I have the marketing instincts of a squid.

Nevertheless, I took a closer look at the signs in my comics. Very close. I had to do a lot of squinting. They are written quickly as an afterthought. Using state of the art graphic software from 2007, I blow the signs up to a very legible size and write them out. They were initially only for my amusement. Little did I know that people would enlarge very pixilated web versions and still be able to read them. I was very pleased with this.

I have a couple of consistent readers who do not know how to enlarge their screen to read the signs. At once I am grateful for their reading and reluctant to type them all out for them. I used to type out signs for individuals who messaged me, but it became very tedious very quickly. You’ve heard that a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain it? It’s really not funny if you have to type it out.

So if you’re not reading on a phone, please know that you can enlarge your screen by pressing Control and the plus (+) symbol on your keyboard (and for Mac users, it’s Command and plus). You can press Control and the minus (-) symbol to shrink your screen back to normal. Or maybe it’s a dash, who knows. Yes, it’s very annoying. This is why I thought nobody would bother to do it.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

The breakroom is a good start. Breakrooms are prime sign locations. Sometimes it’s about employee perks, like discount tickets to a local amusement park. Usually it’s where they stuff all of the legal documents they are required to post about your job. If you injure yourself at work, you might find the Workers Comp doctor information here. Try not to bleed on the breakroom tables.

Hmmm, I didn’t have to enlarge my screen. Maybe these could be used in eye exams. I’ll leap on this marketing idea in a couple of decades.

Might as well go from the breakroom to the doctor here. Doctors also have a lot of signs, but many of them are actually useful. Between the advertisements for the latest and fantastic drug that your insurance won’t pay for you might see some good info on how to detect a stroke or heart attack. I always find those signs to be stressful. I immediately start questioning whether I’m having any of the symptoms. Thankfully, I can point to one of the advertisements for stress drugs and request that before I leave.

Now we’ve gone from the doctor’s office to the hospital. Wow, these are flowing better than I thought. Poor Vickie is in the hospital, recovering from a workplace romance that she was forced to witness (typical retail workplace drama).

Do hospitals have visiting hours anymore? The ones I’ve been to lately seem to let you hang out night and day if you want. I’m not sure why you would want to if it’s not your immediate family, but a free room is a free room. Pull up a chair and take a nap.

Ok, back to work. I’ve always wondered how they determine the price of some of those clearance items, and after talking with a manager in charge of such things I am still wondering. It’s usually done in a corporate office far away from the actual store. I’m also highly suspicious of clearance candy corn. My suspicion is that candy has seen at least ten Halloweens.

Many stores have become a tad loose with their pet restrictions. As stated a million times before, I don’t know why this is. Keep your pet’s butt away from my food, please.

Happy signs announcing a store renovation need to stop. I congratulate their attempt to put a positive spin on the open construction pit in the middle of the place, but the only thing harder than trying to find your regular items after a store renovation is finding your regular items during a store renovation.

Ah, candy bars. They may cost more, but at least they don’t taste as good! I want my ten year old taste buds back.

You may find more emotional signs next to a time clock, usually handwritten. There might be phrases like “no exceptions!” written in red ink. Just in case getting clocked in on time isn’t stressful enough, these signs help your heart rate get to where it needs to be to induce panic.

You get a lot of legal signs at a gas station because of alcohol and cigarettes, but there are also plenty of handwritten signs at many locations. This is where you’ll find the funniest misspellings. I have saved pictures of such signs but it seems too mean to share them. Well, that and the knowledge that I’ve had some pretty bad spelling mistakes make it to print. Redactions are more shameful than handwritten gas station signs. Stay in school, kids.

Back to the breakroom, which is forever trying to be a self-cleaning breakroom. One day we will be able to set our drink down on a table that isn’t smeared with mustard or some other condiment, and then we shall know peace for a thousand years.

I’ve previously asked my readers if they actually read signs. I think it’s safe to say most of you are here because you like to read. However, there are always the funny “did not read” stories….

The raises are always some low figure, just enough extra cash to remind you that you’re screwed. It might be presented to you as a good thing, and you might smile when you receive it, but you’re left feeling like you just ate a large bag of Doritos. Sure it was fun for a little bit, but now you’re stuffed without feeling full. You really should’ve had something else, like baked chicken or a career that paid well.

Raises confuse me because they’re never really a raise. Prices go up, eventually you get a slight raise that doesn’t match the new cost of living, then prices go up some more. Finally, a new person is hired in who makes what you make or a little bit more. Repeat. Why bother with raises at all? With that kind of business model, just spend the money on some “Now Hiring” signs and Dramamine.

Now let’s all go watch The Wolf Of Wall Street.

The meat department makes me want to become a vegetarian. No, it’s not because of the prices, although it should be. It’s because I’ve been on farms and those domesticated animals are nice. I’d rather eat meat from an animal that was trying to kill me, and by “me” I mean somebody else who ultimately killed it and then sold the meat. Farms could be terrifying places where hunters are running for their lives. You know, so I would feel better about it all.

This bit is brought to you by a place that did hire me even though I quit them the year before. They made the Yellow Pages for other countries that still used Yellow Pages, much to the utter shock of everyone I told. The Yellow Pages was thought to be long extinct. It was all fun and games until I quit on them once again. Apparently they were so upset by this that they moved to one of the countries that still used Yellow Pages.

This one was fun to write, mostly because it made no sense. But it would really make the process go faster if everyone told the truth. They are all based on actual candidates. Cottonwood is based on a couple of previous coworkers.

This is true. There’s always that one person who’s as calm as a cucumber, looks great, and is still working in their late seventies because they like it. I hope they attend my funeral.

This got a lot of attention. The world “maximum” is always presented with big smiles. What they seem to gloss over is that the smallest of things can also be a maximum.

“Get Hulu with ads” is a common joke online about lousy advice you get to save money. Obviously (I hope it’s obvious) getting Hulu with ads is not going to allow you to finance a house or pay rent. You might be able to buy something one of those ads is advertising, though.

They never mention the CEO. I think there’s a CEO who takes the standard raise and makes as much as his employees. That one guy, right? All of his employees are happy and don’t quit. I’ll look it up later. Everyone’s switching to his method, right? Right?

I’ve started at a couple of places when my boss is on vacation. It’s always awkward. At one of my jobs I arrived ten minutes early to find nobody there. An hour later and there was still nobody there. Everyone had the morning off. I spent most of the first day in the break room. It was actually a great job. The main people were insane, but the job itself was great. I designed ads and pretended to know what I was doing.

I can’t emphasize enough how dull these videos are.

Readers agreed with Cottonwood, but I do not. This takes me back to Philosophy 101 and Plato’s “The Republic”, where I learned that the Ideal State cannot exist. In order for the Ideal State to exist the Philosopher must rule, but the Philosopher does not want to rule. I think I got a C in Philosophy, so don’t ask me more about this “Ideal State” stuff, but I’m pretty sure that Tabby is the Philosopher. Track down a university professor for further details.

That’s my deep, societal insight.

I’m diving right into the archive today. In a lot of my older comics, people are wearing masks. At first masks were weird. Then they became normal, Then we thought, “Boy, we’re going to look back on these times and marvel at how crazy they were!”

Nope. That was just a crazy prelude.

I liked the bakery setting because I got to draw different cakes. There’s always a huge, elaborate cake that you feel guilty about eating. Somebody created a little work of art. Now you have to cut it up and put it in your stomach. I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve had a piece of an gorgeous looking cake it doesn’t taste as good as the smaller, more simple ones. There’s probably a life lesson in there.

This was me. You’d be tucked into bed and ready to clear the muck from your brain, when suddenly you’d remember something stupid that you forgot. This is the price you pay for clearing the muck from your brain.

This is my coffee cup character back when he would talk. I’m never thinking of an exciting night out when I get off of work, I’m thinking of whatever I’m reading, watching, and drinking. Their voices need to be heard. Right now I have too many books waiting for me. It’s getting to be quite a crowd. If I don’t start getting through them there will be an angry mob waiting for me at home.

This occurred to me while I was at the dentist. I would write “while I was at the dentist getting my teeth worked on”, but I hate it when people write that. What do they think we’ll ask if they don’t add that last bit on there? “Dentist? You were at the dentist? Why on earth for?” Well, the dentist is contributing to the local food drive, which I’m collecting for and….NO! I’m getting my teeth worked on, obviously!

I’ve never used laughing gas. I’m too afraid I’d either turn into the Joker or fall victim to one of his mad schemes. I didn’t watch all of those Batman cartoons and not learn anything. Anyway, this may be a desperate attempt at developing a happy customer base, but we’ll never know until we try it.

Ah, early Tabby. I loved writing her with Penny as a fellow cashier. I dropped Tabby going to veterinary school in favor of her helping at an animal shelter. The thought of her working on a biological sample peaked with this comic.

This is a very real problem now. It was bad when I made this comic, now reality is more cartoonish than the cartoon.

This is still a personal favorite. I love making fun of an employee discount, which is usually only substantial if you spend thousands of dollars. You don’t have thousands of dollars because you work there, so it’s not really a discount worth using.

This one may seem a bit grim, but I believe it’s a verbatim exchange between me and a boss. “Ok, you take care of that” is a common directive. That means their brain has stopped thinking about it and your brain has sole possession.

Penny has gone into management. I eventually got out, she stayed in for the good of the comic. Wasn’t that very sacrificial of her?

I love the dog Claremont’s comforting stance, there. I’ve made about a million comics with Claremont, which is only a slight exaggeration, and only a handful of them have become popular enough to stay alive on the internet. He’s very fun to draw, but maybe a bit too innocent for an online life. I should’ve created him in the 1950s when I wasn’t alive.

