertently forwarded an e-mail with the wrong content to the wrong person. Someone else did something similar with one of my emails...so much about these OB classes...