Discourse, Both Relevant and Meaningful

4 NEW PRINTS IN THE HE STORE! 

Coffee Is LifeThere Are Four LightsSuch Darmok and the remaining (25 or so) signed and numbered Daddy/Daughter Digital Drawing Time Posters have just been added to the HijiNKS ENSUE Store.

The regular prints are available in 8.5×11″ for $9.95 and 11×17″ for $17.95. The Daddy/Daughter prints are marked down from $35 to $15 while they last!

WE FOUND MORE LIL’ WIL WHEATON PLUSHIES!!!

There are about 40 left. GO HERE and get yours. 

UPDATE 4/13/15: I’m over my con crud, done with my taxes and working on the comic backlog. Thank you for your patience. 

COMMENTERS: Is there a part of your job that your coworkers or friends envy because it doesn’t seem like work? 

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36 Comments

  1. I work the front desk of a small hotel. I set the channel on the lobby television. Many people think I get to enjoy watching whatever I want, despite the fact I rarely get to see more than five minutes at a time of whatever is on.

    • I was night auditor at a small town hotel run by the most penny pinching manager ever. The place was falling apart, our pool and hot tub were constantly being shut down by the health dept because of bacteria in the water, and who do we vent our bile of not being able to swim on? Yeah.

      Oh and I was all alone all night long, sometimes with large sums of cash on site (and no drop safe because that costs money duh) right by the highway. Our only security measure was for me to lock the door into the desk/office area but since the front desk is really a big counter…not very much of a deterrant if someone wanted to climb over.

      No other staff on site overnight so that meant if a guest called for towels or other things I had to truck them to their rooms, leaving the desk unattended with a note until I returned. With the scariness of some of our guests and the fact that I was there on weekends (PARTY TIME!) it was lucky if I DID return, one very drunk guy tried pulling me into his room one night, had to fight him off and called the cops when I got back to the desk, they wouldn't take him though, since he was passed out by the time they got there, yipee.

      The manager was so awful about money that when our ancient from the 50's circuit board that controlled power to the rooms went on the fritz he at first refused to call an electrician. Instead he opened the panel and stood there looking at the mass of wires and connections (without cutting power to the board by the way) and grabbed his trusty can of WD40. I and the assistant manager both RAN to the other side of the room while trying to tell him "NO! BAD MANAGER! BAD! ELECTRICITY BIG OWIE!" Thankfully our very real fear of electrocution filtered into his thick brain and he ended up not using the WD40 and called an electrician.

      Yet despite hearing these and more horror stories my friends and family still thought it was a cool slacker job where I pretty much sat around all night playing solitare and watching tv.

      • You need to write these adventures up for Not Always Right or Not Always Working. Sounds like great schadenfreude.

  2. The majority of my income comes from disability, with the jobs I do being a small trickle of pocket change at best, so people naturally assume I can just spend my days doing whatever, which I COULD technically do, if that wasnt incredibly boring.

    • One of the worst jobs I ever had was stay at home customer service via online chat. This was in like 2001, so no highspeed internet and no smart phones. I had to dial in to dial up first thing in the morning, then I would put the computer speaker right next to my head and go back to sleep. I'd get a crazy loud notification, "INCOMING CHAT REQUEST!" and in a stupor I'd log on, talk someone through their satellite TV problems for a few minutes then go back to sleep. I couldn't leave the house, I couldn't really do anything. Some days I'd have 3 chats, some days I'd have none. Just sitting there. Waiting.

      • Could be worse, I do the same thing, but have to do it in an office where we don't even have cubicles…just sit in a row…trying not to commit suicide.

  3. Well, I don't live off music. So when we did our first international tour, everybody kept wishing me a happy vacation despite that being days of driving and doing gigs and not so much in the way of relaxing at all.

    • I feel like people that would classify a tour as a "vacation" have certainly never put on any sort of production, presentation or event and possibly have never travelled out of their own state (which itself is quite a chore).

      • I've helped with setting up and pulling down a few concert rigs, and its utterly exhausting. And I didnt even have to play right afterwards either, I dont know how indie bands do it. The worst part is dismantling the stage, not only is the lighting rig super heavy, but I always burn myself on the lights

        • I'm in duos and we usually either have a fixed stage or bring a pa and light-set that's mobile, not truss-based. Our lightset is LED, so no burning there either. Dismantling shouldn't take more than 30 minutes.. Less, preferably, because beer. That's our offer, if a venue wants more than that, it's up to them to make it happen ;-).

    • I had a boss that once he'd hired people to do basically every aspect of his job he just sat at his desk in a suit (to feel important) and surfed the internet (mostly porn and Apple news) all day. He took maybe 2-3 phone calls a day, packed up his fancy laptop into his fancy attache case and went home in his fancy car feeling super fancy and important.

