Persistence and Promotion

A Day In The Life

When you help people for a living, things will happen that sound fictional. You might even have to assure people that events actually happened as you hit the highlights of your day at home. Like fictional stories, real life often repeats itself, and your stories develop a theme. That theme is that people are crazy.

The more you help people, the more you will realize that crazy is quite normal. When crazy is normal, your idea of what is normal seems unusual. Crazy is persistently consistent, and while it is not the majority of people it is certainly always there.

If you have a long line, the amount of crazy people in that line will help establish a pattern, like a drum beat. It’ll be normal, normal, crazy; normal normal, crazy; normal, normal, crazy. So while most people really aren’t crazy they are certainly an important part of the rhythm.

Then there is unusually normal, which is nice.

Tabby is normally seen confronting crazy, but it’s nice to see her with someone else. She’s actually quite wonderful with the norms.

I’ve worked with some characters much longer than the people they’re based on, like Shelby. In the case of Shelby, this is quite fortunate. It’s so much better to be in control of the time time I spend with her.

Shelby is based on an employee who was often upset. After first meeting her, we thought that she was upset based on whatever situation was causing her distress. No, silly us. With the person Shelby was based on, being upset about something was her default disposition. It was the moments where nothing was bothering her that was abnormal.

This comic is very true. If the person before you encountered nothing unusual, that means you’ll get the wackos.

I worked with a guy named Jeff. Everyone loved Jeff. It was impossible not to like the guy. He was great. We joked that the place should be called Jeff’s, because that’s who the customers wanted.

Anyway, this is what it was like when Jeff wasn’t there.

When the boss is observing, nothing bad happens. The software performs without a glitch and all of the customers are perfect.

Then the boss walks away and everything falls apart.

If the boss returns, everything will be perfect again and she’ll wonder why you were having so much trouble.

We now switch gears to promotion. Here we have the guessing game that companies like to play when talking about a position. Yes, companies ask what salary you expect even when they advertise the salary for the position. Nobody knows why they ask this. It’s rooted in deep mystery that some say goes back to ancient times when witches ruled the planet. Others say it’s because the company is stupid. Somewhere in between lies the truth.

Depending on where you work, Conflict Resolution is a big part of management training. Again, depending on where you work. Some places have more of a “sink or swim” approach to the whole training thing with their managers and there’s little or no training. You can tell which companies do that because they go through managers as quickly as regular employees.

Vickie and April Bloom are not based on anyone in particular, but by god they are out there.

They are two totally different personality types. Whenever you need to speak to a manager, you’ll probably get a Vickie more often than an April Bloom. I could make countless strips just having them talk to one another, but in the end I have to recognize that I’m trying to do more than just entertain myself.

Anybody who enjoys role playing in these work exercises should really just take a theater class. I once adapted a French accent during one of these, and the poor manager opposite me wound up yelling at me to knock it off. That was points deducted for her.

This was very fun to write. Tabby is so innocently not innocent.

If you make the instructor angry during Conflict Resolution class, you’ve passed. And if you don’t get angry at a customer who wants to make you as angry, you’ve passed the real test. The trick, of course, is to let all of your anger out after the customer finally leaves in the direction of their retreating car. It might cause transmission failure.