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The Barely Employed Lobster
Random inspiration: barely employed lobster
AI-generated painting and story
The story
The lobster had been promoted to Senior Data Entry Clerk after three years of flawless alphabetization, though no one remembered to update his job title or pay grade. He arrived at 8:03 a.m. every day, never took lunch, and never complained when the intern mistook him for a decorative paperweight. Today, the spreadsheet glitched again — column B refused to sort — and he tapped the same two keys for the seventeenth time, waiting for the system to notice he was still there, still trying, still barely employed.
The brief
A lone lobster sits upright at a small metal desk under a flickering fluorescent light, one claw resting on a half-filled coffee mug, the other tapping a keyboard with two keys pressed, surrounded by stacked manila folders labeled 'Pending' and a wilting potted fern in the corner of a beige cubicle farm.
The painting and the story were written from this same scene, so the two describe one moment.
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