CSotD: Son of Humpday Humor
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We’ll start out with one that knocked me over. Susan had accepted a job, along with her former boss Savreen, only to find it was a soul-killing dead end. She’s been pondering and job searching and getting frustrated, but today seems promising.
What jolted me was that several years ago, I dropped into my boss’s office and suggested we go down to the coffee shop on the next block. He said he was kind of busy, but we could go have coffee in the break room.
To which I replied, “I know you took the buyout.” And so we walked down to the coffee shop.
Turns out they gave him a generous severance on the condition that he pack up and get out and not say goodbye to his staff. Nice folks to do business with.
It took me a couple of months to find my own exit, which turned out to be a much better job anyway.
I hope Savreen has something good to share with Susan.
This one falls under the category of “Ain’t It The Truth?” Even places that didn’t make gold watches used to hand them out to faithful retirees, but those days ended in our grandparents’ era.
There aren’t a lot of people who stay in one place for 40 years anymore, but then there aren’t a lot of places that make you want to stick around that long.
If nothing else, even if you like working in a place, just wait three or four years and it will be sold to a vulture capitalist who will install a button-down business school android in place of the boss you liked.
I worked at three different papers that were sold after I’d been there awhile, one of them to Lee and another to Alden. I didn’t stick around to see if I’d get an Amazon voucher, and they sure weren’t handing out watches.
Janis Ian‘s most recent Quote of the Day was “Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than spend your life in the wrong room.”
Words to live by.
I like the plan, except that, no matter how assertive you already are, the AI chatbots make it really hard to connect with a human these days. I often feel that I’ve stumbled into 2001: A Space Odyssey or WarGames, because, while they haven’t yet made a bot I want to talk to, they’ve designed some that are extraordinarily assertive themselves and reluctant to relinquish control.
If you ever do eventually get to a human and complain about the interface, they sigh and say, “Yeah, I know.” I think the purpose of the chatbot is to make sure any customer who gets through is completely pissed off before they even start talking to a real person.
I’m a great believer in the idea that every CEO should visit their website as a guest and sample the customer experience for themselves.
But if you made it a rule, they’d delegate the task to an underling.
Danae has good timing, because just about the time this ran, the Minnesota Vikings added two guys to their cheerleaders and Tommy Tupperware has gone ballistic. He is often referred to as the dumbest elected official in the country, but it’s not like he hasn’t worked hard to earn the title.
I was at Notre Dame when they added women cheerleaders to what had been, since Rockne’s days, an all-male group. It enraged some macho types, but they got over it. Tommy will get over it, too, and find a new shiny object with which to enrage himself.
He needs to get a grip, because NFL cheerleaders are there strictly for the TV cameras. If there are 70,000 people at a game, maybe 200 are close enough to see the cheerleaders, who look like ants to everyone else in the stadium.
And since Instant Replay came along, the cameras don’t focus on the cheerleaders much anymore.
Anyway, if George W, Ike and FDR could all be cheerleaders, I think a senator should admit he’s outranked, even if he won’t admit he’s got doubts about his manhood.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Appropriately, I have nothing to add.
I’m so old I remember when a lot of people stopped eating bacon because it is a combination of salt, fat and nitrates. Not only did the pork producers survive, but they managed to turn bacon into something so fantabulous that it’s on everything and people don’t just eat it but gush over it.
I remember when we didn’t even feed the real stuff to our dogs.
I like to pick out thoughtful cartoons that can spark conversations and lead you to new ideas.
I also like really silly ones, and Kyle Bravo has been red hot lately. The socks are a great touch.
My ADHD makes it impossible for me to sit through podcasts at my desk, so I record them and listen to them while the dog and I are driving to the dog park twice a day, since driving and listening are things I can do at the same time.
But walking the dog while you wear earphones is sure not my style. I watch TV while I do the dishes because I have to do the dishes and I don’t much enjoy it, but I have a dog because I want a dog.
We’re currently flooded with cartoons about how glad parents are to have their kids out of the house and back in school, and I can’t relate to those either. But you can have kids by accident, and getting a dog is a conscious choice.
Thandi is right. A little homework offers practice, but it’s better to teach well than to assign a ton of busywork. Ideally, you leave time at the end of the lesson for kids to do some problems while you are there to guide them.
Sending them home to work things out on their own is silly: If they could do that, why are you necessary?
This came up on my music yesterday and made me smile. Sing along if you’re fluent in Douala.
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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