The Boss

I definitely picked a difficult fairy tale to bring into our modern era, but the arbitrary rules of this blog are firm. On one post I analyze a fairy tale, and the next post I write a modern version of it. I scaled down the warfare to office drama, but I ended up keeping the religious aspect of Andersen's original story. I suppose I could have had a boss threaten coffee breaks instead, but this seemed a bit more true to the original.

Never underestimate the importance of a person's desk.

John was The Boss, and he liked it that way. He told his employees that no one and nothing should be more important than their job. Those who disagreed were reassigned or fired. There was no one to fire John. He was The Boss. So, he continued to do as he liked. Until one day when he saw an employee with a religious image at her desk. It didn't matter what the image was, really. Just that this person was using company time to think about spiritual matters.
"We're not paying you to pray," John said to her.

She looked up from her keyboard. "Excuse me?" she asked, not sure she'd heard him right. After all, John had never spoken to her before. He didn't even know her name was Daisy.

"When you're here, you should be completely focused on your work," he said, pointing at the image.

"Having that here helps me work better," Daisy replied evenly.

John blinked at her. She was talking back to him? "Nothing is above the company," he snapped at her.

"As you say," Daisy replied. "I'd better get back to work."

John turned away, convinced he'd won. So he was confused when, a week later, he noticed two religious images on her desk. And some of the desks next to her had various religious images as well.

"I thought we understood each other," John said.

Daisy turned away from her computer screen. "Yes. I thought so too. What are we misunderstanding?"

"Your religious things don't belong at work," John told her.

"I thought you understood that it helps me work better when I have them here," Daisy replied.

"You only had one before!" John yelled.

"Oh," Daisy replied, as if she hadn't noticed. "Perhaps I feel the need to have more now." Her phone rang. "Excuse me." She answered the phone and John stood there while she talked to a customer. Eventually, he walked away, his eye twitching.

By the next week, every desk in that area had at least one religious image on it, and several other areas were starting to have them as well. They were all different, but they were all taking away from the company. John sent out an email to all employees reminding them that decorations on their desks shouldn't take away from productivity.

Perhaps he should have seen it coming when the next day, every single desk at his location had a religious image of some sort on it. Managers were calling him from other buildings, asking what was going on and why everyone seemed to be so religious all of a sudden.

Things couldn't get worse, until John walked into his office and saw a short bit of scripture on his desk. He didn't read it. Tore it up into tiny pieces, in fact. He threw them away and sat down. There was another piece of scripture taped to his monitor. John tore that off, crumpled it up, and threw it away. He turned on his computer.

His desktop background was a copy of the image Daisy had on her desk the first time he'd talked to her.

John screamed and felt his heart hammering in his chest. Everything seemed out of focus and his body started shaking. His assistant slowly peeked into his office and turned white. She called for an ambulance, and John was escorted out of the building.

When the executives came in to get any necessary information out of John's office, there was nothing in the garbage can. His desktop looked as it always had.

John went into early retirement, for medical reasons. The day he retired, he got a postcard in the mail, the front was a religious image and the back had a short piece of scripture on it. John never went back to work after that day.