Mad Men
And Women
I’m rewatching Mad Men while drawing. Why? Well, I found somebody selling the DVD box sets for a dollar. I can’t pass that up. Can you? I remember when the show first came on and it became a cultural phenomenon. I paid full price for the first season on DVD, got rid of it, and now pay a streaming service to show it to me with commercials. Mad, right?
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.
The shoe store I managed had a manual. I kept it in the lower left-hand desk drawer. The general manager on his tour of all 52 stores informed me that the manual was supposed to occupy pride of place on the desk. I told him that:
a) I preferred common sense and:
b) I used the desk surface for actual paperwork, i.e. stock orders, sales receipts/daily reconciliation, and payroll.
Yup. This was way back in the day when paperwork involved actual paper. I had already begun my two weeks' notice so I figured I had nothing to lose by being honest. I even wrote out my resignation by hand on a sheet of paper using that clutter-free desktop.
RE Coming up with believable names: I write code as a hobby, and I struggle to come up with good variable and function names. I end up naming everything after Witcher characters. My program texts read like bad Witcher fan fiction, but if you run them, you can play a crappy game of Solitaire.
RE Situations not covered by the manual: Matthew Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, described how employers intended to eliminate highly paid employees before AI came along and tried to oust everyone. Everything in a particular field, such as Crawford's trade of motorcycle repair, would be reduced to procedures expressed in grade school level language and printed in manuals. Thinking would be eliminated. Just follow the Bible! (of motorcycle maintenance) or the Holy Grail! (of box store management.) Like a good wage slave showing deference to his corporate overlords, Crawford attempted a repair using a manual. The manual said "First, remove the cover from the whatsit." According to the manual, if the thingamajingy wasn't working, the whatsit was the first thing to check, hence, the necessity of removing the cover. The problem is that on that particular motorcycle, the screws holding that cover on are rusted in place more often than not, so the whatsit is typically the last thing experienced mechanics check. They can examine the gogguzzler, the snoofpoodle and the whippitgud in less time than it would take to get one of the screws out of the cover. Manuals didn't eliminate the need for thought. They simply demonstrated that the people who compiled them had never burdened themselves with thinking things through.