The Joy Of Retail

It's funny when it's not supposed to be.

Before I begin, let’s have a moment of silence for last year’s Clearance Candy Corn.

Now let’s shake the tears from our eyes and move on to today’s burning question: “Why would you want to work with the public?”

Good question! It’s an especially good question when the public looks like this confident customer.

She’s either going to be very difficult, very funny, or show us how to relieve back pain. Either way, I actually like working with the public.

I went to school for character animation, which usually surprises people. For those that don’t know me, they wonder why I’m not working in animation. For those that do know me, they wonder why I wanted to see things move on the screen when I’m much more at home with them standing still on a page.

To answer the first question, nobody I know is working in animation right now, except for a couple of guys who own or run the companies they’re at. The field has been gutted and shipped off overseas along with our Levis.

To answer the second question, I have no idea. I got accepted to CalArts and went for it. I shouldn’t have, but did.

By the time I became a working artist, it was for print and it was graphic art.

Ah, and it was a great job. I had my own office with a great desk and powerful Mac with all of the latest software, but my boss was beneath hemorrhoids on the Scale Of Irritability (if that’s not a real scale, it should be).

I was there a long time despite the manic mood swings of my boss, but hemorrhoids being hemorrhoids, I literally fled one day to work for anybody who was sane, which is always easier said than done.

I bounced around after that, discovering that a certain truth never changed no matter where I went.

Jobs become boring.

Not all jobs. Certainly not jobs where I was working for myself. But any job where I have to sit at a desk and do crap for somebody else? Yeah, that’s pretty boring. Just sitting at a desk all day, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, was driving me crazy.

See the movie Office Space for reference, here. You don’t even have to watch all of it. Just watch the beginning where Peter’s life is a slog.

So yes, I made a conscious decision to work with the public. Some public people are crazy and some are incredibly intelligent and entertaining, but most are just like the rest of us, wanting to get what they came in for and leave.

I’ve questioned my sanity, sure. But you won’t get inspirational writing material from a boring office. Well, not for decade or so, anyway, when they reboot The Office.

Would you rather sit at a desk or work with this person who is obviously way more interesting? No, this isn’t where I work. I just felt her pain. They really need to give her better equipment to work with for whatever the hell they’re asking her to do.

I drew this at one of those desk jobs during a meeting. Look at those prices! They were so low back then.

Why not work for a place where you can see a tragic tale of a gas outage and the emergency tools procured to rectify the situation in a single glance?

And why not work for a place that has what I call the “Jesus Aisle”?