CSotD: No, no, that’s not funny …
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If you haven't been keeping up with Sally Forth, you're not missing a lot of laughs. Sally has been ordered to make a boatload of personnel cuts, and Ces decided to let us watch the process, in large part, through the eyes of one of the potential victims of this edict.
Which is not boffo laff-fest material, but this has still been a really interesting story arc with plenty of the mordant chuckles of "oh, yeah, I've been there …"
Having been on both sides to some extent, I can attest that those on the receiving end provide better material than those on the giving end.
How many strips can you get out of Sally drinking Maalox and telling Ted how much she hates what she's being ordered to do?
Okay, you hate it. That's Monday's strip. What have you got for Tuesday?
I sympathize with Sally. I was once hired to edit a small weekly where, after a few weeks, things weren't working out.
The staff were all reasonably talented but quite inexperienced, because it was an entry-level place and we weren't paying enough to expect anything else. I tried to mentor them, and some were learning faster than others but things were progressing and I felt okay about it.
The company also owned a small daily, and the editor left, as happens at small papers, so they hired a new editor and the brass loved her. And I realized what trouble I had wandered into as our differing patterns emerged in the weekly management meetings.
See, I figured that, as editor, it was my job to make sure things went right, barring some purposeful, unacceptable act on the part of a subordinate. So when something screwed up, I'd acknowledge that I should have caught it but that we had discussed it and had added a layer of protection against it happening again.
By contrast, the other editor would complain about the person who had screwed up, toss the hapless miscreant out on the street and place an ad for a replacement. Her updates each week consisted of throwing her staff under the bus, which I thought was appalling enough until I realized that the brass was buying it.
And when I say I realized the brass was buying it, I mean I was called into the office and told I was doing a crap job because I hadn't fired anybody. And my explanation that it was more efficient to train the people we had than to keep hiring and firing interchangeable newbies met with a blank response.
Which is to say, when I said, "Yeah, I should have caught that …" in a meeting, they weren't hearing "A fish stinks from the head," but rather "I stink."
So I know what it feels like to be pressured to fire people who don't deserve to be fired, and I've also watched a couple of my bosses agonize over orders from corporate HQ to "do more with less" by slashing the throats of productive, loyal employees.
I guess that's why I don't think the boss-side offers a lot of comedic variation: It's really binary. You can follow your orders or you can quit.
And while that's roughly the same choice subordinates have — live with the situation or walk out — the difference is that they can keep doing their jobs with a clear conscience, because their jobs don't require them to behave like (choice of scatalogical or anatomical reference).
Watching this unfold from Alice's side provides the grim gallows humor of living in the shadow of the long knives. Ces certainly captures the "who's next?" gossip that goes around, and the divide between those who want to speculate and those who want to remain as oblivious as possible until their own cervical vertebrae have been bisected.
At one paper, we had a bulletin board in the break room with mugs of each employee, which was very handy because you could figure out who that person was who said "good morning" to you each day.
But the publisher's secretary was a little obsessive about keeping it updated, and, once the crunch began, there was a joke that, as you came in each morning, you should stop by and see if your face was still on the board before you bothered going to your desk.
Which is what I mean when I say that the type of humor in this sort of situation isn't the kind where you roll on the floor and hold your sides.
But, oh, it's there all right.
In the midst of which gloom …
It's good to observe a bit of new life over at Retail:
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