Comic for Thursday, March 7th, 2019
Still sort of busy with stuff and the like. Buffer is suffering a bit, but should be done tomorrow(ish).
The situation at work has gone full untreated sewage, to the point where I can’t even really complain about it here, though I’m 99% sure legal departments don’t read my comic (though after saying that much I should at least clarify that part has nothing directly to do with me). Suffice to say that everyone involved seems to have a highly implausible idea of what it is developers do, but even if my finger tips produced literal magic I don’t think it would solve things at this point, unless that magic involved time travel and some things I shouldn’t type but sound a lot like the title of a play written by Arthur Miller.
Anyway… I shouldn’t rant about these things as you guys are here for a comic, but you see… there is this thing about little empty boxes that you can put text in… words just start filling them… It’s probably of the reason that social media was a mistake.
Ryn may think he is genre savvy, the problem is he probably assumes he’s the main character, with all the perks that come with that (well… in most stories, anyway). Maybe I will write that story someday.
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All right Miko but M.Y.M. IS neurologically implanted in your skull. Can you honestly say you know how he works?
(I would have used bolding for the emphasis but the comments aren’t running BBCode)
It’s your box, you can rant if you want to 🙂
The one I really want to see a deeper story about
is Saria- pretty clear she’s the secret to Ryn’s success and hoping it’s not just a ‘she’s in love with him’ trope.
Perhaps she is the man behind the curtain you aren’t supposed to pay any attention to?
Ryn himself is more than he gives himself credit for – he isn’t an inventor like people think, but he’s a people person, and he’s very good at it.
Ryn is a cool guy and he doesn’t deserve the ridiculous mad science shenanigans he has to deal with on a daily basis…
to quote “Ikki, i don’t do mad science, all i wanted was a beautiful secratary, a flying yacht, and lots of money”
Panel 1: “I might be able to swing by,” Panel 2, Bubble 1: “if i wanted banter from a babbling baboon, I would have gone to a ZOO.” Panel 2, Bubble 2: “I would probably have found a more COMPETENT quality of A.I. research there too.”
Fixed all but the first one. The first one Ryn is commenting about giving Miko a lab instead of just taking Miko to the labs, due to his perception that AVon hires its scientists based on the qualification of how insane they are after dealing with Mir and some of the other ones.
…maybe I misunderstood the fix though, sorry if that’s the case. Little sleepy.
And thanks for the corrections! 🙂
Sorry to hear your work situation.
I have told people that I wouldn’t work for them because so far in my career I’ve never had to call the government fraud line on the mandatory posters on the wall and I consider it a goal to be able to ethically keep it that way.
So I can certainly hear the tones of what you can’t talk about and think, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Good luck.
It is a pretty stupid situation all around. For the most part I am just adjacent to the stupid, but being adjacent to stupid tends to get stupid splatter on your clothes. Honestly it could be for the best from my prospective as if the situation went full upside down fish I could go back to my old project, but I deem that as unlikely right now, mostly because I am a pessimist.
Just yesterday evening, a friend told me about a work situation (different employer from mine) that bears at least a few superficial similarities, in that case, it sounded like, based around incompetent management. I think friend (who doesn’t seem to be part of that project) indicated that if the situation wouldn’t improve, the manager’s would escalate from “talking to politely”. There’s stuff like lack of work planning leading to people sitting around instead of working on the project, what should be informing the customer of a necessary small change in design instead translating to stopping work until some time next week when the customer’s input into the problem would sought, and so forth.
Unfortunately the scenarios described are far from rare in the corporate world. There’s more than one reason for it.
If you really want to see stupid at work (or more often not at work), spend a year working for a government contractor.
You remind me of a meeting I was on a couple of decades ago. It was a simple technical about a migration process for an acquisition to stop using the needlessly convoluted and antiquated database their former parent company used to using the standards-based database their new parent company used. The new database was well documented, with most fields being variable width and optional.
It felt like every instance of that call included somebody asserting that they hadn’t made any progress, because they found out after they set down to do the work they’d been given in the last meeting that they didn’t know how long the data field was in the new directory (0 to bigger than you could possibly need, every time.) *and* one of the pairs of cubemates who worked for different departments had only made a slight amount of progress because they needed input from their cubemate. I think they had so many cubicles cubicles shared by people in different departments in response to earlier frustration with how slowly the project was going. But I cannot imagine why they were allowed to get away with their seemingly blatant feet-dragging efforts.
I left the job where I had to deal with that crap to work for a government contractor. I’m not going to try to claim that there hasn’t been craziness at the government contractor. There absolutely has been. But I’ve never had to deal with crap like that meeting. It apparently went on for *years*, every week. “But exactly how long is the description field?”
There’s scads of horrible, horrible inefficiencies and issues within government work, and it’s often said that it’s because the government doesn’t have to worry about staying in business.
However, I’ve had enough first-hand stories of the really big businesses that can make up several billions by raising the price on one of their products by a dime being as bad or worse.
Basically, yeah. While the government as a concept doesn’t have to worry about staying in business, the individual government employees still need to worry about their jobs – some of them answer to voters, and those are the ones with the most influence.
But for the long established companies with high profit margins… fiscal optimization is one of those tricky things. You pay attention to what you think is most important, but you don’t have nearly as much feedback as tiny companies. So they have some parts of their operations that are tuned insanely well, and other parts of their operation that have been forgotten. Some of which may have been hand-crafted by the CEO… 30 years ago when he was working as a summer intern.
Those bits will probably be the worst, because not only are they 30 years old, but they have a VIP name on them that suggests to others that they shouldn’t futz with it. It’s difficult for institutions to remember that the people running the show weren’t always experienced, and for parts of their careers, they were involved with stuff they really didn’t have the aptitude for. Because that’s part of life – you try a bunch of things, and find stuff you’re good at. In the process, you’ll find a lot of stuff you aren’t.
Also, whomever was the wise guy who decided it would be a smarter move to put a wrapper around your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ ancient crufty code to let it continue working without modification on the newfangled Pentiums… you set a *bad* precedent. And considering nobody’s going to blame the CEO for it, it’s now all your fault.
Please tell me this isn’t a case of new guy hot burn, and management actually thinking that was possible and planning accordingly?
Ryn as the main character? Hold on tight, it’s going to be an amazing ride!
You only think we’re here for the comic. We’re here for the drama, regardless of what universe generates it.
Three of my favorite characters. Fun to see them playing together
I don’t think Miko is playing and she literally has a piece of M.Y.M. surgically embedded in her brain.
I also i don’t think we’ve seen what the acronym M.Y.M. means…
Mind Your Minions
Mind Your Manners
Mighty Young Monkey
Master Your Mind
The possibilities are
I floated “Meet Your Maker” a while back. “Make Your Mark” would also be suitably ambitious.
Martin’s Young Man?
Martin’s Your Master?
Ah, Ryn is picking up on alliteration. Though I think I’d prefer “mysteriously missing Martin”, myself. (Miko’s misidentified either way.)