Penny is now an Assistant Manager, which means she can no longer leave when she’s scheduled to leave. This is the sacrifice you make for a title and three bucks more an hour.

Maybe this is funny only to me and maybe this comic belongs in the time I made it, but I don’t think so. Many places have a revolving door that revolves so fast you’ll get dizzy. During the pandemic, that door was a blur.

On the sharpest side of that sword I’m not getting into arguments with distant relatives and former coworkers, so that’s a plus. You always make “friends” with people you used to hang out with, right? Then you discover why your association was never that deep. Maybe you become friends with some of their friends, those people you’ve never met in real life, and you find yourself in an argument about how their wife works for Anthem and by god (this happened, by the way) if you vote for the guy you like it will ruin the health care industry and she’s going to be out of a job!

So I’m not reading the collected woes and complaints of the entire human race in a handy-dandy scrolling fashion. I can just read the news, sigh heavily, and eventually vote. I’ve learned to stick to the things I actually have the energy to do.

Unfortunately there’s another side to that sword. It isn’t as sharp and doesn’t cut me. It’s the happy side. I was able to befriend artists and writers on social media that I would otherwise never be able to meet. I miss that. I even met a guy named Andrew Beals that I’m not related to except that our ancestors may have known each other a few hundred years ago in England. That was nice. It’s too bad it all got drowned out by the angry people, customers if you will, of the various platforms.

At one point, I don’t remember when, I did “meet’ Lauren, who goes by @bioniclauren on Instagram. She has a beautiful style and has done a lot of black and white line work that fascinates me. I used to always try to make very stark black and white line work, but she makes it look so easy. Some of her work reminded me of Felix Vallotton, which is a timely reference considering that he only died last year. No, wait. He died a hundred years before last year. Either way, he’s worth looking up.

This week I received a great honor because Lauren decided to make Shrinky Dinks this summer. Remember Shrinky Dinks? No? Well, they were a weird art toy that existed before the internet. Before the internet, people had to resort to shrinking plastic in the oven while loudly complaining about health insurance. They could only upset their immediate neighbors this way and it was that state of existence that made many talented people work night and day to create a system where we could be upset in front of hundreds, even thousands, of people at once while drinking a Coke, eating Cheetos, and needing comprehensive health coverage more than ever.

And everyone forgot about Shrinky Dinks. Except people like Lauren.

And then she asked for my permission to make a Shrinky Dink of Tabby. My god, this is what the internet was invented for. “Yes!” I screamed. “A thousand times yes!”

I give you the TabNam keychain. This is what I live for, folks. Forget the state of world affairs for one moment and marvel at the affection and talent it takes for one artist to give the time and energy to create an homage to another. Is it up there with Renoir painting Monet as he was painting? Yes. Yes it is. To me, anyway.

I drew this man and it occurred to me that he could be Tabby’s grandfather. Up close, the little waves in his hare are quite Tabbylike. I kept his identity a secret until the fourth panel which worked out very nicely.

Penny is back from vacation and doesn’t have enough staff, which inspired the title of this post. Some places run on what is an unintended, but permanent, state of low staff. I remember when I worked for a very large library system one of the workers said, “I don’t ever want to hear the words ‘skeleton crew’ again. I’ve heard it enough here to last me the rest of my life.”

This was inspired by someone who recounted the history of the land our building sat upon. It went from a field, to some sort of weird factory, to an abandoned building, back to a field, to a bunch of uninteresting smaller buildings. The tale wasn’t really worth the story time atmosphere he created. I tossed Tabby’s grandpa some more interesting details.

This was furthering the tale of Penny getting help for the store and I thought it would be cute to give the customer a bucket of popcorn as well. This caused a GoComics reader who goes by the name Huckleberry Hiroshima to loudly announce he had enough of this strip. He said Tabby having popcorn was one thing, but a customer having it as well was too much. He was sick of them constantly complaining about their jobs. I would’ve been shocked at this announcement if Huckleberry hadn’t made the same proclamation in various forms at least seven times before, going back to 2018 or so, long before the strip was about retail. I gave him the “I’m Never Shopping Here Again” award for return business.

I let April Bloom call someone a “lima bean” again. As far as I know, this isn’t a real insult. It should be.

Vickie’s happy pills are not a comment on any specific medication. I just know that results vary. Anxiety meds that don’t really affect me have put other people in La La Land. That’s what this is really based on. I don’t take any medication these days and that’s my own personal La La Land.

Be careful with your medicine, folks. People have asked, so let me emphasize that, no, I don’t know what Vickie’s on. Ask your doctor.

All of this was just to write the line that Rusty was off to meet his maker, meaning his mother. I like that line. Some comics are made for dumb reasons.

File this under “comics I like that many people did not”. A number of people were on the side of the customer. I’m not promoting mindless chit chat. I just think that saying nothing to someone greeting you instead of simply saying “hello” is a bit weird and passive/aggressive.

My four day weekend happens to coincide with this nation’s 250th anniversary and a horrible heatwave that is gripping large chunks of the planet. That means I really can’t go outside. I have skin that doesn't tan so much as catch on fire. Once I heal from the burns I go back to being Casper the friendly ghost. I’ve learned to accept that. When I dash outside I’ll just carry a fire extinguisher.

But at least I have air conditioning. If this heat wave has done anything it’s educated many of us about millions of people who have to roast indoors. That’s horrifying. I spent the first nine years of my life without air conditioning and I also spent summers helping my grandfather harvest cantaloupe and watermelons in scorching Mississippi heat. I would say that I don’t know how I did it, but enough time has passed that I think it’s safe to reveal my secret.

I had superpowers back then. Yes, I was Child Man. I had the brain of an adult with the super regenerative powers of a child. I hauled watermelons out of ant infested soil until I was soaked with sweat because I knew, at the end of the day, my reward was enough money to buy comics. Then, by the ol’ swimming hole I would read those comics instead of swimming, which is when I stopped being Child Man and became Odd Ball: The Weird Kid. Because any kid who would rather read than go swimming was obviously weird.

Those are my happy memories of heat without air conditioning.

Since this post is a quckie, I’m going to literally click and point at a comic in my archive, then discuss it sight unseen. What could go wrong?

Ok, I cheated. I just made this comic yesterday. This is obviously about me. There’s Penny accidentally waking up early. This makes me think of Mary Higgins Clark. I haven’t read Mary Higgins Clark books but I have read a lot of Harlan Coben. Harlan has spoken about the hard work success requires and there’s no better example than Mary. Apparently she was widowed at a young age and wanted to be an author. She had five kids to raise as a single parent. In order to be an author she simply got up three hours before her kids got up, worked on her book, then got ready herself and went to work. She did that for years before she made her first sale and it’s people like her that make the rest of us look like lazy dung beetles. It should be noted that she did this long before the invention of the snooze button.

Dang it, I cheated again. I just made this one tonight. Is it any good? Who knows, I have no feedback. Going through the chain of command is never as exhausting as quickly going through the chain of command for the second time, but it happens way too often.

My best friend Jim Randall (please search him on Google so he becomes known) pointed out that Mr. Thompson is either a Time Lord or the C3PO of my comics. He pops up from my earliest scribblings (when I was ten years old) to know, regardless of the setting or characters.

The truth is that I was born into this world with the real life Mr. Thompson and he left this plane of existence right before I decided to start drawing comics. The first rule of creating comics is not “write what you know”. Rather, it’s “bring back the dead”. You are the creator of your own little universe, you might as well have your cat back.

Ok, this really is a random click, because it’s Christmastime and Penny has her little suit on. This is when Penny first became an Assistant Manager. My clever observation at that time was that anyone who became an Assistant Manager was suddenly wearing a suit jacket. They had the same clothes otherwise. I imagined a store called Suddenly Manager that was just filled with suit jackets. That way, you could buy something in a hurry that said you were a cut above everyone else.

Ooh, early Pandemic Tabby. She would show claws and nap like a cat then. I think we should be prepared for honest answers when we ask people how they are. We’re putting the question out there. If they have a bad hip we should be willing to hear about it. If anything, we’ll know why they’re a bit crabby.

This is June 2023 and we’re doing inventory. I remember doing inventory then. I had inherited a store that was missing about 20,000 items. I wish that was an exaggeration. I think I was given a pardon on that because previous managers at that store were no longer with the company and it was their fault, probably because they didn’t know how to count.

This is September of 2024 and Penny is enjoying a life with shorts that I cannot enjoy. This is the upside to having your own little universe. You can make characters that do not catch on fire when exposed to the sun.

This is sometime in 2020. Hey, I like this one. I’ve never had the opportunity to throw myself at the mercy of the court, but I think I would. Courtrooms are pretty intimidating. I think they’re designed that way on purpose. If they wanted everyone to relax while in court they would design them to look like an arcade.

August of 2025. Berle is in purgatory and Ian is leading Penny and Tabby to Berle through some sort of portal in the dark caves beneath their store. You know, a typical slice of retail life.

This is late 2022. Vickie is in the hospital because April Bloom was making out with Winter Sun. Such a happy time. She’s now as skinny as a rail thanks to modern, unaffordable medicine.

I hope this wasn’t too quick for you. It wasn’t too quick for me. I’m getting back to my “vacation” with the full expectation of something way better than a prolonged bathroom break.

The first Stephen Beals that pops up for me is myself, as expected. It is, after all, my computer. My computer knows who plugs it in, and if it wants to stay plugged in it better make sure I’m at the top of the list. If I google “hardware stores in my area” the first result should be Stephen Beals.

Ok, we went from disturbing, to sad, to weird, then back to disturbing, but that’s google for you.

