Company Loyalty

An Oxymoron On Both Sides

I’ve had a lot of jobs. Let’s get that out of the way. You know how some people go through boyfriends or girlfriends like water? I’m like that with jobs. Does this mean I’m a bad person? No, and it doesn’t mean that people who go through boyfriends or girlfriends are bad, either. We’re easily unamused.

I crave amusement.

And, really, if you’re at Job A and there’s a nearly identical Job B down the road, but Job B pays two thousand more a year, why not switch? I know all of the good reasons not to jump ship, but my brain doesn’t like them. Sure, it may not look fantastic on a resume if you’ve worked at ten different places in a year, but resumes are usually more fictional than this comic strip. In fact, if it were on a resume my comic would be described as “laugh a day truth bombs that have delighted millions for decades”, which is only truthful if you replace “laugh a day truth bombs” with “drawings on paper” and “millions” with “my mother”.

I did not set out to work at a ton of different places, it’s just that my needs were not consistently met and I was moving in a different direction that management currently had in focus. That was professional-speak for “the new manager sucks, so see ya.” People really quit managers, not jobs.

I thought I had gotten better. I thought that in my maturity I had slowed down my job hopping, but I recently got a position with a company I had worked with before and part of it included a background check. I had to write down my last ten years of employment history, and after whittling that down I realized I worked at exactly ten places in the last ten years. Maybe eleven or twelve. It was hard to remember. It was like an alcoholic being shown video of a party the night before.

I think of it as good research for a comic strip.

The only thing worse than being the first one to get sick is to be the only one to get sick. It means your immune system is on vacation.

I’ve gotten every cold this year. It’s like watching every new movie that is released in the theater, but with less disappointment. I just want my days off to be as productive as the days that I’m paid to work.

This just reminded me that I need to catch up on Star Trek.

I always said that I would go down on my drawing board, a hilarious comic completed beneath my body. Then I found out that’s how the novelist Robert B. Parker died. He was literally writing a novel.

Since it’s been done, there’s no need to do that now.

This is a hard rule. If your manager texts you during your off hours you have to pretend like you didn’t see the message. Apple has made this very difficult because they have iMessage, which lets the sender know that you have seen their message. So an even harder rule is that you have to turn off read receipts.

This rule is brought to you buy the Lessons Learned The Hard Way school of knowledge.

I hope to reach the Too Old To Punch age because I have a lot to say.

I’ve been studying of the Art of Shutting Up my whole life and, at best, I’m a D+ student. Instead, I’ve mastered the Art of Saying the Wrong Thing. However, I am very good at shutting up once I’ve said the wrong thing.

I once worked as a banker for about five months. I thought I’d learn all about banking, which would be a helpful skill to have as a cartoonist. Cartoonists generally aren’t great with money unless they become so rich that it doesn’t matter. There are a few good exceptions to this, but for the most part we aren’t great with money and we also aren’t so rich that it doesn’t matter.

The bank I worked for didn’t care so much about banking procedures. They were in a department store. They more clearly defined the role, once hired, from that of “banker” to “salesman”. So my job was to ask any customer, who was innocently shopping for something like hand towels, if they wouldn’t mind dropping what they were doing and randomly sign up for a bank account.

I kept it up long enough to find something else, but I did learn how to audit an ATM. If I’m ever rich enough to have my own ATM, by golly, I can audit it.

If you’re ever accosted by salespeople while shopping, just remember that they expect to get rejected by fifty people before they get a bite. When I had the job, the number was more like a million because I avoided doing it and made sure that ATM was audited as much as possible.

By rejecting a salesperson in the store you are being a proud member of the fifty rejections and getting them closer to their one bite. You’ve done something good. Be proud of yourself.

Or you can be like Tabby with salespeople and confuse them.