Writing and thought

In chapter 1 of The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker introduced the following key ideas:

1) The human mind can construe a particular scenario in multiple ways.
2) Each construal is based around a few basic ideas like "event," "cause," "change," and "intend."
3) These ideas can be extended metaphorically to other domains as when we count events as if they were objects or when we use space as a metaphor for time.
4) Each idea has distinctively human quirks that make it useful for reasoning about certain things, and that can lead to fallacies and confusions when we try to apply it more broadly.

Write a story about a character who construes a scenario in a particular way and metaphorically extends this construal to a domain in which it does not apply well. Develop this mismatch into a conflict that escalates to a major crisis between that charcater and another character.