CSotD: Failure is always an option
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Since we're all off for the national holiday — except for those who don't work in banks, post offices or schools — let's talk about work.
Today's Cornered reminds me of a sort-of job I had back in the early 80s in which I wasn't getting paid but I was being issued stock.
Or so they told me. I never saw any, nor did I really ever expect to. And I also wasn't doing it for "exposure" because there wasn't much of that, either.
Artists and writers get their knickers in a knot over "exposure," but, when someone asks you to work for exposure rather than money, there are two factors to consider:
First, if the exposure is significant, there ought to be money in it for someone and why not you? And if the exposure is not significant, it's not exposure.
The other is that you can say "no."
Or "wotthehell."
You might say "wotthehell" because you believe in the mission.
In this case, I said wotthehell because it wasn't like I'd have to turn down a lot of paying jobs to work on this one, and they were a start-up and if they got rolling, there'd be money. And valuable stock. And monkeys might fly out of my ass.
This was back in the early days of VCRs, pre-Internet, and their cunning plan was tape rentals that delivered to your home like pizzas. My job was to write film critiques for their monthly catalog.
It was a bad idea, but I got a videotape machine as a loaner back when they were still kind of expensive — I had at one time a Betamax and later a VHS.
And I could go down to the shop and get all the free movies I wanted.
When they went belly-up, they just kind of disappeared. I never got any stock certificates but nobody demanded I return the machine, so I guess it was a lose/win, and I'm okay with that.
And the VCR worked really well with the first color TV we owned, which we bought when a motel went out of business.
And speaking of business failures, this seems like a good time to alert you to what I assume is the start of a story arc at Retail, though riffing on store closings has been going on there for awhile.
In case you missed it — and even if you didn't — Marla's store was spared, but there's plenty of corporate chaos to go around and part of the gags there have involved whether it's better to be axed or to survive.
There are worse things than being out on the street, and, as the fellow in "Cornered" notes, there surely are times when it's good to be paid up front.
Nice thing about being out of a job is that you don't have to race down to the bank with an unemployment check to cash it while it's still good, and, meanwhile, there's some comfort in knowing that you're not just being played for a chump.
Alex cracked me up this morning because I was forced out of a job where they didn't know what I did for a living but were hoping to find someone to do it for less money.
They didn't fire me, but, rather, made my life miserable enough that I finally found something else, at which point there were lots of crocodile tears and expressions of sorrow and gratitude and, throughout my two weeks' notice, I kept suggesting we sit down so that I could explain the system to them, since both my previous boss and our publisher had been bought out and were gone.
Finally, on my next-to-last day, I sat down with the new people in those positions and had about 20 minutes to explain a part of the industry they had never encountered.
I showed them how to transition to a new person painlessly and I might as well have explained it to the dog, because after I left they threw away thousands of dollars worth of critical materials I'd left behind.
And for several months after, I got phone calls at my new job from the part-timer hired for my old job because nobody had told him how anything worked.
So I didn't get to keep a VCR, but I got a parting gift in the form of schadenfreude.
At least they understood how to make newspapers.
A few jobs later, when the paper I was editing was shot out from under me, I interviewed with a publisher who said it was a relief because he'd been watching and wondering how in hell we stayed in business in the first place.
He was glad to know he hadn't been missing some clever secret.
And while we're on the business beat, I got a chuckle out of On the Fastrack mostly because I'm self-employed these days and when I have to fly out to Colorado, I get a stipend rather than having to voucher things. What this means is that how I spend it is between me and the IRS and so corporate bean counters aren't asking why I got sushi at O'Hare instead of a burger.
And not only does the IRS not care about small fry like me, but they've been so underfunded that they can't even afford to chase the big spenders down. My Civic Virtue side says we could do some real damage to the deficit if we brought back audits, but the Personal Responsibility side says, "Shut up, man. And try the negahamachi maki."
While my Overthinking Comics side says that this is yet another case of a comic strip accidentally showing up at a moment of political relevance.
Well, thank god somebody is enforcing a little thrift.
Noted with approval
I'm glad Mark Anderson doesn't waste chocolates on people who don't realize that, indeed, you can know what is in each piece if you simply learn the shapes and squiggles.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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