23 January
Chutes and Ladders in Professional Development
Clive was a long couple of years ago in the corporate world. He was good there too. He bought a lot to the professional development of the companies that came to his company for help. Though he had played Chutes and Ladders, he never once encountered a chute in his career until he had a stroke.
Clive had a stroke at the age of thirty and if you know anything about strokes, that is extraordinary. The left side of his was paralyzed. He managed to get most of that part of his face back, but says it still has days where it just seems dead to him and he has trouble with certain words. He hated this kind of handicap, especially since he was a kind of golden boy at the company he did executive training for. He needed his face in order to be articulate.
During a training session he was doing for a gas company he will to this day not tell me the name of (he never will let slip a client name from his lips because he is like the 007 of the corporate world) a woman came up to him. On her name tag was a name of Margaret Watson. He also never forgets a name, a trait that kind of reminds me of that character Eric Roberts played in Star 80, except not creepy. Margaret started to speak, and Clive realized that she too had had a stroke, except she was older than him by about twenty years. He remembered she wore a broach in the shape of octopus too. Later on she would tell him she wore it because it make more limbs for itself when the other get damaged, a thing she wanted for her face.
She also told him how she had been demoted a couple of months after her stroke because she had difficulty with words but that his success after a stroke provided her with comfort that she might be able to get her old job back. He quit his job that day and got in with the government doing work for people with that were disabled.
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