Unsupervised Whiners

WE FOUND MORE LIL’ WIL WHEATON PLUSHIES!!!

trouble-with-lil-wils-03-18-15

72 more, to be exact. GO HERE and get yours. 

Someone must have gotten them wet and fed them after midnight, because when Explosm (who used to handle my merch) moved warehouses, they found another box of Lil’ Wils.

I know I’ve said this 3 or 4 times in the past, but this is really it. These are the last ones. The old warehouse is completely empty and no more will ever be made. I promise. They are still half price. Just $10 while they last!

EMERALD CITY COMICON IS AT THE END OF MARCH! 

emerald city comicon 2015
I will be at booth 110 with my con-wife David Willis. I will have old prints, NEW PRINTS and THE SKETCH-A-MATIC! Come see me, and bring me booze and cookies as is our tradition. (There is a helpful map of various Hiveworks webcomics at ECCC here.)

I used to be a boss. A manager, really. It was one of the least rewarding, most frustrating experiences of my life. I love teaching, and I love mentoring, but all the love and joy of the teacher/student process are just sucked into oblivion for me and I have to start dealing with things like “I need to get off an hour early,” “I have a problem with my cube mate,” and “I am simply too dumb to carry out the simple set of tasks you have laid out before me, despite your very clear instructions and the fact that I have performed these same tasks (poorly) dozens of times.”

It was a learning experience, in that I learned that I should never ever ever ever manage a team of underpaid, 20-something dumb-dumbs ever again. Especially if the thing we are collectively doing is a thing none of us particularly care about. I like being in a leadership role, but I need to actually be passionate about the goal and working with competent, enthusiastic people who bring their own special skills and creativity to the table. Where I fail is at giving a shit or even a collection of shits about the reasons young people with $100K in student debt can’t just fucking download the website via FTP before they work on it so they don’t overwrite the changes someone else did earlier in the week when they upload THEIR changes! Fucking Christ, Todd, I swear to shit you are as dumb as a bucket of who gives a fuck.

COMMENTERS: Do you need to be supervised and managed, or do you need to be left the butts alone to get your damn work done? Are you a boss? For PEOPLE?! Gross. Stop that.

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33 Comments

    • I wish I did. Getting furious with management requires me to self-soothe by playing some variation on 2048 before I can get back to working, even if I actually would rather be working.

  1. I need constant motivation when doing math homework normally threats Xbox shortages and tech bans also cat phoros

  2. I'm curious to see where this is going. I recently started laying out rough drafts, and letting people dictate the details of the finished version. It's been helping my work-at-home work ethics. It is kind of like having a boss, because they pay me, and if I don't do the work eventually, they get angry. Same thing! No actual singular dick-boss, and if I do what I'm supposed to do, each individual person, eventually loses their right to yell at me. I like it.

  3. Fear has never been a very good motivator to me, I just sorta go "fuck it" and ignore everything until it goes away.

  4. I'm getting better at being my own boss (who is, by the way, a total tool) but it's still a challenge. I have a ton of market research I need to do now, and my internal boss is really breathing down his employee's neck (who is, by the way, a complete slacker).

  5. "What is the greatest thing you have learned in university?"
    "How to cope with a team of people who for some godforsaken reason cannot manage their own work."

  6. i swear to god, i did think that i was the only one, joel i've being a silent reader of your comic for quite some time and this get me… i'm not lazy but i can't for the life of me focus or do something if the autority figure is not there breathing over my neck, is frustating to say the least. i just need the estructure, i hate being a drone but being my own boss is a pain in the ass

    • The way I see it you're only a drone if your boss is a tyrant, there's a big difference between cracking a whip and actual whipping!

  7. Someone once did the math and realized that, in a typical month, YouTube gets somewhere around 80 years of video uploaded to it. Okay, it was me, and it was like a few months ago so who knows now. But anyway. 80 years. More than an average United States' male's lifetime. IN ONE MONTH. How do we get anything done at all, knowing full well that, at any time, we could pop open YouTube and spend decades watching just what showed up in January 2015?

    • By knowing that the cream generally rises to the top, and we only want the cream. And are only interested in a few flavors of the cream.

  8. Yeah, I'm in the "leave me the butts alone so I can do my damn work" category.
    I mean yeah, if it's a "new task" that actually needs to be done a certain way, fine let me know that up front then let me do my work. But if I'm getting the job done and your satisfied with the work then leave me the ass'butt alone, don't nit-pick my damn process unless you have an issue with the end result. If you do have an issue with my work, please be frank about, hell fire me if need be. But otherwise butt your butt out of my butts space you butt!

    As to being a "boss" No Thank you. I don't actually like… what are those things called again?… oh, right "People". So why the Hades would I want to actually be in infernal creatures known as "coworkers", damn their useless hides!

    (I say all this, and yet I still usually end up in the "person who keeps the wheels turning" position. Letting someone else "make the decisions" while steering them in the most effective direction, and gently keeping everyone working together and moving forward.
    BAH! people need to stop expecting me to be the reasonable/helpful/organized one. Don't they realize I am a bitter cantankerous SOB who hates them all?!)

    • I somehow deleted half a sentence there.

