George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Instead of looting and pillaging and plundering, when it was a nice day, George just wanted to roam through fields of flowers or sit by the ocean and listen to the waves.
Surprisingly, instead of making George walk the plank, the captain agreed, and went with George.
So did the rest of the crew.
Word spread quickly. Other pirate crews walked off the job. Navy crews too.
Pretty soon everyone was enjoying a day off.
“Your plan worked,” the captain told George. “Now let’s go rob those other vessels!”
Category: My stories
George says fore
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
But he was good at designing miniature golf courses.
He sketched out the plans on old maps, arranging treasure chests and sea serpents.
Every hole was marked with an X.
The last hole was an epic sea battle, with little dolls swinging on ropes and firing cannons.
“Where will you get the construction material for this?” said the captain.
Suddenly, the ship wrecked on an uncharted island.
George and the crew salvaged as much as they could.
“While guys build a shelter,” said George, “I’ll build the first hole.”
George in the life boat
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
The other pirates were okay with this, and they picked up the slack.
“We don’t succeed or fail as individuals,” said the captain. “We do everything as a team.”
So, when George accidentally fired a cannon into the hull and sank the ship, his crewmates didn’t mind at all.
“This is why we have the lifeboat,” they said as they piled in.
But when George tried to get in, they threw him overboard.
“Not that we want to take chances,” they said.
He watched them as they rowed away.
George and jury duty
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Pirate ships don’t get regular mail service, but somehow George got a letter.
“Jury duty,” George growled.
Three weeks later, George was taking off his boots and hat, and setting his swords into a plastic tub.
“Are these real?” said the security guard.
“The letter said business casual,” said George, smiling. “Otherwise I’d have brought all my daggers and flintlocks.”
The guard looked at George’s letter, entered a code in his terminal, and said “Not of sound mind, exempted.”
George gathered his stuff and went back to the ship.
Fearsome George
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Why? Because he had a lot of fear, and his therapist told him that he needed to face his fear.
Joseph Campbell said that “In the deepest caves, we find our darkest fear.”
So, George looked for the deepest caves, and he found his darkest fear.
He came across a massive underground auditorium.
And he was asked to give a public speech.
In only his underwear.
“Oh my God,” said George. “My darkest fear!”
Oh, and there were spiders. Lots of spiders.
Because George was afraid of spiders, too.
George and the painting
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
After looking at a Paul Gauguin painting of naked Tahiti women doing various things, George took the title to heart and asked himself…
“Where do we come from?” The ship. George came from the ship.
“What are we?” We are pirates. We loot and steal and stuff.
“Where are we going?” To a fence to sell this painting I’m about to steal.
George took the painting off of the wall, rolled it up, and ran for the exit.
The fence George found turned out to be an undercover cop.
George and the X
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He walked along the beach, listening to the waves roll in.
Where did he bury that treasure chest?
Of course he’d marked the spot with an X. Every good pirate knows that.
But every good pirate marks the spot with an X on a map.
George had marked the spot with an X in the sand.
Which, with the first high tide, the waves had washed away.
George sat down and sighed. “This really sucks.”
He thought about eating lunch, but he’d left his lunch in the treasure chest.
Scrum Master George
George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
At first, the other pirates thought it was George, but the overall performance of the crew was declining.
So the captain divided the crew up into Scrum-Agile teams.
“Break up your weekly duties into tasks,” said the captain. “Then determine the effort they will take to accomplish.”
Simple tasks were easy to score, but complex tasks were harder.
“I can’t throw more than a five because of my hook,” complained Lefty.
Scrummaster George divided the tasks into smaller sub-tasks.
“Forget it,” said Lefty, drawing his cutlass. “Back to Kanban!”
Someone may have run a background check on you
It amuses me when I get Spam that says someone may have run a background check on me.
Go ahead. Run a background check.
You’ll find the usual stuff: a decent education, a car note, and a good credit rating.
And a rap sheet as long as your arm.
Every line on it, a vicious assault on a spammer.
No jury would convict me, because everyone’s sick of spam.
It’s not hard to find the source of spam.
I track it down, run my own check, and get an address.
Then I get out my baseball bat and car keys.
Helter Skelter
I knew a girl named Helter Skelter.
I shit you not, it was her legal name.
And not a joke name, picked out as an adult.
And it certainly wasn’t a stage name, like actors pick out when their legal name is already registered with the union.
Or their birth name is something boring or strange, like John Wayne being Marion and Norma Jean becoming Marilyn Monroe.
Was it her birth name?
No. She was born Helter Smith.
When her parents died in a car wreck, she was adopted by the Skelter family.
And that’s when she became Helter Skelter.