Our plane had just landed and we would be disembarking soon. I was with M., who noticed that the last few pages of my notebook looked like some kind of official paperwork allowing me to check other passengers’ passports or destroy them. That notebook was one of my teal Moleskine cahiers.

M brought out her own Moleskine notebook to show it to me. It was at this point that Bill Gates noticed us and our notebooks. He asked us what those notebooks were, and when hearing they were of the Moleskine brand, he said he was quite impressed with the quality of ours. In English, he explained that the Moleskine brand is quite unreliable, that their notebooks’ build quality is very inconsistent. I was nodding in agreement while he spoke. He told us he cared about our notebooks because he was on a quest to find the best notebook in the world.

We were then interrupted by a hostess, or maybe it was a border patrol agent. She asked me to do something using the powers of my strange paperwork, and she was way too excited because she saw Bill Gates. A cameraman started filming him, who had sat between M and me on the seat numbered 57. Someone called that seat “window 57” even though we did not have a window.

The aisles started to get crowded as people were preparing to disembark. We got up and walked back to our seats in economic class, but I first walked to Bill Gates’ seat to finish our conversation. He was surrounded by Marines, and somehow, while trying to call out to him, I mistook some of them for him and called out to the wrong people. I did get his attention in the end and told him I did not buy Moleskines anymore, and that if I had to recommend a pocket notebook brand without having much time to think about it, I would recommend Field Notes.