Penny's Vacation

A Valid Attempt Was Had By All

At one point in my life I took vacations. Like, I actually picked out a fun place to go, paid money in advanced, packed, got up early, and drove a long way to get somewhere that was allegedly fun. Then I enjoyed planned time off with planned activities that caused me to plan to stay away forever.

Inevitably, something would not go according to plan, which would cause unplanned stress, which would invalidate the whole point of a vacation, then motivational speeches would be made to psyche myself back into the mindset of being on a vacation and back into the plan of having fun.

Nothing says carefree fun like solid planning.

Some vacations took longer to pay off than others. How much fun I had was often measured in the time it took to repay the cost. I’m not sure it’s worth it. Nobody is rich in my little world, so saving money for an honest-to-god vacation is an achievement. It had better be for something good.

Should you spend your money on things or experiences? That’s a personal choice, of course, but I always argue that one can have the experience of spending money on things. A hardbound volume of Carl Barks Donald Duck stories is fun to purchase, read, and keep over the years. How is that not better than a vacation?

Before anyone answers, let’s leap to Penny, the heroine of my comic. She never has normal vacations. Weird things keep happening. It’s my view of the whole vacation scenario. Vacations don’t exist in the real world, but in some alternate vacation universe where things you never would’ve paid money for are suddenly second nature and a $30 hamburger is a reasonable expense, especially when compared to the other places that don’t even have hamburgers, let alone a meal that inexpensive. You’re in Vacationland, where prices and experiences have no relevance to the real world.

This year I decided to give her a break.

Assistant Manager, as I keep saying, is the sweet spot of more money with less responsibility. Unfortunately, when the manager goes on vacation, that’s the person in charge.

I haven’t had a series of strips where Penny is locked inside of a theme park, but the other ones have happened. Now I’ll have to retroactively lock her inside of a theme park. I, for one, wouldn’t mind that. At lest there would be no crowds to deal with.

This happens every year. Vacation? The one you put in for back in January? How will we find the staff to cover your absence? It’s a math problem that has never been solved.

There is nothing more “fun” than a team of managers from different locations coming together to fight the evil that is a staffing shortage. It’s kind of like the Super Friends, only with less superpowers and more bickering.

I once worked with a team of about five managers who were helping out a store with no staff. They all tried to look like they knew more than the other managers, but were going along with what the others were doing for the sake of the team. It was hilarious to observe as a non-manager.

A former coworker that is now a manager is no longer your former coworker. They are now a new manager. The caterpillar is now a butterfly. It’s best to run away.

Penny is enjoying my favorite vacation activity, which is reading. It’s so solitary that most family members do not consider it much of a vacation. Most family members are wrong.

I’ve never done this. I’ve never “popped in while on vacation”, but I have known people who have done it. My advice is to never do this. The purpose of a vacation is to completely wipe your memory clean of your non-vacation life so that when you return you have to take baby steps back into your former existence. You can start by relearning the names of your fellow staff members.

This never changes. It’s never the last day of vacation. It’s the day before work. The day before work isn’t a day of true relaxation, but one of slight dread. It’s especially worrisome if you’re not finished with your book. You should always pad your vacation out with several purgatory days that are neither vacation nor work days.

We now switch to Berle. Berle is not on vacation, never thinks about vacation, and would never even try to save money for a vacation. He takes little micro-vacations, often by being late to work and spending too much time in the bathroom.

The human brain isn’t great at perceiving time. You can tell when a day is dragging, but when you look past at a long stretch of time, the years appear to have flown by. I think our brain compresses decades down to hours and stretches some hours into decades. We need to fix that.

Tabby only acts this way against characters like Berle. She’s more pro-Penny than pro-employer.