CSotD: Getting the full ream
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Donna Lewis's "Replay All" is a good place to go right after a discursion on New Yorker cartoons, because she has that same, "yep, that's how it is" approach: Observational humor that doesn't have a punchline so much as a wry acknowledgement.
This particular arc has me laughing because, to start with, a once-noble paper, the Oregonian, has just come under the heel of stupid measures of productivity that argue against good journalism.
(And the only thing worse that getting stupid instructions from corporate HQ is having to sit through a Power Point Presentation in order to see them.)
To which I will simply repeat my comment over at Jim Romenesko's blog:
Coming soon in the Oregonian:
"Mayor Johnson did not return a phone call asking for his viewpoint within the necessary 15 minutes"
"The library is using the additional tax revenues to purchase books, some of which include depictions of sex."
"The new parking meters will also accept debit cards, according to Councilman Smith, who believes that a woman has the right to decide to terminate a pregnancy without consulting her husband."
This "goal" of generating clicks and traffic and page visits — by which bonuses, incentives and raises will be determined — specifically codifies the idea of switching from in-depth analysis of the Affordable Care Act to running cat videos.
It also declares Geraldo Rivera a better journalist than Seymour Hersh, because he's more attuned to stupid things people will tune in for and because he's more telegenic. And that's what matters.
Never mind 1984. We're turning Idiocracy from satire to reality.
And so I'm laughing at Donna's arc because the notion of filling printer trays as a measure of productivity is barely ridiculous enough to qualify as fiction either.
I used to hate annual reviews back in my office days. At one paper, they called it "lunch with the editors" and it consisted of three senior editors taking you out to lunch and destroying your appetite.
But the idea of making sure the printer is always full of paper as the sole measure of productivity hits on two levels:
(1) I have always been the guy who made coffee, or refilled the paper tray, or cleared the jam. Any business with 100 employees has three of those people, max.
(2) When the suits at HQ took over one place I worked, they created a one-size-fits-all annual review form. First you filled it out, then you went over it with your boss, then it went to HR, then it came back because it wasn't right. Thank god it didn't arrive in Power Point, but that was the only good thing about it.
Not only did it have to be right so you could quit filling it back out, going over it again with your boss and resubmitting it again, but your raise — which could be anywhere from one to four percent — depended on it.
And when I say "one-size-fits-all," you have to remember that a newspaper has reporters and editors, yes, but also bookkeepers and graphic artists and pre-press tech people and sales people and clerks and press operators and fork lift drivers. Same annual review form for each and every employee.
One year, my damn review hung up on what I had done that year to improve safety in the workplace. The year before, I had moved some boxes of records into a corner where nobody could trip over them, but now I was out of things to have done.
We joked about "always check to see that my shoes are tied" and "use the handrail on the stairs" but I don't remember what we made up to keep HR from kicking it back. It might, honestly, have been the handrail.
Whatever it was, the process easily ate up in wasted time whatever paltry raise in pay I eventually was awarded.
And I never got to even tell them how often I filled the paper tray. And I did. Often.
Maybe I should have unplugged the printer first, so I could claim it as an improvement in workplace safety.
… and to the thug life for which it stands …
Clyde explains it all.
A family member sent me this Darrin Bell editorial cartoon on the death of Fred Phelps and my response was that Darrin has just started doing editorial cartoons and has, so far, been consistently awfully good.
But let's not forget that, while it is interlaced with character-driven humor, Candorville is also based on societal criticism. A lot of that is "this is how people are" but some of it is "this is how things are."
Today, Clyde puts into thug jargon a foreign policy analysis that has defied all the editorial cartoons about bears and responses to bears and metaphors about who's a leader and who's a wimp.
Best part is that it says "Don't be that guy" to a crowd who live in mortal fear of "that guy."
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