Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 13, 2021

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!”

This is a company of crazy people ……or very smart.

Things are definitely not going as planned by the big boss. Fear & panic are in the air.

Clearly the word of massive layoffs has preceded Mike’s arrival. If you see [some senior exec] walking toward you, it’s the executioner.

Zeke’s identical twin brother?

GBT’s “morally ambiguous” human characters (Zeke, Duke, Honey, Earl, Havoc, Clyde, Sal “Dr. Whoopee” Doonesbury, Jeff after he joined the CIA, others) almost invariably* have their eyes concealed by hair or glasses so that so that they neither look like “wide-eyed innocents” (like Zipper, Jeremy, and most children) nor look like slightly more narrow-eyed, reasonably cynical adults (almost every adult character whose eyes are not, in fact, concealed by hair or glasses).

Obviously, GBT didn’t conceal Tim’s eyes by accident, he made that conscious artistic choice. This implies that Tim will eventually prove himself to be “morally ambiguous” but for all I know, this is his only appearance. I guess we’ll find out sooner or later. Unless we don’t. ;-)

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*To anyone who simply HAS to be That Person who contradicts every conceivable statement, I included the “almost” just for you. ;-)

Whoops – someone forgot to secure the files before beginning to tell people goodbye.

Up load your files. Down load your trojans. Start the car, hit the bar, and mass mail your resume. You’re FREE!

“What rough beast, it’s hour come ‘round at last, lumbers toward Tim’s career?”

And that is why the first step in layoff is locking the profiles of everyone on the list. “Huh? Really? Must be an IT issue. While they get that worked out, lemme holla at ya for a second, playa.”

No, Tim! Don’t ask what’s going on, you walked right in to that one.

This section of the company are VERY dramatic, aren’t they.

Where was the shadow of doom and all that wailing back in 2015… WHEN I NEEDED TO HEAR IT??!

“And listen – the rending of Gapwear!” Best line I’ve read in a while!

The first rule that HR people all know is that you cut off a persons access to the system before you fire them

Even Worse, they are Nuking the files that contain the Source Code for the Company’s best selling products.

Not a layoff, but a reverse sort of situation, from the files of “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”: I had quit a job because I was sick of the new Psycho-Director. \ I was one of two people there who knew how to archive the system so that it wouldn’t fill up. (This was long, long ago, lol). But one day, a coworker who was my friend called and pleaded with me to come in and archive the system so it wouldn’t crash. (The other person really didn’t know how to do this.) I obligingly went in and cleared it all up. Then it had some problems in a couple of days (which was a frequent occurrence) and I got a call saying that the Psycho-Director suspected me of botching up the system when I came in and fixed it! (As if I would even know how to do that.) Needles to say, I NEVER did anything “helpful” like that again.