Not Enough Staff

Plenty Of Customers

I phased all social media out of my life years ago except to present my comic and it’s been a double edged sword. I’m not even a person who likes swords.

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.