Can you hear me now?!?

You think your roommate is loud? I beg your pardon. Have you ever had a European roommate during soccer season? We have cable tv for the sole purpose of being able to catch the matches between Italy and ... well, whoever is Italy's main rival in soccer. I don't profess to know much of sports, and luckily, I don't have to.

Because for the most part, my roomie keeps to himself, and I stay in my room reading cheesy romance novels. This is for the best.

You've got mailing address!

Ugh. So many comics to catch up on.

I'm touched by the number of you who read the last comic and sent me a message to tell me your own personal stories of apartment-hunting/craigslist horrors. Luckily, my workplace has a nice distribution list for all manner of outside-purposes. So I fired up an email and pretty much spammed my whole company.

And within a matter of minutes, I'd gotten about 6 possible candidates for hassle-free roommates who had already had a background check run on them. Convenient!

It's Quittin' Time!

My, but it's been a while since I posted a comic, hasn't it? Here:

Well, that pretty much wraps up THAT story arc. I'm sure none of you are shocked that it ended this way. Shortly after quitting that deeply demeaning and abusive job at the boutique, I landed myself another position a little higher up the chain but in Connecticut. More details will be coming. It's better, but as you'll all see, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. My GOD, I wish there were unicorns.

Lunch negotiations

There comes a time in a young woman's life when she has to stand up for all that is right and good and delicious. I don't care WHO you think you are. You do not get to make me work during my lunch break. Lunch is only for eating and decompressing.

To see the comic full-size, click here

I swear if I had to eat in that place, I would keel over from the sheer physical pressure it would require to keep myself sane. And it wouldn't actually be do-able. I would probably throttle her first.

Dis R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There isn't really much that gets my heart pounding more than being called into the boss' office and being told to shut the door. Because once that door is closed, people have not reason NOT to say some really incredibly offensive things.



Maybe I'm just soft from my days working out on the west coast (where they not only probably coined the phrase "passive-agressive", but they also have positive opinions toward taking "mental-health days"), but I was sure that working in some no-name boutique would at least be a little less militaristic than working at a company where I'm nothing but a number. Harsh.

The Final Straw

Oh, for pete's sakes!

My coworkers and I might just be the only people who can say "we hate our job, and our job hates us."

Clap On, Clap Off. Clap On Clap Off!

Repetition makes long strips easier. Luckily, while I am an office drone, repetition is ALL I do.



This is seriously my day. Call the TIME phone line 4 times a day, Sign a piece of paper 4 times a day. All for the sake of making sure we're actually IN the Building. AT work. Not necessarily DOING work but at least they know we're there.

Additionally, they've incorporated a new game into our day: Musical Rooms. In which all 28 of us manage to settle into a room that seats 20 and only has enough outlets and ethernet ports for 20 computers, and then someone tells us that we've been moved to another room on an entirely different floor which is also insufficient to seat us all. So we all hustle as quick as we can to the other room, fighting tooth and nail to get a spot where we can A) sit and B) plug in a computer. Rinse, repeat. They had us switch rooms THREE times.

I'm a Survivor

True Story:


You have to wonder about a company that seriously considers asking its workforce who they would eat first in the case of desertion. You have to wonder about it even more when this company considers this question to be part of "team-building". Personally, I'm not too thrilled that 140 of my coworkers now know that in case of a dire emergency, I would eat coworker Keith. This doesn't make them trust me more, and knowing who they would eat doesn't make me like THEM any better.

Where back at headquarters, so I'm back on a M-F schedule and working 8:30-5. I'm still working on adjusting my schedule.

This comic clearly depicts 4 of my coworkers. I don't think the women will be too unhappy with their portrayal. I think they're sorta cute, and they always are impeccably dressed. The managers however??? My dad thinks I drew one of them kinda girly. Ah well. There's only so much that facial hair can do. You all know that drawing males is not my strong suit. Plus, their clothes are always so boring.

I'm home for the holidays! Hurray!

Bending the Rules

Now that we've been at this hospital for over 3 weeks, there is REALLY nothing to do there. I mean, it's ridiculously slow. Naturally, being an intelligent individual, I am endlessly searching for something to keep me occupied. Unfortunately, nothing is allowed by our "managers". damn. Now we're at a really really small hospital in Manteca. There are more of us than there are nurses! So we get thrown off the floor because we're crowding them.

Twist of irony: I drew this at work two weeks ago, and I am posting this update from work now. MUAHAHAHAH! I'm subverting the system!

You're SUPPOSED to be HELPING

I wish I could say that this hadn't really happened at work, but unfortunately, it sort of has.


I like the color palette for this one!

A Sudden Rush

The generalities of work:

It could be better.
It could be worse.
Overall, I'm just happy I'm getting a paycheck. On the other hand, an 8 hour shift with nurses who are constantly stressed out and don't really want you around... well, they could be paying me more to deal with that sort of thing.



For the uninitiated, my job involves teaching the nurses at a local hospital how to use the new computer system the health-care company just set up there. They have to use the system for EVERYTHING. "Go-live" was on February 9th, that was the first day all the people in the hospital were required to use the program. No more paper.

Study, Study, PANIC

One would assume that if one was in a training class for four months and the average time required to pass the training exam was approximately one month, that one would be quite over-prepared by that time.