No, the real reason I Googled myself is because for the last, oh, fifteen years or so whenever anyone googled my name they would say, “Hey, look! You’re a plastic surgeon in Arizona!” That’s right, another Stephen Beals, Stephen P. Beals to be exact, became a doctor. Just like my father wanted. Damn him. So my goal was to beat him in the search results and be the first Stephen Beals. Just like my mother wanted.

And what kind of doctor is this Stephen P. Beals, anyway? Ha, he’s a plastic surgeon! Making everyone look pretty, is he? Smoothing out wrinkles and making people look younger. Big deal! Reconstruction surgery after an accident and injury, is he? Big…well, that actually is a pretty big deal. Thank you, Mr. S.P. Beals. Can I call you S.P.? It has a better ring to it.

Let us not concern ourselves with who is googling who and which person is first in the search results, the important thing to know is that we love and respect ourselves for who we are and that I am finally, after all of these years, number one. Also, googling yourself is both disturbing and sad whether it’s the 1990s before we had one heck of a search engine monopoly or today when Stephen Beals, cartoonist, is definitely the first result in a Stephen Beals search over Stephen P. Beals, the plastic surgeon. Keep that knowledge close to your heart.

I should’ve gone to medical school.

Penny’s vacation went extra long this year and left poor Tabby all alone to get into a sort of Abbott and Costello routine.

Berle is right, of course. There’s always some tightwad where you work, it may not even be the actual boss, who makes sure every procedure is followed correctly. That person can make down time nonexistent and the day more tense than it needs to be.

When that person goes on vacation, you’re on vacation whether you’re still at work or not.

Normally, I wouldn’t include this strip in a roundup because I thought it was sort of lame and didn’t work. I just wanted to point out that if you spend way too much time drawing a merry-go-round and a shopping cart Ferris wheel, you may not be spending enough time on the joke. It’s the writing, stupid.

Penny being locked in a theme park was foreshadowed in a backwards way, if that’s possible. Last year I had her reminiscing about her bad vacations and one of them was about being locked in a theme park. I hadn’t made such a strip, so I did it this year.

This strip was done with directors David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams in mind. They are most famous for the movie Airplaine! and the Naked Gun series. They excelled at having foreground characters unaware of extreme things going on with characters in the background.

Penny and Harvey finally got a break and are getting an honest-to-god real vacation. Too real, it winds up. I don’t know what’s going on with these troubled cruises and I don’t intend to find out, not because I’m some sort of cruise snob but because I can’t afford it. I will, of course, accept free cruise tickets if some cruise bigwig takes pity on me and wants to toss a couple my way. Just be aware that I start throwing up the second I even look at a ship.

I love Penny’s segue into mentioning her place of employment, but I mostly want to point out that this is the first time we’ve seen an empty popcorn bucket near Tabby.

This is an important comic to me. My best friend’s father actually did this to a pair of pants. A teacher at school demanded he wear a belt because his pants had loops. His solution to this demand is everything you need to know about him. He was a great guy who had a great family and started great business that is still in operation today. That teacher had nothing to do with his success.

I thought this little tale was like something out of a Mark Twain book, so I gave it to Berle. Berle is the only character I have who could possible work in a Mark Twain novel.

I’m Rusty, here. If anyone messed with my work while I was away, I would never go away. My comics are my porkchops.

The cast of this comic can be broken down into little friendship groups. Tabby is Penny’s friend. She’s the only one who actually worked with Penny before she became a manager. Since she’s never wanted to be a manager, Tabby has zero jealousy for Penny.

Most of the characters have little backstories in my head. I should probably explore those some day.

Unlike Rusty, Penny did go on vacation and her boss messed with her work, her work being the schedule. Having a boss unintentionally mess up the schedule seems to be a common theme no matter where I work.

Don’t answer that. It’s just a greeting. Common verbal variations of “hello” really don’t work when you write them down, do they? If you’re obviously overcome with grief, fighting for your life, or carrying a loved one to safety as fire licks at your heels it’s safe to say that I won’t use any of those greetings when I see you. I do hope you’re ok, though. If you’re reading this, perhaps “ok” can be assumed.

What have I been doing? Going down memory lane, at least the physical one that is paved with comics. Mentally, going down memory lane can be tricky because I’ve said and done some eye-watering, headache-inducing things that are caked in embarrassment. I hate forgetting the details of events, but sometimes it’s good to forget the details. That’s where friends and family come in. They come at you with forgotten details and their battle cry is “Never forget!”

You might not remember every stupid thing you’ve done, but your best friend will. I don’t need a memory. I have a Jim. Jim has been my greatest friend since the beginning of recorded time. He can tell you many, if not all, of the stupid things I have done in my life. He also, bless him, held onto numerous copies of comics that I made and subsequently lost. I am preparing to scan those copies so that the nation, maybe even the world, can say, “Wow, he really wasn’t that good back then.”

So my memory lane is kind of a physical place. I look back at old comics and see all of those little details that I’ve forgotten. This week I’m sharing a batch of forgotten memories that cast me in a non-stupid light. It wasn’t easy.

This is a very early strip about retail. It’s so early that I forgot to draw Penny’s glasses. She didn’t always have glasses. She started wearing them more and more as I started wearing them more and more. Funny how that works.

Harvey used to be the star of the comic. I don’t know if he was supposed to be me, but he sure said a lot of the things I said. After reading this again, I remember saying this. I always eat healthily and get good sleep when I’m sick, so I know I can do it. Too late.

I remember loving this comic. Two little, singing tea cups. That’s extremely cute and I stand by that opinion. Today I draw the always-silent coffee cup Charlie. Back then it was a fully animated cup.

Pandemic Penny. This was based on me slipping into my work voice and being called on it. Anybody who regularly deals with the public can accidentally do this with their family, frequently when explaining things or issuing orders. It’s a horrible side effect from dealing with the public.

This would possibly be interesting to other cartoonists, but I still like it. I remember drawing this when I was supposed to be designing a newspaper ad, hence the reason it’s more of an elaborate doodle. I think I used a Sharpie on copy paper, which is more Presidential equipment these days, but back then it was not anything one would seriously use to make a comic.

I used to break away from my characters to do a joke using other life forms. I really liked this worm and I remember this strip being pretty popular. I’m not sure how a worm would sit at a breakfast table, but he’s really trying in that first panel. He’s obviously despondent that he can’t pick up his coffee.

This was popular and about as controversial as I ever got. The problem with having a popular comic on the internet are the thieves that do whatever they want with it. Someone stripped out my dialog and replaced it with their own, which was even more wordy and preachy. They also cropped out my signature, of course. Thieves do that with every cartoonist they “share”. Share the whole thing or don’t share at all, I always say. The altered version was also popular, which was frustrating. At least it wasn’t an essay attributed to me. That’s the reverse. If you ever see some essay attributed to a celebrity, Morgan Freeman is a popular choice, never believe it.

This comic was made because someone asked me if I believed in god and I asked “Which one”. That immediately shocked and upset them, the thought of a multiple choice answer being the upsetting part. If they’re asking the question, they usually have a particular god in mind.

I also used to break away from my characters and draw talking flowers. I think flowers could have interesting conversations.

Amazingly, this comic hasn’t aged at all. I could easily see Berle running for office. Maybe he has.

Pandemic Tabby. She used to be more outwardly goofy. This was based on me finding a puppet in the children’s room at the library and using it to answer a patron’s question. My coworkers were used to me by then, so it was just a normal workday.

Vacations can also be tricky. Ever try to organize a vacation with more than two adults? Serious negotiations have to take place. Whoever isn’t having fun is the lousy negotiator. Either way, fun is going to involve money. That’s right, our level of fun depends on how much money we have.

If you tell me that a vacation doesn’t have have to involve money it’s because you’ve learned to love the great outdoors and sneak past an entrance gate. What you mean to say is that a vacation doesn’t have to involve much money. But this, too is a lie. Contributing gas money to the carpool for a trip to the beach and eating a prepared picnic before shivering until dawn in a pitched tent is only a vacation until you reach the age of reason. That’s when you say “I’m outta here!” and drive to a hotel. So I’ve heard.

Fun is horribly expensive. That’s the crappy part. Want to travel to a far away city? Ha! It costs too much money. Want to go to the Grand Canyon? Money! Want to tie a giant rubber band around your ankles and dive off of something high up in the air, like a balloon? Money! Want to go to Disney World? You need the kind of wealth only the lottery can provide. No, you’ll be paying off your rubber band vacation until Christmas, assuming you survive, and envying all of those college aged kids who were able to cheaply backpack to Siberia.

This is why my only option is to stay home. It’s fun not to spend money. I don’t have any, but it’s still fun not to spend it. And relaxing.

One reader said that this strip made Tabby the type of person he wouldn’t like to be around. I think she would agree with him because she doesn’t want to be around him either.

Tabby is just being selective about who she shares her time with. The idea of meeting anybody and everybody is exhausting and annoying to her. She’s such a cat.

When I was in the fourth grade I mentioned that I had a headache to one of my teachers. To my great surprise, I was sent to the nurse’s office. Then I was sent to the principal’s office where I annoyed the two secretaries so much that the principal burst out of his office and told me that he didn’t care how badly my head was hurting. If I didn’t stop talking he would take me into his office and do something you can no longer do to students without getting the court system involved. I believe the word “paddle” and “ass” were also mentioned.

Yes, I was the last generation to go through that.

