Topic : Assumptions (conclusions)
Carpet Layer
A professional carpet-layer stepped back to survey a newly installed carpet. Reaching into his shirt pocket for a cigarette, he realized the pack was missing. At the same time he noticed a lump under the carpet in the middle of the room, about the size of the missing cigarette pack.
There was no way to retrieve his cigarette pack from under the attached carpet without ripping everything up and starting over. Finally, he decided to beat the object flat, thereby destroying any evidence of his mistake.
Gathering his tools, the carpet layer walked out to his truck. There on the seat of his truck was the mislaid pack of cigarette. As he lit one up, the homeowner hurried out of the house and asked, “Hey, have you seen my son’s gerbil?”
Fruit Stand
When the 1960s ended, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district reverted to high rent, and many hippies moved down the coast to Santa Cruz. They had children and got married, too, though in no particular sequence. But they didn’t name their children Melissa or Brett. People in the mountains around Santa Cruz grew accustomed to their children playing Frisbee with little Time Warp or Spring Fever. And eventually Moonbeam, Earth, Love and Precious Promise all ended up in public school. That’s when the kindergarten teachers first met Fruit Stand.
Every fall, according to tradition, parents bravely apply name tags to their children, kiss them good-bye and send them off to school on the bus. So it was for Fruit Stand. The teachers thought the boy’s name was odd, but they tried to make the best of it.
“Would you like to play with the blocks, Fruit Stand?” they offered.
And later, “Fruit Stand, how about a snack?”
He accepted hesitantly. By the end of the day, his name didn’t seem much odder than Heather’s or Sun Ray’s. At dismissal time, the teachers led the children out to the buses. “Fruit Stand, do you know which one is your bus?”
He didn’t answer. That wasn’t strange. He hadn’t answered them all day. Lots of children are shy on the first day of school. It didn’t matter. The teachers had instructed the parents to write the names of their children’s bus stops on the reverse side of their name tags. The teacher simply turned over the tag. There, neatly printed, was the word “Anthony.”
The Violinist
A violinist noticed that his playing had a hypnotic effect on his audiences. They sat motionless, as though they were in a trance. He found he had the same effect on his friends’ pets. Dogs and cats would sit spellbound while he played. Wondering if he could cast the same spell over wild beasts, he went to a jungle clearing in Africa, took out his violin and began to play. A lion, an elephant, and a gorilla charged into the clearing, stopped to listen, and sat mesmerized by the music. Soon the clearing was filled with every kind of ferocious animal, each one listening intently. Suddenly another lion charged out of the jungle, pounced on the violinist, and killed him instantly.
The first lion, bewildered, asked, “Why did you do that?”
The second lion cupped his paw behind his ear. “What?”
Kitty Litter
A family of five was rushed to the hospital to have their stomachs washed out after the cat with whom they had shared a meal of mushrooms suddenly began to have stomach contractions.
While members of the family showed no signs of illness, the doctor still had them rushed to the hospital. When they returned home they found the cat feeling well, after having produced five kittens.
The Photographer
The photographer for a national magazine was assigned to get photos of a great forest fire. Smoke at the scene hampered him and he asked his home office to hire a plane. Arrangements were made and he was told to go at once to a nearby airport, where the plane would be waiting. When he arrived at the airport, a plane was warming up near the runway. He jumped in with his equipment and yelled, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
The pilot swung the plane into the wind and they soon were in the air.
“Fly over the north side of the fire,” yelled the photographer, “and make three or four low level passes.”
“Why?” asked the pilot.
“Because I’m going to take pictures,” cried the photographer. “I’m a photographer and photographers take pictures!”
After a pause the pilot said, “You mean you’re not the instructor?”
Houdini
On one of his European tours, the master magician and locksmith Harry Houdini found himself locked in by his own thinking. After he had been searched and manacled in a Scottish town jail, the old turnkey shut him in a cell and walked away. Houdini quickly freed himself from his shackles and then tackled the cell lock. But despite all his efforts, the lock wouldn’t open.
Finally, ever more desperate but completely exhausted, he leaned against the door--and it swung open so unexpectedly that he nearly fell headlong into the corridor. The turnkey had not locked it.
