gosh darn it! if i don't get a smile out of you guys after this one, i'm gonna quit.
*****************************
Software Engineer
An ambitious software engineer finally decided to take a vacation.
He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the
time of his life. At least for a while. A hurricane came up
unexpectedly.
The ship went down and was lost instantly. The man found himself
swept up on the shores of an island with no other people, no supplies,
nothing but bananas and coconuts.
Used to four-star hotels, this guy had no idea what to do. So for the
next four months he ate bananas, drank coconut juice, longed for his
old life, and fixed his gaze on the sea, hoping to spot a rescue ship.
One day, as he was lying on the beach, he spotted movement out of
the corner of his eye! It was a rowboat, and in it was the most
gorgeous woman he had ever seen. She rowed up to him. In disbelief,
he asked her, "Where did you come from, and how did you get here?"
"I rowed from the other side of the island," she said. "I landed here
when my cruise ship sank."
"Amazing," the software engineer said, "I didn't know anyone else
had survived. How many of you are there? You were really lucky to
have a rowboat wash up with you."
"It's only me," she said, "and the rowboat didn't wash up: nothing
did."
He was confused, "Then how did you get the rowboat?"
"Oh, simple," replied the woman. "I made it out of raw material that I
found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum-tree branches,
I wove the bottom from palm branches, and the sides and stern came
from a eucalyptus tree."
"But, but, that's impossible," stuttered the man. "You had no tools or
hardware - how did you manage?"
"Oh, that was no problem," the woman said. "On the south side of
the island, there is a very unusual strata of exposed alluvial rock. I
found that if I fired it to a certain temperature, it melted into
forgeable
ductile iron. I used that to make tools, and used the tools to make the
hardware. But enough of that. Where do you live?"
Sheepishly, the man confessed that he had been sleeping on the
beach the whole time.
"Well, let's row over to my place then," she said.
After a few minutes of rowing, she docked the boat at a small wharf.
As the man looked onto shore, he nearly fell out of the boat. Before
him was a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue
and white. While the woman tied up the rowboat with an expertly
woven hemp rope, the man could only stare ahead, dumbstruck.
As they walked into the house, she said casually, "It's not much,but I
call it home. Sit down, please. Would you like to have a drink?"
"No, no, thank you," he said, still dazed. "I couldn't drink another
drop of coconut juice."
"It's not coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have made a still - how
about a Pina Colada?"
Trying to hide his continued amazement, the software engineer
accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had
exchanged their stories, the woman announced, "I'm going to slip
into something more comfortable. Would you like to have a shower
and a shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom."
No longer questioning anything, the man went into the bathroom.
There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells
honed to a hollow-ground edge were fastened to its tip, inside a swivel
mechanism. "This woman is absolutely amazing," he mused. "What next?"
After his shower he returned downstairs, where the woman greeted him
wearing nothing but vines and smelling faintly of flowers. She told him
to sit down next to her. "Tell me," she began, "we've both been out
here
for a very long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure
you really feel like doing right now." She stared into his eyes.
He couldn't believe what he was hearing - this was like all of his
dreams coming true in one day. "You mean...," he replied, ----"I can
check my e-mail from here?"