Anyway, my mother was phoned and my older sister drove to the school and got me back home, where I did whatever I usually did, only much earlier in the day. People in my family got headaches. The idea of a headache being a legitimate excuse to leave school never occurred to me. They weren’t migraines, but they could get pretty bad. Now, of course, we live in an age with wonderful headache medicine that performs miracles. When I have a headache today I can, thanks to modern science, just continue doing what I normally do. That miraculous headache medicine costs about four hundred bucks.

This was out of character for April Bloom, but I made her the Assistant Manager and it’s the Assistant Manager’s duty to allow everything to pile up on the Manager’s desk. Doing anything less would be shirking her duty.

Nobody wants you to go on a vacation until it’s immediately imperative that you go on a vacation for your mental health. It’s more of a convalescence than a vacation at that point.

The idea of a retail theme park was too much fun for me to ignore. Really, the park needs a large graphic novel to explore just how stupid it can be. I’ve been to far too many theme parks. It’s a big reason that money I had in the past is no longer with me in the present.

Many people have “out of office” messages on their email, interoffice messaging systems (like Teams), and voicemail. They have an elaborate explanation stating that while they are away they will have limited or no contact with any of their messaging systems. Some day I hope to be a part of a society where we don’t have to state that. If someone is on vacation please don’t bug them and leave it at that.

I spent quite a long time drawing everyone in the strip for that last panel. Then someone commented, “Where’s Rusty?” Arrrrghhhhh!

Here’s Rusty. Sometimes these strips just write themselves.

Obviously, we’d need a lot of shopping carts in these ride designs. It would get a little old after awhile, so other retail items would have to be used for seating. Maybe we would need a graphic novel trilogy.

I think Charlie takes a nice picture. Penny needs a trip around the world so Charlie can be posed with a variety of landmarks.

Thank you for joining me and excuse me while I take a mini-vacation. Some may call it simply going to sleep, but overworked people know a real vacation when they see it.

So now I have Mad Men back on DVD and can get rid of whatever streaming service I’m paying for, I don’t know which one. I’ll have to Google it. Sometimes we have to reverse progress because we accidentally drove past it.

I’ve also been watching the TV show Newhart for the first time. This is how I fill my head with comedy material so that I can remain sharp and witty as I attempt to entertain you, not that I should be spilling trade secrets. Bob Newhart was a sublime genius that was so subtle that you might forget about him completely as you try to recall the great comedians. Then you’ll slap yourself too hard when you realize that you forgot about him. Imagine that. Nobody gets angry when they forget about me. I doubt that they realize they forgot.

We’re paying to stream stuff that is for sale at very cheap prices because nobody is buying DVDs anymore. What are we paying streaming services for, anyway? Ah yes, for all of the new and good stuff that we can’t get anywhere else. I’m not sure what the good and new stuff is, exactly, but right now I’m saving a lot of money by catching up on the old stuff. By the time I get caught up and am ready to watch the good stuff going on now, it’ll be old. And cheap.

I didn’t even mention music. Have you heard of that guy Sinatra? You can get his albums for a dime if you know where to look.

That’s as far as my financial savings acumen reaches. I may have saved a hundred bucks. For practical tips on how to earn and save any real money, please consult practically anyone else.

Speaking of old, I’ve chosen a bunch of old comics to discuss today. Some of them didn’t get much love when they first appeared, but I liked them. Isn’t that what we’re always told when we’re growing up?

“It doesn’t matter what other people think, it only matters what you think. Now, what do you think?”

I think if you’re trying to sell something, it matters what other people think. It also matters if you want them to actually read your work. I also think you might think what I think and like these comics. I think.

This was back when I actually had Tabby using exclamation point. Today, you’ll never find one in her dialog. Well, never say never, but it’s unlikely. It’s also dedicated to all of the customers who deserved a photo album capturing their various declarations of secession. I’ve known quite a number of those people.

The boss also doesn’t get an exclamation point. He used his last one in the 80s. This was the first time Tabby was approached about becoming a manager and is also the first time that she was way smarter than I ever was.

Penny’s first management position mirrored my own. No, I didn’t work at a gas station, but it was a very small place inside of a much bigger box store. I really like Justin’s description of the previous manager suddenly leaving to pursue other interests. Most likely, the previous manager’s sudden departure was due to a sudden interest in not working there any more. I’ve had that same sudden interest. This comic also introduces Bobby. I have a cousin named Bobby and my creative ability to come up with believable names usually involves thinking about family reunions. Uncle Toxie and Aunt Rudell are excluded. Nobody would believe those names.

I decided Bobby would be into video games. My involvement with video games usually consists of me trying one for ten minutes, realizing that I could be reading a book, and then not playing it. My ability to buy video game systems that I don’t play is somewhat legendary. They look great, seem exciting, and are exactly the type of thing you would imagine that I fill whatever spare hours I have playing, but my interest wanes faster than my desire to eat lobster. No one is more shocked than I.

I had to Google Bobby’s dialog because I couldn’t even remember anything about video games.

Back when I had a dog, I often said that I would quit my job to be a stay at home dog owner. My dog was unnecessarily bored while I was away.

Ten million dollars really ages this strip. Today, Tabby would ask for twenty million.

Ok, so Berle got settlement money from the company for reasons that I still can’t remember and we later learned that he spent it on a jetpack. We learned even later that he finally saved up money to get fuel for it. Then he crashed.

I liked this one because there are a million scenarios that come up in the course of your daily life at a store that are never in the manual. The place I worked at was big on manuals. They had a million of them and they were always being updated. We had to print them off and have them bound and ready for employees to read when they wanted to, which was never. It was the most pristine and contemporary collection of unread manuals you would ever see.

I also like Tabby holding the first aid kit. There were never any good drugs in that kit. It was all about gauze.

I admit, this one was just for me. When I’m checking out and the machine orders me to “place item in bag”, I always imagine a follow up command to put my hands in the air. Those self check out machines can sound too authoritative.

This is one of the older strips where I have Berle and Penny acting like the brother and sister that they are. Unless I do this regularly, people are shocked that they are brother and sister. I haven’t been doing this regularly. Sorry for the shock.

It’s also before Vickie got whatever modern weight loss drugs are sweeping the nation. My original intention was for her to gain the weight back, but I decided to keep it off as a symbol of hope. Hope that I can some day fit into the old pants that are hanging in my closet.

This is a favorite old one because I have seen countless customers lose their cool, to put it politely, over something that was their fault. Almost none of those people apologize. The one or two who actually do should be rewarded with flowers and balloons.

But for the rest of us it’s Happy New Year then, BAM, welcome to summer and bugs (depending on your geographical location). Bugs tell us when it’s summer, not the calendar. If you have a problem with gnats in March, that may be climate change, but it’s also summer whether you like it or not. Bugs, and this is always reassuring, have a much shorter lifespan than us. Maybe time passes slowly for them, there’s no way of knowing, but they don’t even care that it’s summer. All they know is that they better reproduce before they’re dead. Sure, it sounds a lot like the lives of many people we know, but trust me when I say that they’re not exactly the same. You might think that their brief existence would cause me to have a great deal of sympathy for bugs, and I do to an extent, but they have been know to provoke me into levels of violence that I do not engage in with other life forms. Please, buggy creatures, just stay off of me so we can all go about our lives, as brief or as lengthy as they may seem.

I like summer, I like longer days, and I don’t like bugs. I will celebrate two out of three. I better enjoy each and every day because there’s only one thing worse than summer bugs and that’s Christmas holiday shopping. Perhaps I should buy a puppy.

I came up with this idea about five years ago and revisited it because I thought I could make it better. Did I succeed? That’s the task for future scholars. For now, I can say that the tombstone that was originally in the fourth panel has been replaced by a small child, and that’s more visually appealing. Am I saying that the aged man was reincarnated in the fourth panel or that the child is a symbol of renewal and hope? Again, I will leave that to future scholars, who will most likely not give this comic a second glance as they try to explain our world leaders instead. Hint to future scholars: Focus on the comic. There’s a chance you can actually explain it, whereas it’s impossible with the leaders.

This is based on my phone’s inability to recognize my face at the end of a long day. I know I look bad, but phones just had to come up with facial recognition to press the fact harder.

I’ve said it before, but Tabby’s ability to suppress her emotions is what makes her good with customers. If keeping a neutral expression during a conflict were some sort of competition, it would be won by somebody in customer service.

I hate to say this, I really do, but Walmart has the best self checkout machines. There are other stores that like to frequently interrupt the process with redundant and inane chatter, but none of them come as close to the ones you’ll find in Kroger grocery stores. Those literally talk to you throughout each and every item that you’re scanning, and then continue to talk to you as you’re bagging. If you fiddle with the bag, or try to double bag an item, it stops everything to make sure you’re not up to something. Kroger owns Ralph’s on the West coast. I think a road trip is in order to see if they are just as annoying there.

I liked this one because it was me at so many jobs. I would hover over the clock out button, appreciating that I was earning time and a half with every second of hesitation. This caused some pretty negative feedback from some readers who said this was impossible and would never happen. It was not only possible, it happened. At several companies.

I will never stop being surprised at what dumb, little things cause people to yell out the ol’ “That would never happen!”

Customer service desks are all about big display screens now. I was at one that had three. There’s something about a nice, big TV screen that forces customers to stare at it as they wait in line. They should really be playing old cartoons. It would lighten the mood. How mad can you get about a transaction with a Goofy cartoon in action above your head?

Commenters informed me that Japan is much more affordable than Paris. Well, it’s obvious that I’m Penny in this scenario, isn’t it?

This was in my notebook for ages. It’s based on a guy at the self checkout station that liked to go on about the old days as he was supposedly helping you. I enjoyed this one. I’m not sure about anyone else, but when you’re making these things you have to please yourself first.