      It's supposed to read "…why in Hades would I actually "Want to be in charge on them. And don't get me started on those infernal creatures known as coworkers…"

      Don't know how I deleted that section, but I wish I could edit my comment (or was smart enough to review it BEFORE posting. but of those 2 options I doubt the "me being smarter" one is likely to happen any time soon)

  9. When I first start working somewhere and the management seems to forget that I am a New Worker Droid that hasn't been programmed yet being left alone is The Worst because I know I'll fuck something up and be yelled at even though it isn't my fault. But once I've been successfully programmed, Leave Me The Fuck Alone To Do My Damn Job and it will get done without management breathing down my neck.

    Though my last job (which was a work study job at my university in the computer lab) it didn't help that our section at one of the smaller campuses functioned differently than things do at the main campus so when shit went wrong they'd be like "Why didn't you do X?" "Because we don't do X. We do Y." "What's Y?" *long explanation of Y* "You should do X" "We can't do X and I just explained to you why we can't do X." "Well you should do it anyway!" Worse was the supervisor above us who didn't actually know what we did 90% of the time because he left the supervising to the student supervisor which became a major issue when the good one graduated and had to be replaced and the replacement only wanted the job so she didn't have to deal with the students in the lab anymore. I left not long after she was hired because I was tired of taking the blame when shit went wrong because she'd told me incorrectly or hadn't know herself so I'd had to make something up. Honestly it made me miss retail because at least being able to blame corporate was a valid option that didn't bite me on the ass.

  10. I work best when I'm left the fuck alone, by which I mean I'm NEVER EVER EVER GOING TO GIVE THE TINIEST FRACTION OF A SHIT ABOUT VERINT, DHAVAL, AND NO I HAVEN'T COMPLETED THE HOUR-LONG WBT WE JUST HEARD ABOUT TEN MINUTES AGO SO GO AWAY.

  11. I am a grunt–a "paralibrarian"–at one job, and at my other, while I lack any real power except over the class of students I teach, I am effectively left to my own devices, with 30-minute classroom evaluations coming once every two years or so.
    I've been a manager–of a Christmas season "pop-up" major toy store–and at the end of that season, my supervisor and I agreed that said toy store was not designed to be managed by people with graduate degrees.

    I have said for years that my ideal job would be sitting alone in a room with a computer and a goal, and being left completely alone until that goal is achieved. I do not yet know what that job is.

    However, I've started Googling things like "careers with no public contact" or, as of this morning, "jobs for people who hate other people." Good ideas on that one.

    • I had a job like what you described, and it's called "data entry". At Apple. It was great. Just me and my MacBook in a tiny closet of a room I considered my "office", meeting with the rest of my team an hour a week to update my boss on my progress, and occasionally meeting them during lunch.

  12. I know you're probably super busy (and exhausted) with cons, but just wanted to let you know that I really hope you keep putting up the con photo strips because those are awesome. 😀

    • I haven't done any of those in a few years. They were always the most divisive part of the site. People either loved them or hated them. Now that they've been moved to their own section, it would be less invasive to post them. Though I haven't really felt like making them in a good while. I took some fun photos with David Willis at ECCC, but I posted post of them on various social media already. Who knows?

    • Almost none. The flight alone to Australia would cost more than I normally earn at a 3-4 day convention. The only way to do Australia is as a guest (flight, hotel and table provided for free by the con) and I\’m about 200-500% less famous than people that typically get that sort of treatment.

  13. Joel, I love your stuff, but I wish it were a bit more consistent. Is it just that you need more patrons through Patreon to help you post more funny-ha-ha's or is your current story line a little too autobiographical? As a slacker myself, I know I can't be self-employed unless I make some significant changes.

    • I hear you. I've been struggling lately. I got sick at ECCC and have spent the last week pretty much asleep or expelling snot from my head. But, excuses are just excuses. The goal of my Patreon was to do less conventions (essentially NO conventions) because they are the number one killer of my productivity. With preplanning, travel, the actual con and the post con rest and/or con crud sickness they can eat up 2 weeks + of my time. It didn't work out that way, and unfortunately cons are still an essential part of my making a living. I could risk it and just give up cons and focus on nothing but comics which would probably lead to more patrons which would probably lead to less dependence on cons, but that would be a huge risk. I have to agree to go to cons almost a year in advance. Once I've agreed and tables are bought and flights and hotels are paid for, I can't really back out without taking a huge financial loss. It's a catch 22, and I don't have a great solution for the problem.

      • Put a rider in your contract for any convention you are asked to attend that you must be at all times in a negatively pressurized hotel room, with a picture window, private bath and kitchenette, and signings will only be done when the material is sent, irradiated, through the viewing port on the left. The nursing staff will handle the purchases and cash, and wish the event coordinators a good day!

    • Also, I would like to make sure I point out how much I appreciate your kind and civil tone when offering feedback/criticism. I get flack for \”not appreciating criticism\” when laying into people who are incredibly rude in their comments. The Internet seems have to taught people that anonymously shouting opinions at strangers that didn\’t ask for them is a valuable service. THIS is constructive criticism. THIS is how you do it.

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