Category: Talk Like A Pirate Day

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
This didn’t matter to graverobbers. They just wanted pirate corpses that they could sell to museums, where they were stuffed and displayed in historically accurate dioramas.
Schoolkids would walk past the scenes, going “YARRRRRR!” and swaggering like Johnny Depp in those movies.
Then they’d beg their parents to buy them plastic swords and eyepatches and cheap paper pirate hats from the gift shop.
Or they’d steal something from the dioramas. Sometimes, they’d knock over a figure.
Raising the next generation of thieves and plunderers.
George would be so proud.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
His ship struck a small boat, a boat on which the leader of Tomainia had been fishing.
George bore an uncanny resemblance to the dead man sinking into the water.
So much so, he was grabbed by the special secret police and rushed to the country’s capital.
Dressed in a military uniform, addressing the crowded stadium, George stood there and froze.
What would he say? What would he tell the assembled masses?
What deep wisdom could he share to make everything better for everyone?
George passed out and collapsed.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The other pirates didn’t respect George.
When he put his lunch in the ship’s refrigerator, someone would always steal it.
“I marked it with my name, guys!” yelled George. “I used the marker that’s clipped to the fridge!”
Someone stole the marker, too.
George began to carry his lunch around with him as he worked.
Sometimes, he’d drop it during a battle or a raid, and someone would step on it.
“You did that on purpose!” George would whine, and stab the offender.
It became his whiny, annoying battlecry.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Most pirates had a girl in every port.
Sometimes more than one, depending on the money.
George wasn’t like that.
He had someone special back home
George would send letters from every port he visited.
When he arrived back home, they’d read them together under a tree they’d planted when they were young.
Then, one year, George returned home, but his letters were waiting for him, undelivered.
George put them under the tree they’d planted together, where she’d been buried.
His crewmates found his body, hanging from the tree.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When he felt depressed, he ate.
“What is this?” said George, opening a Wonka Bar and seeing a Golden Ticket.
“It says you’ll get a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,” said the captain. “And you’ll get all the chocolate you could ever want.”
They set sail for the chocolate factory, but bad weather prevented George from getting there on time for the tour or the chocolate.
Which made him even more depressed.
He opened another Wonka Bar. Another Golden Ticket.
He crumpled it up and threw it overboard.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He said “Sorry” a lot, even though he wasn’t genuinely sorry.
He tried to feel genuinely sorry, but he never did.
“You’re not really sorry,” said a man that George had just stabbed.
George sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t feel sorry. But I want to.”
George sat down and wrote an apology note.
Then, he revised his draft, correcting his spelling and grammar.
Finally, he wrote a clean copy of the note and handed it to the guy he’d stabbed.
But by then, the man was dead.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He couldn’t figure out why he was still a pirate.
Why would a crew keep an incompetent like George around?
That’s when George decided he was in a reality television show.
Every now and then, he’d stop and shake one of his crewmates.
“This can’t be real,” he’d say. “Fess up.”
But the pirates were pirates, not actors.
George peeked in every crate and cupboard for cameras and microphones.
Eventually, he gave up, and accepted that things were real.
“Real bad,” said the captain, writing the next day’s script.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The captain constantly shouted at George, making an example of George for the others.
“YOU’RE NOT A VERY GOOD PIRATE! WHY CAN’T YOU BE A GOOD PIRATE?”
When he was just getting his sea legs, he wasn’t very good.
But with time and experience, he got better.
It was the captain who wasn’t a very good pirate. Or a very good leader.
George looked at the crew and wondered who would make a good replacement captain.
Then he looked in his mop bucket, saw his reflection, and pondered mutiny.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He rarely checked his work e-mail, so he missed a lot of memos about training for new equipment or work schedule changes.
He also never bothered to delete his email. His inbox used up a lot of storage, and the ship’s quartermaster got on George about needing to clear up some space.
So, George created a rule to just automatically delete everything that landed in his inbox.
He still missed training session and work schedule changes, but at least the quartermaster was off of his back about meaningless shit.