This was also in my notebook. “Tabby: Resting Cute Face”. After months of it sitting in my notebook, I had to try and figure out what sort of comic I was planning on building around such an observation, but the immediate realization was that all I had was her resting cute face. Todd was brought in for his own resting face problem.

Finally, this was based on me as a customer. A guy at a store’s self checkout helped me without ever looking up from his phone. I was too amazed to say much more than “Wow.” I don’t think he was listening to me.

However (and that’s the dreaded however followed by a comma), I am now described as having “hundreds” of paid subscribers and I cannot find evidence of this. I think I poked my head over one hundred and then went back down. Either way, a hundred and one is not hundreds. Having worked in the advertising world I certainly understand the hyperbole, but it concerns me. I do a lot of schtick about being a poor cartoonist and it might be giving a false impression

Shouldn't a best seller be able to, I don’t know, afford a car payment? Take a vacation? Buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks without feeling like he’s throwing money out the window? Ok, skip that last one. I don’t care how much money I have, I’ll never be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks without feeling like I’m throwing money out the window. It’s a cup of coffee for god’s sake, not a can of Folgers.

So I was feeling weird being called a bestseller, but I remember Dave Barry joking about how little you have to sell to be a New York Times Bestseller. A quick search tells me it’s between 5,000 and 10,000 copies of a book in a single week. Wow. I forgot that nobody reads. If only 5,000 people went to a movie during a one week period nobody would consider it a hit. They wouldn’t even consider it a documentary about a sitting First Lady. That’s pretty bad. Thanks, Dave. I feel both better and worse.

Maybe I just need to learn how to handle success. Say “thank you” and shut up, you idiot! Ok, here we go: Thank you.

Well, I was able to do half of that. I got the thank you part down. No problem. I’ve never been able to shut up. I’ll work on it.

I’m practicing shutting up right now. Nothing to say. Silence.

Pure silence.

So boring.

Maybe I’ll put on The Cars.

This was said in real life and it went into my notes, where it sat far too long. Eventually, I put it into the comic and wished I’d done it sooner because it resonated with people.

Any time I’m asked if I enjoy working some place by an applicant I feel like I’m a hostage giving very measured answers. I don’t know why. It’s just a quirk of mine. I’ve learned to lean into it and stiffen up, looking left to right as I answer, as if I’m being watched and afraid of saying too much. Fortunately, applicants recognize my ruse and it’s just a bit of humor before an interview. I hope.

This would’ve been a bland one for me if I didn’t like that line about rattlesnakes so much. A line like that is usually believable when it’s said with a Southern accent.

The CEO is making far too much money to be caught dead in the place he’s in charge of unless he’s making a promotional video. Yes, I know, the profit margins on the grocery side are very low. People keep telling me that. Have you seen the CEO’s house? That’s a nice profit.

The top salesman at a company I did the advertising for would always ask me if I had any exciting weekend plans. I think that was his opening conversational line for every occasion, including funerals. I would have to inform him, repeatedly, that I’ve never planned a weekend in my life.

We went five strips without Tabby, so here she is. The setting that is out of touch with the masses is no longer a yacht. It is now a ballroom.

There’s something uplifting about seeing someone tell another that they are very uplifting and I attempted to capture that effect.

Basically my schedule without the goal of getting my Masters.

Shelby’s fate was to quit and never be seen again. I stopped myself from making that happen. Maybe I should’ve let her go.

This sat in my notes for well over a year. I was thinking of my father and the Mark Twain line “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Sadly, my father did not live long enough for me to tell him that he was right about so many things, but he’s been with me every day. His molecules are just doing something else. Working that into a retail oriented comic was risky, but it was surprisingly well-received.

Take, for instance, the man who nearly lost his life by suffocation in a bizarre manure spreading accident that buried him in the freshest product. The person who was telling me about this tragedy was very annoyed at my inability to keep a straight face. There was nothing funny about clawing your way out of manure to get a fresh breath of air and then gagging when the air that you go was anything but fresh. Nothing funny at all. Terrible accidents are not funny, even with poop.

That’s an extreme example, of course, but I think people find what they’re looking for. One person can be disgusted by a landfill while another is admiring the flowers that have managed to grow there. It’s all perspective.

Sometimes I can’t help but laugh, especially as one horrible thing after another is happening, as if it was carefully choreographed and rehearsed for weeks.

Say that I find out something needs to be done in the next twenty minutes, like deposit physical money into the bank that takes eighteen minutes to drive to before it closes, and everything goes wrong while trying to accomplish that task. I can’t find my left shoe, or my housekey, hit every red light, forget my phone, almost run out of gas along the way, get a stomach cramp while running into the building that perfectly mimics a fatal medicals situation, and realize that I had several more hours than I thought because there is an ATM that doesn’t end the business day until eight o’clock.

I have to laugh at that. How stupid. Panic makes us stupid. It’s very funny.

But not everyone sees it that way. Let’s say that your significant other is with you during this grand bank run. He or she may have the opposite reaction at the end of it and feel like laughter is the last thing that should be coming out of your mouth. So you might try not to laugh. Don’t do that. It becomes much more funny. Trying not to laugh is the equivalent of using nitrous oxide in a racing car.

But it’s so much fun. I’ve come to the conclusion, through a lifetime of exhausted indifference towards those who are annoyed by laughter, that it’s ok to laugh when you want. It’s cleansing, it’s healthy, and you’ll most likely outlive the people who want to designate a time and a place for laughter. Just try to keep a straight face through their funeral.

I’ve collected a random batch of comics for this week. Randomly picking out comics from my archives, I’ve discovered, is not the same thing as shuffling a deck of cards. My brain is involved in the randomness and it’s messing things up. So I may be gravitating, allegedly at random, towards the ones that I like more than others.

This is a very old one that was made as the strip was transitioning from its former setting, which was basically nothing, to that of a big box store. I have to say that I’m pretty good at retracing my steps and finding something that was placed in a particular bag in a weird location. I have to be careful when retracing my steps, though, or I’ll fall into a well of regretful missteps.

People love to point out that this is a nice thousand dollar a year raise and I like to point out that a thousand pre-tax dollars divided by fifty-two paychecks is $19.23. That might not be enough to buy something that was ten bucks a couple of years ago and now costs $21.95.

After a few grueling years of working her way up the ladder, Penny finally becomes manager of the store. Beware of employers who treat their employees like family.

This was me as a part-time employee. It was like watching a soap opera. I’d be gone a couple of days and I would have to binge the gossip to catch up.

I had to show Berle frozen in the meat locker. Somehow he survives this. Berle should be studied in the name of science.

I really like the dialog here. Sometimes I feel like a new reader when reading older strips, because I have no memory of it. The employees who have emergencies that are consistently of their own making are especially fun employees to work with. By fun, I mean horrible.

I don’t want to brag, but this comic has the Mom Seal of Approval. I remade this from a comic that made my mother really laugh many years ago.

This is me. If someone has made me dinner, I don’t care what it is. Am I eating blowfish for the first time in my life? Great. Making someone dinner is love in its purest form.

This is one from the middle of a storyline years ago and is special to me because everything in this strip is true. Ms. Tautgore is the reason I ran screaming from that job, quite literally. Screaming is the opposite of laughter, so it’s very important to laugh as soon as your are able to do so. It’s the only antidote.

I speak only of the employees who are a good kind of weird. I am a good weird. At my worst, I’m a bad weird, but I like to think I lean naturally towards good weird. That giant, unused posterboard that was shaped into a paper airplane and launched into the lobby during a presentation to investors? Yeah, that was me. The paper airplane wasn’t the weird part, I’d made them multiple times since leaving childhood, the weird part was that I didn’t know a group of investors was visiting. Apparently it was all anyone was talking about the week prior, but somehow it escaped my innocent ears. So weird.

Employees who are the bad kind of weird are the employees who always have a lot of drama attached to them. Perhaps their car was shot up by a bored group of roving gang members and they can’t come in that day (an actual excuse) or they got lost on their lunch break because they were in an argument with their boyfriend on the phone and they weren’t paying attention to where they were driving, so they should be back in an hour or so (another actual excuse). They might have some unaddressed mental health issues which makes all of the weirdness sad, but you’re not a psychiatrist and should not play one. Those employees don’t get discussed after the workday as much because all of your mental energy has been drained. You don’t want to think about them anymore. But they do get discussed after they’ve left the job for a few months. You might speak of them with the same kind of emotional expression that you attach to a life threatening illness.

I try to keep my characters a good weird. I have bad weird in there, but I try to keep it at a minimum. Last month, the good weird was the best weird. Come, join me in the Return of the Tabnam.

Have you made a hotel reservation recently? It’s all A.I. The alleged person you’re talking to will even tell you she’s a real person. I’m waiting for our elected officials to at least make it illegal for a non-human to insist that it’s human, but considering all of the things I’m waiting on elected officials to do I think I have a long wait. Anyway, I thought Tabby would be a perfect A.I. voice that wouldn’t insist that she’s real even though she is.

I knew a manager that had to participate in a recruitment video and she thought the whole think was ridiculous and absurd. She did a wonderful job pretending to think the opposite. That was part of what made her such a good manager.

After introducing Cynthia, I knew that we needed something more theatrical than Miss Snuggles. If good weird was to play a part in this, we needed better weird.

People who aren’t weird are so weird when they try to act weird.

This delighted me to no end. The Tabnam signal appearing out of nowhere made me happy. Man, I need this in real life. I’m not sure how you produce a light like that as a surprise. Clearly, it can be done. Even Spider-Man had a Spidey signal in the earlier comics. He would shock burglars with it. If that’s not proof of success, I don’t know what is.

