The guy's hearing wasn't so good, but what he thought he heard--what he misheard--almost always ended up evolving into a gold-plated business opportunity. He was the man with the bad hearing and the million dollar ideas.
For instance: This one time when somebody said 'summarizer' what he heard was samuraizer. Less than an hour later, he'd come up with the recipe for the samuraizer, the trendiest drink of the summer: a spoonful of wasabi chased by a shot of Yamazaki whiskey dropped in a snifter full of cheap sake--all of which is done while being berated by your superiors.
Another Japan-centric example: When he first arrived in Tokyo on a business trip, everyone was talking non-stop about the salaryman, but what he heard was celeryman. I'll bet you'd been wondering where that cartoon character made out of celery who's always reminding your kids to eat their veggies came from, right? Well, now you know.
One not related to Japan: A misheard reference to Pirates of the Caribbean eventually led to an online store specializing in Caribbean parrots. It also led to the unionization of the same islands' people who made their living flying planes.
Another: A passerby's mentioning of the Pulitzer Prize that he didn't quite catch because he was talking to someone else on his cell phone eventually morphed into the Pew Lit Surprise, those positively sinful candies you sometimes find taped to the back of church bibles.
And finally: When someone he knew mentioned a visit to a clinic for urinalysis, she probably couldn't have guessed that she'd inadvertently given him the slogan for Alice's Pancake House: "If you're digging the hell out of your pancakes, you're in Alice's." A lot of people balked at that idea, saying the slogan would cause people to associate her restaurant with, well, urinalysis, but he insisted it would work, even though he knew it would blow up in her face. And the reason why he did this was because he was an asshole.
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