Do You Work Here?
August 29th, 2008 | by jg3 |
At one time in my life I worked in a job where I had to wear a nametag and a tie to work for an hourly wage. After some time I inspected my world and decided that I would make it a goal to never work a job for which I was required to do those things again. Truth is, occasionally it is still necessary but not on a regular basis and if I do submit, I get a decent free lunch out of it.
Working retail is hard. Not heavy lifting hard (well, usually it isn’t), but having to deal with the general public on a regular basis while wearing a funny costume is a certain kind of hard. It isn’t designed to confound and confuse you and crush your soul, but it is designed to squeeze it until the sound of cracking ribs can be heard.
There is a vicious cycle which everyone who walks through the door of a retail establishment is involved with. You automatically have to assume that any employee falls into one of three categories: too stupid/lazy/stoned to work anywhere else and thus probably too stupid to provide any help beyond pointing me to the right aisle for the products I’m looking for. Then there is the slacking underachiever who is plenty smart but battles the spirit-crushing pressure with turtle-speed apathy. Finally, we have the first job-er who has yet to be completely beaten down and has yet to identify which of the two other groups s/he will eventually fall into.
A situation so familiar and so horrible is ripe for laughs and the comic strip Do You Work Here? delivers well. It is clever, it is simple, it isn’t fancy but it gets the point across well.
Another relatively new entrant into the webcomic race, DYWH has only been around since the beginning of the year, so the quantity is still fairly low. While you could argue about the quality of the drawing or site, or even dismiss it because the subject matter is so obvious and easy. But don’t, because the subject matter is so obvious and easy and nobody else, as far as I can tell, is doing it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.