Of course, the whole “I am vengeance. I am the night” is from the excellent Batman animated series. A tribute was necessary. So the second panel here is another variation of an animated Batman speech.

Several readers were confused about Tabnam spelling “Manbat” backwards, so I was pleased that many people understood that it’s “Bat” backwards followed by a backwards “Man”. It’s the “Tab” part of Tabnam that I was after.

Now I want to watch Batman after I get done posting this.

It’s true. You may not be up for anything very active when you start you workday, but nothing wears you out more than doing nothing. Why is that? Our brains require entertainment, that’s why. We can’t even sleep without playing a little movie in our heads.

Many people wonder what our dreams tell us about ourselves, and I’m here to answer that. Our dreams tell us that our unconscious mind is not very good at story construction or character development. If walking towards an ice cream truck, the ability to fly, and a deceased grandmother miraculously alive and folding laundry is our brain’s idea of an entertaining break from reality, then thank god for the real filmmakers. If my brain could just show me something like Succession as I sleep, I could really save a lot of TV time.

If superheroes were real, as portrayed in the comic books, everyone close to the masked hero would know who they were. I don’t care if he is wearing a Spider-Man costume, I’d know my brother’s voice anywhere. Clearly, these people would have to be paid off. The only thing that makes sense is that they have a cut of the licensing. Everyone knows that’s where the real money is.

The sidekick is often the one who is amazed by the knowledge and power of the main hero. The sidekick is also the one who is most likely to get hurt, giving the hero a motive to try even harder to save the day. Also, the sidekick is the one who gets kidnapped and held captive to lure the hero into a dangerous situation.

Berle was born to be a sidekick.

It’s hard to follow up Tabnam with anything, but I think Berle did a good job here. The honest interview is a kind of wish fulfillment, but we all know that everyone tries to pretend that the job doesn’t suck for as long as possible in real life.

Welcome to my break! Whew, last week went on forever. I’m glad to finally take some time, kick back, and write about comics. Of course, I can’t afford one of those fancy writing cruises that Amy Tan can afford. This is me in my row boat.

I gave an unfair description. Comics aren’t work for me. They’re meditation. Reading comics, like any good fiction, is joyful and calming. Making them is equally so, only with the brief hiccups of anger that you get while creating in any art form. Nobody continues their creative meditation unbroken after accidentally dropping a dipped paint brush on their carefully crafted canvas, but the anger dissipates after they start painting again.

I always tell people that the key is to have fun. You want to relax? Have fun. Relaxing is fun. How can it not be in today’s distraction-heavy existence? You want to build a fence? Have fun. You might be learning something new or making an area for your dog to run around in. That’s fun. You want to paint the Mona Lisa? Obsessively nitpick over every detail for a decade and a half, then consider it unperfected on your death bed. But have fun.

Having fun seems like such a simple mindset, but it was never there while I was in college. Sure, a lot of kids ran around naked, drunk, and screaming throughout college. I don’t know directly, but I think it’s safe to assume they had fun. I did not. College was expensive. I wasn’t a finance major, but I’m pretty certain that anything you buy in early adulthood that is potentially paid off in late middle age is expensive. That’s a lot of pressure. I thought, “By god I better make something of this experience or I’ll be reminded of this failure with every monthly bill for the rest of my years with decent knees.” Fun times, right?

No. I had to learn how to have fun after college while at work. Work taught me more than college. I’ve often thought I took the long route to work through college, but I’m glad I went. I learned about the futility of over-seriousness. And deferments. I learned so much about deferments, which was a word that was not in my vocabulary before my academic studies forced me, through strength-building exercises such as poverty, to learn it and learn it well.

Sigh. Memories. May they remain distant. Hey, is break time over? Awwwww. Thank you for joining me. We’re doing this again sometime, yes?

I tend to personify all technological devices. I did this before AI was a real threat. I know that, technically, my alarm doesn’t have a job and does not feel or care that it did not wake me up. But I could be wrong. Better make sure I’m asleep so it doesn’t feel useless.

This was based on my real life with a real worldwide corporation, so I was delighted that some commenter on Instagram wrote, “I’ve had six jobs after college and none of them have made me use up my vacation at the end of the fiscal year!” Then he went down and rephrased the same thought under other comments. “Yeah, right! I’ve never had to use up my vacation this way. And I’ve had six jobs since graduating college!” Aside from the repetition, the insinuation that I was full of yesterday’s fecal matter irritated me. Maybe it was one of my “not enough sleep” days and I was easily irritated. I thought of several clever responses along the lines of, “Good for you pal, but it ain’t so with me! And I’ve had a million jobs since graduating college!” Thankfully my inner Tabby emerged and I said nothing. Neither did he. He’s blocked and deleted.

Readers liked this one, but I don’t think anyone liked this more than me. I seldom laugh at myself, but “steep when slanted” killed me. The trick is to be so tired that my own brain seems to be going without my conscious help. I have no idea where that came from. It’s a practical warning, though.

I’ve had too many discussions about inflation. After all of the talking, I would like to tell you that I’m now an expert on the subject. Surprisingly, constant anecdotal conversations have yielded no real knowledge.

People are still commenting on this one. There are the retail workers who have very strong opinions about this joke and there are customers who are irritated that the retail workers are irritated about this joke. It really is the joke that divides the staff from the customers. Let’s try to come up with a different joke.

Being cute and young will have people questioning your authority. If you’re tall and somewhat menacing, you’ll have a leg up as a representation of leadership. You could be as dumb as a lobotomized squirrel, but as long as you’re not as cute as one you could be management material.

Some people who are angry that they can’t find something they’re standing next to are able to laugh at themselves. Some. Many others are determined to remain angry.

Many people want to be a manager for the money. It’s my contention that it’s more logical to desire the position for the parking space. The money isn’t worth it, but depending on where you work the parking space might be.

Todd and Shelby weren’t meant for each other, but they did happen to work together. Many relationships blossom and die at their place of employment.

Todd makes his bed and is surprised that he has to lie in it. Aren’t we all, Todd.

Let’s see, Friday eventually ended and I did that thing. Then I finally slept longer than usual, maybe even the amount doctors recommend, and woke up to do that thing I couldn’t do earlier because I didn’t have any time. Oh, and then I did that other thing that needed done. I put off that one thing because, let’s face it, it’s the weekend and it can’t all be about getting things done. But then I had to do that other stupid thing that took way too much time. Saturday must’ve become Sunday and sleep was involved, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I think I had fun. I know I don’t feel rested.

But we’re off to start a new week. How joyous. It’s a time of new beginnings with old responsibilities. What am I supposed to be doing? Ah yes, that one thing. It would be nice to put off things so I could just relax at home and enjoy my things, but doing things allows me to enjoy my other things and where would I be without those things? Thingless, that’s we’re I’d be. A frightening thought.

I thought I’d select strips with the theme of moody people for today’s post and I stupidly thought it would take some time to carefully select such strips out of the archive. It winds up that most of my strips revolve around moody people. I didn’t even make it out of the year 2022 with my selections.

“I’m tired of showing people how to operate their $1,000 phones!” That was said by Jerry in 2022. Jerry, sadly, is no longer with us, but the $1,000 phones are. Some of those phones have grown up to be even more expensive. Wherever you are, Jerry, I hope it’s analog afterlife.

During my thing-filled weekend I went to the art museum. I have to go there frequently because it’s where my friends hang out. Well, they don’t hang out so much as sit there bolted to the walls, but but that’s how I like to phrase it. The museum closes at 5:00 p.m. sharp and I can always see, from the distance of the parking lot, people still wandering about inside without a care in the world. I like to look at the security staff buzzing from one group to the other so they can tell them, as politely as possible, to get the hell out. I can’t relate to the mindset of a person who is unaware of closing time at all, but I suspect that somewhere in their head lies the secret to a stress free life. It must be nice to not worry about time. The problem is that a timeless mind like that requires the caretaking of those who are aware of the time.

This was a 2022 strip in which Penny actually went on a vacation to France with her boyfriend Harvey and their dog Claremont. Somehow, she got talked into watching the hotel desk for a few minutes and, naturally, was confronted by a group of Americans. Poor Penny. Escape is useless.

Ah, 2022. Supply chain problems were everywhere and prices were going up. Today, of course, the shelves are full of items priced so high that you think of 2022 in black and white. People think I’m making this up, but back then (so very long ago) Walmart had a box of crackers for only 79 cents. It was amazing. You could live in cracker heaven. Sure, the generic crackers were a bit rough and would cut the roof of your mouth, but by golly they were a cheap way to consume a lot of carbs and maintain the weight you should be losing. Today, that same box of crackers requires a credit check and payment plan.

This strip isn’t about moody people, it’s the result of moody people.

If a customer offers to pray for you, the answer is always yes. It may seem a bit passive, but the goal is to get the encounter over as smoothly as possible. They may have to pray for you as you help the next customer, but this isn’t the place for religious debate. I’m all for the separation of church and everything else, but getting along is the goal. Call me controversial.

There was a time when we were told that we didn’t have to wear masks anymore, then suddenly we were told to wear them again. I saw a lot of bold, maskless people who were armed. I never made fun of these people because, frankly, they had a gun, but I never understood the “I must remain armed at all times because there is a potential enemy everywhere” mentality combined with the “I’m not wearing this thing that might protect me from the germs that are everywhere” mentality. All I can say, anecdotally, is that I never got sick when I had to wear the mask, and I get sick a lot. My immune system gave up years ago. I should actually start wearing a mask just to see if I stop getting every stray cold that wanders my way, but not wearing one keeps the bold, armed strangers from starting up conversations.