The day I drew this, we found ourselves in the awkward position of being trained in the SAME. EXACT. CLASS. as we were in the month before. Same topics being covered. Same doctors teaching us. They didn't recognize us at all. It was as incredibly mind-numbing as it was the first time.



Then, one of the head honchos came in at the end and quizzed us (this happened last time, too, so it wasn't much of a shock). But he decided to act offended that we didn't know how to do anything in departments aside from our own (if "Lisa" works in the emergency department, why on earth would she care to know how jerky a surgeon is going to be when she doesn't know where he should click to learn his schedule. "Tanya" wouldn't be interacting with surgeons anyway!).

In any case, all the doctors started freaking out that we didn't know anything and "Go-Live" is in just 9 days, and our exam is in 2. It's a little late to question your teaching methods, no?

Awfully Glad to be Unhappy

2 Months in to work, it was not going too fantastically. I'd come home very depressed when my shift ends at midnight. And one night's conversation with one of my 'managers' didn't much help. The way things are done at this company really frustrates me sometimes.



I'm trying to let it go though. This was drawn on my last day of work before my "weekend". It'd been 7 days straight, where I'd been doing day shifts, alternating with evening shifts, and it's hard to adjust. I was tired and cranky.

Another Day at the Lab

It's true. Chemists can't keep ANYTHING alive. It's their mission in life to kill everything, whether they know it or not.

Crazy Theater People

When I was a sophomore in College, I took a set design class. As part of our final, we had a role-playing meeting with our professor who pretended to be the director of our play, "The Glass Menagerie". The student who had to go first was totally blind-sided because she just wasn't ready for our prof to say. "I see BLACK". Really, what's that all about!? Theater People are nuts.

Worth Waiting For?

This comic took a ridiculous amount of time to make. Most likely because every computer I've worked on in the past week has been remarkably finicky. As you can see, work was often a little hectic when I was working in the college computer labs, and our new director had stepped things up a little, so the majority of us were running around like crazy. With clip boards and name badges. Nothing makes me feel more official than a useless piece of pressed wood with useless pieces of paper attached to it.

It was also spring semester midterms time, so many of the people around me were in a semi-dream-like state, which required poking and loud noises to shake them out of it. I, myself am prone to such hallucinations as sleep and watching tv. These things simply do not exist.



Sometimes, we all just want to be appreciated for all the running around we do.

This comic features much smaller lines because everything was scanned in originally at 150dpi and then had to be copied over and shrunk down. I'm not sure I care for the style but at least it's done. I was having so much trouble with the tablet and the Photoshop program at work that I actually did half the comic in Macromedia Flash before I gave up and resolved to figure out what the hell was wrong with the tablet driver.

I still have no answers. But this seems to be a common theme, so I'm not going to panic about it.

Sugar High

From working in the computer lab, senior year:

"Ahh, another late night in the computer lab. I'm working a double shift, from 8pm to 2:15am, and I'll probably feel pretty darn tired at the end of it, but my coworker, A- has got to be exhausted. She's been here since 7:45 this morning, taking 6 shifts in a row. Exhausted and CRAZY. This is what happens to you when you have no exams. She's written 3 essays today, and when I look across the hallway, she's actually dead asleep at the desk. I don't blame her.

I recently had a conversation with some of the older folks in my dorm about jobs and employment. Looking back, I haven't had it too bad, and my work experience is definitely well-rounded. They say that's a good thing, since a lot of places won't hire college students straight-off because they've never had any office experience. I've had plenty. I present to you a vague resume of my life:

Chore Pay - My parents paid me a $5 a week allowance if I did all my chores. This included making the bed, tidying up my room, doing the dishes, helping to fold laundry, taking care of the dog and so on.

Dotcom Pay - In 7th grade, I somehow managed to make it onto the roster as a beta tester for a pre-teen website. I gave suggestions and edited and created content. Pretty sweet gig until I realized that I was only making $200 a month. But the dotcom bubble burst 4 months later anyway and it ended up not much mattering. Which wasn't much of a shame because whoever chose their color scheme must have been blind. It was that ugly.

Icecapades Pay - In 10th grade, I became the newest skate guard at the local hockey arena. This would have meant a lot more if they weren't so desperate for staff that they'd hire any schmo off the street. They even hired people who couldn't skate. But the pay was minimal ($6.25 an hour), and my boss was a jerk. And it's hard to get to a skating rink that far away when you haven't got a car. And did I mention my boss was a Jerk?

File Pay - After skate guarding and nursing a lot of scraped knees and bruised egos, I got a job at the local news-clipping agency. You know how after talk shows they say, "If you would like a transcript of this show please contact...." I worked at the place that made those transcripts. I filed. Good God, did I file. I was so fricking efficient. And at the end of the day, it was like I hadn't even made a dent in the pile. There was no feeling of accomplishment, because as soon as I'd finished filing a stack, my supervisor would have already placed a new stack on my desk. It never ended. It was awful. The following summer I went back. And I managed to make it into the summer-worker elite of computer input. Which didn't suck. But my boss was still a Jerk.

And there have been internships and summer jobs

And now I work in a computer lab where people of questionable intelligence abuse me daily. "My computer won't start up!" "Why don't you have PC's?!" "I forgot my printing card!"

Today's comic is of myself and my coworker.



It never ends. I brought candy to work today. Too bad that sugar wears off so quickly..."