Cultural faux pas: In the spring of 1986, the newspaper USA Today recruited me into its Cover Stories department as a writer and editor. It came to pass only because my friend and mentor Dave Mazzarella, who had published my first work when he was editor of the Rome Daily American, interceded on my behalf. He had left Rome in the late seventies and was now head of the international side of Gannett, USA Today’s parent company. Filled with hope, I arrived from Rome at the newspaper’s gorgeous Rosslyn, Virginia, headquarters (a strikingly reflective skyscraper) where Karen Jurgensen, the head of the department, and Barb Geehan, her assistant, immediately invited me to a get-acquainted lunch at a Georgetown restaurant. It was there, toward the end of the meal, that I committed a major blunder. As my European training had taught me, I excused myself from the table and paid the check. When Jurgensen found out, she was politely livid and explained, between the lines, the protocols of position, power, and money. I was no longer in Europe, she said. My payment was canceled, and the ride back to the newspaper was a silent one. Geehan later tried cheering me up by telling me it wasn’t my fault that I lived in strange, Jurassic Rome. In later years, when I returned to USA Today as a correspondent in London, I shared this story with Mazzarella, by then the newspaper’s editor. As a dapper man of European sensibilities, he laughed. All it took was one faux pas to teach me that culture can be tricky. Sadly, my ties with Jurgensen remained on the chilly side, and I left the paper 18 months later, a lesson learned the hard way.