Early April Bloom! She had shorter hair then. At first, people assumed she talked like Janice from Friends. That mystified me. I had to steer them more strongly towards a Southern dialect. Inflation was the constant theme back then, but it quickly became the ongoing yearly theme that we see today.

These people exist. I would never have imagined a customer threatening an employee with her job because they “know a lot of people in this city.” It sounds way too cartoony. Yet they exist. I wonder if they know that they are a real life cartoon.

I know it means something to the customer who says they are never shopping in a store again. It’s an emotional moment. But for the staff it’s so devoid of emotion that you might as well be telling a mortician about a dead body.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been listening to popular hits from the 1920s, according to Apple Music, while writing this post. It’s pretty wild. I’m not sure I want to come back to the 2020s. I may have to put these characters back a hundred years. At least the prices were definitely lower in that post-pandemic era.

I worked at a place where bigwigs were flying in from bigwig headquarters for some bigwig reason and the story was that they might visit a few locations in the metropolitan area. Managers acted very professionally by excusing themselves so they could cry in the bathroom and then proceed to lose their minds. They developed a crack management team that visited each store to make sure everything was in perfect order, then a phone team was established so that they could warn store managers that the bigwig motorcade procession was headed their way. It was a solid week of panic, planning, and tidying up.

The bigwigs didn’t visit any stores. They went to a bar after their local bigwig event.

My favorite CEO interaction was with the director of a very large library system. He wasn’t a CEO until he renamed his position from “Director” to “CEO”, but by golly he was a CEO by the time I interacted with him. He spoke to me about the downtown library eventually becoming the hub of a “Silicon Valley” of information, the envy of the world. This guy thought a lot of the library. And himself.

For some reason he eventually didn’t like me. I’m not sure why. Sure, I made fun of him in cartoon form and in emails, but I think it was because (as the British would say) I’m a Ginger. That had to be it. Too much red in my hair.

One time I had to attend a late night event that was with the City Council and the CEO. There was also a television reporter and a small camera crew. Afterwards, the CEO went down the line of people and shook everyone’s hand. Without batting an eye, he passed right over me as he shook the hand of the person before me and then the person after me. I responded by bursting out laughing and making his smile falter a bit. I think we bonded that day.

I decided that most CEOs have some sort of untreated mental illness. Leadership draws the power hungry, and power hungry is a symptom. Maybe it’s narcissism, but it could also be something that’s responsive to treatment. The guy I described above was ultimately fired by the City Council. He recovered quickly, became the CEO of another major library system in the middle of the country, and then he was fired again. His career arc was over and I considered that a form of treatment.

We really need a crack telephone team to inform the customers when higher ups are coming to visit. We’d all get the best customer service we’ve ever had.

There’s always somebody who has a personal relationship with a higher up. It may or may not help their career path, but in this CEO’s case I’d be nervous around April Bloom.

Here we go. William, or perhaps Billy. You may think that I overdid his hair. I can assure you that I did not. William/Billy is based on a bigwig with the most outrageous hair I’ve ever seen on a man with grown children. I think he used whatever money that normally goes to car purchase for a mid-age crisis on his hair. It was amazing. Whatever we spoke about is forgotten to me. I was too stunned by the magnificence and perfection of whatever the hell he did to his hair.

A lot of wrong things are said by the person in charge and a lot of people who know better let them say it. Are the yes men thinking of the big picture or of themselves? I think we all know the answer to that.

Tabby is clearly making no effort to act differently. To expect otherwise is not to know Tabby.

See K in the background? That’s me today. I’ve had enough interactions with CEOs.

I’ve said it a million times, but if you’re really good at your job and they want to make you a manager of that job, don’t think that it’s the same job with additional responsibilities. Managing a job that you like is a good way to no longer like that job.

I stand by this. Some jobs just attract the best people. Call them weird if you wish.

I’ve seen a lot of people try to introduce new, great things, and most of them were just above horrible on the ol’ New, Great Things scale. I’m just a spectator on this one, but if you want a fun read Google “Who is the CEO who ruined JC Penny?” That guy, unfortunately, tried to reinvent the wheel.

There’s always a sigh of relief when the bigwigs are gone. It really is no different than being in school. We can relax, release the Berle, and focus on more pressing matters. Like toilets.

Thousands of hours? To learn how to create something like Porky Pig? Yep. Did they have Cheetos back in the days when Porky was created? They did not. Those amazing pioneers created classic cartoon characters without the benefit of modern junk food. They only had alcohol and cigarettes. Let that sink in so you can admire those amazing pioneers even more than you already do.

To be a cartoonist, you have to learn how to draw. That’s the hard part. It doesn’t take forever, it just feels like it. Maybe 10,000 drawings or so. That’s to learn the basics. Then you have to keep it up the rest of your life and continue to learn. It’s similar to the effort required to become a doctor but without monetary reward or access to medication samples.

Next, you need to break the rules. Not all of them. Leave the ones that keep you grounded to Earth, like design principals, but break what you need to in order to give those drawings your signature look. It’s your own special form of handwriting.

Remember learning how to write? I do. I remember the the first word that we covered when I entered the public school system. The word was “red”. It was the prefect word for a red state public school system, but I knew nothing of that then. I only knew that a magical door was opening up. “The fools!” I thought. “Once I have deciphered their communication system I shall take over the world! Mwah-ha-haaaa!” The magical words led to a magical acceptance letter from an out of state college.

I never took over the world, as you know. I didn’t want to. Frankly, it looked like a lot of work. Somebody would have to be crazy to want to take over everything, and modern political figures demonstrate this daily, but I did want to mock it. Being silly is much more fun.

I’ve selected silly strips for some silly fun so we can discuss and laugh at the silliness at it all. Come. Be silly with me.

This is still the goal. If it weren’t for free concerts and art shows around me I’d really never go anywhere. Sure, I can go look at new things in stores, but buying things I don’t have to have is some sort of luxury vacation item.

This one probably amused me more than the readers. At the time I made this, I was working for a Justin. He was a very nice guy, and very hard working, but he seemed to come from a school of Justins that must have also been a school for game show hosts. It’s a weird connection but I swear it exists. The same can-do spirit that permeates young leadership professionals is the same kind of energy you see in a game show host. It’s not a bad thing, it just is. I was either working for Justin or Ryan Seacrest. I really couldn’t tell the difference.

If you don’t know, there are many jobs where the reward for learning new things is to be asked to do them without an increase in pay. If Berle has any redeemable traits, which is unlikely, it’s that he can sense unrewarded work a mile away.

Tabby is relaxing and holding her cat, Mr. Thompson, here. As my friend Jim pointed out, this is Mr. Thompson 4.0. Mr. Thompson has appeared in three other comics throughout my life. He ties together a little comic universe that nobody has read. Be happy you have not read the previous comics he has been in. Trust me. As noted above, you have to create quite a bit of work before you wind up with anything good.

This is an eternal truth. Don’t say how slow it is. Inevitably, when it’s busy, someone will also say that a lot of customers makes the day go by quickly. It might even be a customer who says it. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Life is precious, right? Why would I want it to go by quickly? Wishing for a lot of customers is wishing for a quick death.

Ah, now we’re into some supreme silliness. Berle got settlement money from the company at the conclusion of an early storyline. I would reveal what the storyline was, but then I’d be spoiling it for you and I’d have to go back and read it myself, as I don’t remember. Nevertheless, he spent his little windfall on a jet pack. The problem was that he couldn’t afford the fuel. It was so very Berle of him.

I worked at a Walmart in a very posh area of town for two weeks. I was laid off from a company and thought I’d get a little job to pay the bills while I looked for something else. Something else came along much more quickly than I thought, so it was with great embarrassment that I handed in my resignation at the Walmart deli so soon after starting. Well, the embarrassment wasn’t that great. It was little. Very little, now that I think about it. Maybe it was none. None whatsoever. Zero embarrassment. I just left. Poor Walmart. Now I’m embarrassed.

Anyway, they had the biggest unused breakroom I’d ever seen in my life. It could’ve been a Silicon Valley breakroom. Thinking about it, maybe I should’ve kept the deli job.

If a customer finds out that you’re a manager, no matter how low on the manager pecking order you may be, they might give you a million and three suggestions for changes. The fact that implementing said changes would require major decisions from higher ups a thousand miles away will be lost on them. Worldwide conglomerates aren’t known for individual, local tweaks to their cookie cutter system. Hopefully the company has an email address for such suggestions from customers. I’m sure there’s some AI bot thingy answering all emails now.

I may have posted this one before, but the theme today is silliness and this was one of my favorite silly comics. If there is something in the back that’s not on the shelf, there are plenty of workers who will be enthusiastic about finding it. Finding something that’s actually in the back is kind of like winning a little lottery. Everyone involved is enthused, and they should be. Whenever I’m with someone who gets an employee to check the back, I keep telling them that it’s never in the back. The door in this comic is really hitting me.

This was an early Tabby comic that I may have written when I accidentally bit the inside of my mouth. When you see a problem customer, the theme to Jaws may start to play in your head. I equated it with knowing that I’d bite the same spot in my mouth again. It was a very personal analogy that I inserted here. So silly.

I have known managers who eat with the staff that they supervise, but they’ve been atypical. I’ve known many more managers who never seem to eat at all. It’s very mysterious and silly.

Want to learn how to play the piano? Start tapping the keys. Want to paint? Start painting. Want to learn Calculus? Start, um, calculating? Ok, that one’s a bit of a stretch for me. My father was the math whiz but he failed to pass along those genes. Just know that you start doing something, presumably with numbers and funny looking symbols.

