And isn’t that an enticing headline?
Alex made me laugh but, as it often does, also made me ponder, which isn’t the same as making me think.
That is, nothing cosmic, but, rather, a question of how much job-hunting and head-hunting happens over the phone these days?
In 1999, when I was aching to get out of a bad work situation, a business conversation turned slightly personal, the person at the other end mentioning her plans to retire shortly.
I don’t remember how I upgraded that into a job interview, but I lived close enough to the office that I went home for lunch and I do recall some phone-based job prospecting from that secure location.
The next two times I was looking to jump from a sinking ship, however, it was all done by email and, since I was smart enough to use my personal account, I could do it discreetly from my desk or after hours from home.
Meanwhile, the convergence of smoking outside and wearing masks inside reminds me of when King Soopers in Colorado banned smoking in their grocery stores (Yes, O Best Beloved, people once smoked in stores.)
On one of their new no-smoking signs, someone wrote “You sell cigarettes!”
Under it, someone else wrote, “They also sell toilet paper.”
That, dear friends, is a riposte!
And speaking of good moves …
Sunday’s Off The Mark may have provoked a different level of laughter in some places than others.
When I moved from Colorado to New York State in 1987, I found that the rules and regulations for residential real estate were quite different.
As noted yesterday, residential real estate is regulated to protect consumers, who don’t have a lot of experience in the field, as opposed to parties to commercial transactions, which are a full-contact blood sport.
Being a Realtor in Colorado was practically like being a CPA or an attorney in the level of fiduciary responsibility demanded of a licensee, while things were considerably more, well, fluid in New York at the time.
As the new kid in town straight off several years of covering real estate, I thought I’d warm up in that familiar zone, but discovered I had to make a lot of phone calls before I even found a Realtor who understood the concept of buyer agency, and while “errors and omissions” was a frequent lecture topic for Colorado Realtors, my new market apparently operated on don’t-ask-don’t-tell.
Presumably they’ve caught up, but it’s important to know the rules before you rely on them.
In this case, specifically asking for disclosures proves these are no dumb bunnies, as long as they get the answer in writing.
The gag being that they won’t.
Juxtaposition of Funny/Not Funny
Meanwhile, here’s another case in which the comics are funny but the topic isn’t.
I assume city folks have at least read about the importance of keeping your food secure if you go camping, but in less urban areas, it’s more of an everyday issue, at least in the Spring when the bears wake up hungry.
We haven’t had a problem at my house, but a friend a block away has had to not simply secure her garbage but take in her bird feeders, and she’s still two blocks from the edge of any forest.
Our most famous ursine resident is Mink the Bear, who turned to crime after being fed, yes, doughnuts, but, spared execution by the governor, was transported to the rural north of the state.
As predicted, she promptly returned and has had yet another litter of little nuisances this spring. Nor is she alone: This place is crawling with bears.
The shame being that black bears are, by nature, pretty harmless critters and, while they’re not the shyest animals in the woods, they normally keep to themselves.
Back in the days of town dumps, people in truly rural areas used to drive out in the evenings with bags of marshmallows and feed the bears who emerged from the forest to pick through the garbage, but that ended years ago with mandatory landfills.
Even then, however, we knew that what happened at the dump needed to stay out there on the fringe of town.
True words: “A fed bear is a dead bear.”
Wotthehell, let’s keep going …
F-Minus adds to our collection of funny strips that aren’t funny with this proposition that seems more ridiculous than it probably is.
Tony Carillo bases his gag on the notion that money talks in criminal matters, which, alas, is true.
I sat on a jury that quickly acquitted a young man charged with assault with a deadly weapon, but only because he lucked onto a public defender with an unusual sense of dedication.
His attorney told me later that far too many of these cases were pled out so that a person potentially facing 20 years only served 5 for something he hadn’t done in the first place.
When it comes to legal counsel, you generally get what you pay for.
Speaking of which, this Pros and Cons cracked me up. But I digress.
F-Minus also builds on a bit of history: During the Civil War, rich boys like Grover Cleveland who got drafted were entitled to pay someone else a bounty to serve in their place.
Which was more out front than paying a doctor to certify imaginary heel spurs, the flaw in the system being that the person accepting the bounty didn’t always stick around to die in glory like they were supposed to.
Damned untrustworthy peasants!
Timing is everything dept.
I’ve been reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian ultimately executed for his part in an attempt, along with members of German Intelligence, to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
This Bizarro dropped the morning after I had read this section:
Which made Bizarro, well, not all that funny, though I liked it for more or less the same reasons I’m enjoying Bonhoeffer’s biography, which I won’t share in a Friday Funnies posting.
Thank God for Macanudo
This Macanudo doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a cartoon.
More than one “substitute” hired to serve in the Civil War not only didn’t show up, but enlisted in several other places, collecting a bounty each time and not ever seeing battle.
BTW, one of those jobs I negotiated by phone over my lunch hour at home was in Tacoma and we went through a couple of conversations, until we got to the one after which I would get on a plane and fly out there.
Only she said, “I need to tell you that I’m leaving. My husband got a job in Dallas with Belo so we’re going. Also, my boss is retiring.”
Which is to say that, if all went well, I would pack up and drive 2,800 miles for a job in which the woman who hired me and who would be my boss wouldn’t be there and the person to whom she reported would also no longer be there.
As is so often said, it’s not that you can’t make this stuff up, but that you don’t have to.
The Pros & Cons strip is absolutely masterful. In three simple panels he captures this scene. This couldn’t be told as a joke or as a pun. It’s not slapstick. It’s hard to see how it would work in a movie or tv show, or on the stage. It’s a comic strip, and it’s funny as hell. Is the cartoonist Meehan?