Part-Time

Or Full-Time In Disguise?

I’m sick. How sick am I? Get this, I am too sick to work overtime. I mean, I still have to work, sure, but any additional hours? Forget about it. I’m just too sick.

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.