When you learn something, starting is step one. Are we all clear on that? You’ve got to start. Many of us try to start by reading about what we are wanting to learn. Then we can watch interviews with people who do whatever we’re learning on YouTube. Then we can watch people doing whatever it is we’re wanting to do. Then we can go to sleep comfortably with the knowledge that the “pre-start” activities are accomplished and that we can start the actual starting tomorrow, with tomorrow being some vaguely defined day in the future that is not the current day in which we now preside. There may be even more pre-start items to consume before starting, who can say, but starting is definitely on the horizon.

If and when you actually start something new, it’s possible that every part of you will be telling you to stop. There may be cake in the fridge that is getting lonely. Ignore that. Keep starting, keep going, no pain no gain, mistakes will be made, eat the damn cake, keep going, make a million more mistakes. Have you reached the million mistakes point? Very good. That’s a good start.

Once you’ve started you may wonder when it’s ok to stop. I don’t have any advice on that. Frankly, it took me so long to get started that the idea of stopping is terrifying. Additional mental health cakes may need to be purchased to cope with that. Just know that you can stop if you have something else to start, like a dive into this month’s comics.

I changed Tabby’s wording just for this post. In the original strip she says, “You found my cat food smoothie.” That had some readers assuming she was actually drinking it. I can see how they thought that. I didn’t think that, obviously, but I changed it to avoid confusion. Feedback can be a writer’s best friend.

People are still commenting on this one on various Meta-owned social media platforms. There are some pretty insightful comments, tinged with some bitterness, but a few are very pro-business and using the comments section to promote their stringent views. Or they were. I deleted some of the nutters.

This was a personal favorite, because it’s me as a college freshman with a credit card that has an obscenely high limit. Why they chose to give an unemployed eighteen year old access to spend whatever he wanted at the mall bookstore is beyond me (yes, I was that kind of crazy partier in my day). I’m sure it was for solid business principals. I not only learned a valuable lesson, I now have some really cool books that are no longer in print. Let’s just say that I no longer do business with that credit card company and move on.

I liked this one because of the sign. Now that I work at home, it really is too fattening. I have to watch it. If I eat a candy bar I have to leap onto the treadmill. Unfortunately I can afford a candy bar but a treadmill is out of my price range.

This one didn’t work. Isn’t that great of me? Posting the ones that didn’t work? No? Well, it’s frustrating. As a clerk, if you have someone who is nice but won’t stop talking, it’s very challenging to scoot them away as a crowd builds up behind them. The trick is to waive the next person forward as you’re listening to the talker. That usually provides a nice conclusion to the conversation, but not always. You have to work at three times your usual speed to make up for such a customer.

The night before your day off is always the real day off, at least for me. I did know a guy who would be at the tennis court at seven in the morning on his days off and I called him Mr. Perfect. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem to mind that insult.

Readers took this opportunity to throw insults at Berle, as expected, but all of this was to lead up to Todd covered in paint. Using two strips to satisfy an urge to see a paint-covered Todd may have been a bit of overkill.

At my local big box store they have a paint department that is pretty nice, with a big table, paint mixer, and checkout area. It’s also completely spattered in paint. I think Jackson Pollock is the manager and Todd is the sole clerk.

The last CEO hasn’t been seen in quite awhile. She was based on an actual person who left the company to be some sort of motivational speaker. I have to wonder what kind of motivation she’s trying to instill because sending positive vibes wasn’t her forte.

There is such theater when a higher up visits that it was only natural to turn it into actual theater.

It made sense when I was a kid. The Oscars were a big deal. Celebrities weren’t seen outside of movies or whatever talk show they were on to promote a movie. Seeing them supposedly being themselves was an event in and of itself. Why, they might even use their acceptance speech as an opportunity to speak out about a political issue of great importance. How shocking.

That was then. Now they’re in our face every day telling us what to eat and who to vote for, and we, as informationally overfed receptors of their product, are very thankful that YouTube exists so we can simply speed through a highlight real. We might watch that tomorrow. Or five years from tomorrow when we’re feeling nostalgic.

Yes, cartoonists get awards, and yes, it’s wonderful to be recognized by your peers, but they don’t televise the occasion. You know who should? Scientists. Scientists are always having to be peer reviewed anyway, why not cast a ballot at the same time? “And the award for discovering DNA goes to….James Watson and Francis Crick!” There wouldn’t be much suspense on who the winners are, but I think it’d play big on PBS.

Vickie is not wrong, here. When confronted with a crowd of people, try breaking them up into individuals so that you will like them. The best way to do this is to stand behind a service counter.

We all know there are no stupid questions. In theory. In practice we know that there are indeed stupid questions.

I’m always fascinated by customers who give detailed instructions on how to improve the store to a cashier. Unless the cashier is the owner or the owner’s daughter, it’s really not going very far. In fact, even if the cashier is the owner’s daughter it may not go very far. One reader commented that the usual expectation is that the cashier will tell her manager, who will tell her manager, until, I can only assume, the feedback is presented with helpful charts and graphs to a board of directors.

In reality, the cashier tells her manager who responds back to the cashier that she just needs to tell the customer thank you and move on. It’s not a game of advancing helpful information, it’s a game of ping-pong.

I’ve known managers who like to pretend that they are customers. I think their secret, lifelong ambition is to be a spy and this is as close as they’ll get.

The signs upset a few people with emotional support animals. They were told by Walmart that they cannot place their dog in the cart, which is interesting because this was one of the few signs that was actually inspired by a real sign. In Walmart, of all places. Go figure.

Another person talked about a Yorkie who licked the hand of its owner when her blood sugar level was low. I was interested in this because one of the real life inspirations for Tabby is a Type 1 diabetic who has a little monitor somewhere on her person. So I asked her about it. Her response, not verbatim, was that the dog is a real thing but it doesn’t need to be in the cart.

I love dogs, I just don’t want their butt where I set my bananas. My question was what do these people do when they’re not in a store with a handy cart? Do they have a little doggie carrier or something? Love finds a way, right? There were no immediate answers from the complainers.

My little signs don’t usually inspire a wider discussion of what constitutes a service animals, health code laws, and potential roundworm contamination, but that’s the power of the comic strip.

My friend Jim pointed out that Star Trek had no new shows in production and thought Tabby must be devastated. I raced to address that.

The best five year present I saw was a wood-burning pen. The guy who got it could have started decorating the walls, but he was more professional than that.

There was a real life counterpart to this. We really couldn’t place which jerk she was. It was a jerk-heavy time period. All was forgiven until the anticipated next incident.

This is why I haven’t been sleeping well, even when I’m allowed.

Always the best gift.

I conclude with the Academy. It looks like the Best Picture is one I actually saw in the theater. That never happens. I should get an award for that.

You know who gets offered all of the overtime hours? Part-time workers. Part-time workers are typically hired to work full time hours part of the week. It’s seldom a happy four hours a day, as the description of “part-time” would have you believe. No, a typical business, especially in retail, can stretch those part-time hours out to look like a grueling full-time schedule.

Part-time work is often described as having “flexible hours to meet your needs”. When they say meeting your needs, of course, they mean their needs. You’ll need to be flexible when you bend over backwards to accommodate six hour shifts at weird times off the day. Then you’ll be asked if you want to work longer. Or you’ll be asked to drive to another location, hopefully within the same country, to help out at another store.

Yes, you’re an eager beaver part-timer who is hungry for full-time work! Would seventy-two hours a week be enough? We promise, once we aren’t busy anymore, we’ll cut you down without notice to twenty hours a week. Hope you weren’t planning on a consistent paycheck.

This always happens when I’m sick. I have fever dreams about part-time work.

They don’t give the average employee the power to price match because they are afraid cashiers will go crazy and just constantly lower prices. It would ignite some sort of revolution, cause all of the stores to fail, and make the world economy collapse. Well, at least that’s what they act like what would happen.

This one wasn’t a favorite but I liked the little signs. The little signs can occasionally save a mediocre strip.

One thing’s for sure, if employees are going to make more money then somebody’s going to have less of it. A store is going to make sure it isn’t them. Prices started going up the second store employees started making several dollars more an hour. There was a brief window when employees could do things like pay rent and still have some money left over to save or spend on other things. Then rent went up several hundred dollars and now everyone is broke again.

I don’t know why, but I was looking at a bunch of TV displays and imagined Berle on every screen. I was probably tired. This was one purely to amuse my tired brain.

This is an update of an old theme about Tabby getting the last customer to leave the store. If you want someone to leave, silently staring at them usually does the trick.

This upset some people. Well, it upset the people that work from home. I currently work from home, so it was really about myself, but I should’ve considered the feelings of other people who work from home. Or should I have done that? It winds up that if you overly consider feelings, you won’t have any comic. I’m all for empathy, but the pie has to hit somebody’s face.

Here we are again with the part-time work topic. This comic was on my mind because it keeps getting shared and has slowly become quite popular. I was happy about this for my character K. K hasn’t been appearing in much and she deserved a win.

I do think the ten minute break is a worthless insult, but this was inspired from my time at a university library. There was so much time devoted to sitting around and talking about things that it’s almost impossible to parody. Entire work days could be written off as group discussions.

I’ve had part-time jobs where I was consistently called in on every scheduled day off. It always made me wonder why they bothered hiring a part-time worker in the first place. It was usually because they were wanting to hire a couple of more people but hadn’t filled the positions yet. Then they would fill those positions, things would look perfect for about a day, and then a couple of people would quit. Really, if you want to work an obscene amount of hours, you can ironically find it in part-time work.

I work in such a state. I worked through my lunch break, but it never meant that I could go home earlier. I just wound up with overtime for the week, which would sometimes confuse and anger management. I would like to publicly apologize to management for the inconvenience. I would like to, but I won’t. I needed the money.