So I’m doing a leadership training course for work. They make you do all these self evaluations prior to the class, one being a picture story evaluation. Basically they show you a picture and you have to say what you think is going on, what had happened, what people are thinking, etc.
Being delirious at the end of a busy day, I think this is a good time to write the stories. I think I’m most amused by this one and how they’re going to interpret my management style from it.
Sadly I could not copy and paste the picture but essentially it was of the back of a man looking at a captain with a cruise boat in the background. The captain was saying something to the man.
Here is my short story:
Jack had always wanted to see Jamaica. He had heard amazing things of the beauty of the beaches, the jungles and the exotic people. This was his one chance to finally see something outside of his small life in Hoboken, NJ. He had saved his pennies for years, working at the local joke shop. It had been slow in coming, seeing as they were one of 5 joke shops in Hoboken. But each whoopie cushion added up and here he was, standing on the brink of a grand adventure. As he walked down the plank to the ship, he saw a captain standing there in a white hat. He had to smile as he had always imagined the captain of a cruiseliner to look like that. He noticed a dark look on the captain’s face as he approached. He reached out to shake the captain’s hand but the captain quickly drew his hand away. He had bad new. The ship had been contaminated. Swine flu, he said. They were going to have to cancel the trip but he assured Jack he’d be able to take another trip in the future. Sadly what the captain did not know was that Jack had only months to live. Working in the joke shop, it seemed, was a hazardous occupation. The asbestos in the building had caused him to develop cancer and he had stopped fighting it. Jack turned away, wondering why life had to throw him so many curve balls. Back to Hoboken and the joke shop…maybe the next life will be a better one.
As I read this to my coworker, I was pretty much in tears laughing…only imagining how they’d read into it. What are your thoughts?