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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Amusing ourselves to death … or unemployment

Published: February 18, 2011 1 minute 3 comments

Xkcd

Today's xkcd has one of the best fourth-panel surprise punchlines I've seen in a long time, and put me on the floor possibly because the precise topic of trying to get things done amid such distractions just came up in a Facebook comment about yesterday's CSotD.com

I wish old Ben's disembodied voice would occasionally tell me to get off the computer and back to work. Unfortunately, I can't lay out pages using the Force. But there are plenty of other things going undone in the world that don't require me to be sitting here and, in fact, can't happen while I am.

One solution has been the puppy, but as his little bladder matures, his ability to get me out of my chair diminishes. Still, the sound of whining at the kitchen door remains a powerful motivation for getting away from the computer, however briefly. Not sure it would translate well to an office environment.

At my last office-based gig, I was the boss, and I never knew quite how to handle reporters who would leave the office with Facebook still up on their screens. Did I discipline them for wasting time while they were on the company clock? Or just for being dumb enough to make it so obvious?

Two jobs before that, I worked at a daily where I was only in charge of one person and we were too busy to goof around. But the circulation department, in which we were housed, was a land of "hurry up and wait," and the amount of time the customer service reps spent between customer service calls shopping on-line, playing games, passing along jokes and downloading screen savers was prodigious. It was also very annoying to the IT people because most of the viruses, adware, spyware and assorted scum that showed up on our servers could be traced to those aforementioned games, jokes and screensavers.

If you're reading this at work, well, this is the end of today's blog, so get back to work. Or over to YouTube. Or whatever seems most pressing at the moment.

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Comments 3

  2. What’s peculiar about CSotD and filtering is that it’s the only site I ever try to access from work that is filtered. I suppose I’d find that pr0n sites are — but not necessarily, since I work at a putatively academic institution — but Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and all the other usual timewasters are readily available.
    CSotD gots some serious mojo, looks like.

  3. Sherwood, have you tried using the direct URL?
    http://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/
    BTW, Mike, Neil Postman did actually have something to say about computers:
    “Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology – that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data – will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

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