  4. I spend a lot of time reading International Trade Compliance news. It's full of government regulations and is incredibly boring, but everyone assumes I am just goofing off on the web. Which I am, but not nearly as much as they think.

  5. As a high school teacher, people assume a lot about what I do. The most common is "boy I wish I could get the whole summer off". Just because teachers choose whether to get all of their money at once versus getting paid less a week and having it stretched over the summer does not mean we get paid over the summer. Also, teachers put in work on curriculum planning, developing resources, and oftentimes taking classes to keep up with the certifications and licenses.

    Also, most people who give me that line do not have to individually take care or, or even work regularly with, 150 other people every day.

    • As I grew up and started to realize that (most of) my teachers were actual human people, I had a bunch of frightening and sad revelations. They got to school before I did, stayed MUCH later than I did, then took stacks of papers home (from 8 different classes) to grade at night. When was that person supposed to have a life?

      • Coming from a family with four teachers in it, they kind of don't. Unless they're your rich aunt, with the dentist husband, and only teach the first grade. (It's a lot easier to grade homework that's half a page long.)

  6. Six coworkers and I all worked "with the public." The particular niche I carved out was in our online interaction and presence. Everyone else though I was goofing around on the internet all day while they did "real" work in a face-to-face way. At the end of each reporting period my output exceeded that of the next two highest coworkers combined. When I left it took four people to replace me. They've since whittled it down to two, but I still took no small amount of satisfaction when yesterday they announced how terribly stressed and overworked those two were dealing with a lesser volume than I did by myself.
    Yes, one of the reasons I left was because of the snide, "He doesn't do anything all day" comments. Those seem to have mysteriously stopped. But I'm sure it's only a coincidence.

  7. I get paid to make video games for a living, and I get to do it from home with my husband. It's actually quite a lot of work, but basically every part of my job causes envy in the average person (except maybe my closest friends who see me run ragged and sleepless after two weeks of 12+ hour days).

    • I stopped envying game developers after I made friends with a few people in the industry. Creative work is still work and the design-by-committee nature of games can suck all the fun out of it after a 3 year development cycle.

  8. When I tell people I work at Walmart on 3rd shift, they seem to think we just stand around all night talking and maybe shuffling merchandise around. The reality is, for 9 hours a night, I bust my ass moving carts overloaded with cases, trying to put away hundreds of cases worth of freight before the customers come barreling in for their crap. And when some of those cases are 40+ pounds, it can be quite a work out. Oh, and I can't forget to mention helping unload the random trucks that we get in per night. Nothing like hauling 1-ton+ pallets around for exercise.

    Oh, but yea, I never have to work hard, because there's just so few customers, so what could I possibly be doing all night >_>

    • I shop at Wal-Mart during your shift sometimes, because crowds are stupid. I empathize. What you describe is exactly what I see when I go.

      You forgot to mention the floor care though. 🙂

  9. I'm a chemist who works with hazardous waste as alternative fuel. People hearing that are usually pretty sure it needs to be mentioned that I must be creating superheroes, whether purposefully or inadvertently. I'm not.

    Also, people (read: visitors) sometimes come into the lab when I'm mixing chemicals into batches for lab use. They are usually pretty sure that means I'm making drugs as a side project. I'm not.

    I think some of these people envy being able to identify as a "chemist"…kind of like being able to say, "I'm an astronaut." It's a job with so many cartoonish stereotypes and media representations that the general public's concept of the enterprise never gets around to thinking of it as "work"; therefore, it must be non-stop amazing fun to be around all these arcane glass containers with sciency liquids in them what explode when you touch them wrong. So to speak.

    No disrespect to cartoons intended. 🙂

  10. I work at a specialty paper mill; I may have made the coat/seal on your last book, (I CERTAINLY made the coating for the thermal receipt from your last trip to <insert big box store here>).

  11. I am a stay at home mom. Apparently just about everyone I know got their reference for that from Married With Children, because they don't have the first freaking clue. Add in the fact that one son has mild autism and the other not so mild and cracks like "I wish I could stay home and do nothing all day" have my husband reflexively grabbing my arm before the slapping happens.

    • Peggy Bundy may well be the most famous stay at home mom since June Cleaver. You may well be right that that's where the template is coming from.

  12. I work at home as a software consultant and most people think that I don't wear pants, or work for that matter. I do get to spend some of that time completely fucking off on the internet and not getting fired for it … and making my own schedule.

  13. I work in theatre so I would say basically my life? People think it's more glamorous than it is. Today I spent like hours just hauling shit back and forth from the theatre to the rehearsal space, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning the prop room. woooooo

  14. I also make drawings for a living. Not exactly webcomics, but I get the same kind of feedback and incorrect assumptions that you probably do.

    People: Oh, you draw things for a living! That must be so easy and fun, all the time.

    Me: *Hair catches fire, glare of death.*

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