CSotD: Sunday Late and Short Takes
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Good morning, Rhymes with Orange and, yes, that's what day it is.
I shut off my cell phone last night because it would have reset for Daylight Saving Time and then woken me up at an hour at which I did not wish to wake up. I fretted over the possibility of posting late and then realized that the reason they change times on Sunday is because it only matters to a handful of people, mostly ones who belong to such a small church that it only has one service.
If it matters to you, you had to get to church before you read this anyway. If it doesn't matter, you're probably running an hour late, too.
My apartment was rewired this past summer, so my smoke alarms don't have batteries, which is probably true of airplanes also but I laffed and, by the way, I still have a couple of antiquated clocks to reset. Except the one in the bathroom, which never got set back the last time, and I've long since given up on the microwave clock because it's a pain to reset and then goes to Zero with every blip of the grid anyway.
It's easier to keep track of which ones are an hour off than to get the step ladder and fuss with them. It's even easier not to care.
I will eventually get to the point where I don't give a damn at all. It's one of my goals in life.
But, yeah, assuming you haven't had your place rewired, replace those batteries. Not because they will save your children's lives. They are very likely not to.
No, because otherwise, in about three months, you'll start hearing the random beep of a dying battery.
At 2 a.m.
Always at 2 a.m., Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time.
"I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid"
The best strips in Dustin are the ones related to his attempts to find work.
In fact, I'd go farther and say that they're the only ones I like, because the fact that he's living with his folks rent-free makes the strips set in the home stick in my craw. The strip is apparently popular, so, different strokes for different folks, but cheerful slackerism doesn't appeal to me or seem at all funny.
In any case, his inability to find a steady job is often humorous, and today's even has some welcome bite.
I've heard millenials complain about unpaid internships and I. Don't. Get. It.
College internships make a lot of sense, though I was appalled to learn that our interns in the newsroom were paying for the credit hours, because the college's heavy lifting consisted of asking us for evaluations.
We couldn't afford to pay them and so, if the law required it, we probably wouldn't have taken them on. We were serious about helping them, however, and did a lot of training and mentoring and then gave them real work to do.
And the idea that we got free labor, while technically true, is misleading, because a semester of having a kid in the office translated to half a semester of spending twice as much time showing them how to do something as it would have taken to just do it yourself, so that, when they were able to do it without direction for the second half of the semester, well, it was kind of a wash overall.
If we'd had the money to pay our interns, we'd have spent it to create an entry-level position that didn't require babysitting.
I addressed this at some length before, and, if you're interested, not only is it worth a read but the comments are even moreso.
But the bottom line in all this is a quote from someone who we thought was an old fuddy-duddy half a century ago, Ann Landers: "Nobody can take advantage of you without your consent."
Times are tough, but they aren't ever so tough that you need to put on a tie to get screwed. I'd rather flip burgers for minimum wage than do something that mattered for free.
And I say that as someone who has not only flipped burgers for minimum wage, but also testified in front of the Federal Trade Commission against a company that offered "management trainee" positions that involved no training and no path to management.
(The stereotype of the slacker in the basement is unfair, but the person who would rather be exploited by a prestigious major publication than put in some paid time at the East Overshoe Gazette is making a choice I wouldn't. But then, I majored in classics, not journalism, and have seen both this choice and this one.)
Speaking of classics majors
I don't know what Val majored in, but there are some pretty smart, well-educated people working in retail and therefore appearing as characters in Retail.
We were seniors before we realized that those CEOs who came to campus to make speeches about the importance of a liberal arts major for developing a talent for thinking out of the box were making those noble speeches to us and then going across the quad to the business school to conduct interviews.
I recall a conversation in one of our classes senior year where someone proposed that we should set up an exchange program with the local tech school so that, while we read Plato and Tolstoy, we could also be learning a practical skill that would earn us a living.
It was only half a joke: We had no problem with thinking great thoughts on our own time, as long as we had roofs over our heads, though that wasn't our first choice of lifestyles.
For instance, I wanted to be JD Salinger. Turned out there already was one.
Here's the historical laugh for you: The specific example given in that conversation was "TV repair." Yes, children, that used to be something people did.
Anyway, Val should know better, but I'd have risen to the bait, too.
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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