How to Explain What "the Hell" You Are Doing

When you put yourself in the position of having to come up with a certain number of original jokes a week for several years, you are going to occasionally come up with an idea that is similar to an idea someone else had at some other point in time. This kind of accidental plagiarism is unavoidable. As such, I tend to try to keep an eye out for it when it happens, but I don’t tend to lose much sleep about it.

What does make me lose sleep is when I discover a bit of accidental plagiarism in my work, and find that it appeared earlier in a place that it’s very likely I would have seen it. For instance, the concept of a masking tape mummy came up on the show Phineas and Ferb, a show that I watched religiously for a while.

 Anyway, I have no conscious memory of noticing Phineas and Ferb’s masking tape mummy bit until after this comic ran, and I named my third book “Curse of the Masking Tape Mummy.” I remember seeing it after that all too well.

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How to Write a Superhero Story

Here he is, Omnipresent Man, in his first of what will technically be hundreds of comics, since he is, in theory, present, just out of frame, in every panel of every Basic Instructions I ever made after this point.

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How to Kill Off a Fictional Character

In this comic, I introduced a new character, didn’t quite give him enough attention to make him seem really important, then killed him. Fans of the TV series LOST will recognize this as a classic Nikki and Paulo Maneuver.

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How to Show Some Class

This one was inspired by a trip to McDonald’s, where I saw little plastic pouches marked “Fancy Ketchup.” Good to know they weren’t putting any ol’ low-quality tomato pulp in plastic packets and serving it to their patrons, like Burger King would.

On a semi-related note: a long, long time ago I worked at a Skippers (a chain of fried seafood restaurants that used to be everywhere in the western United States, but now seems to be down to 14 locations). The manager would occasionally bus tables himself when it was busy (which was good). If, on the table, he found paper sugar or salt packets that were soaked with water, coffee, pop, or any other unidentified fluid, he would lay them out on a table in the back room to dry out so he could put them out for other customers to use (which was bad).

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How to Get Out of a No-Win Situation

I did once have a job where one of my duties was to monitor everyone in the office (an office where everyone outranked me, and was paid substantially more than me) to make sure they filed a certain report. If they didn’t complete the report, I was supposed to “get on them” about it.

Several of these people had the power to fire me.

Needless to say, they often failed to respect my authority. More than one of them responded with the helpful suggestion that I fill it out for them. When I pointed out that I didn’t have the information I would need, they tended to offer to email me the information.

One time, when I pointed out that writing the information into an email would take as much time as just filling out the form themselves, I was accused of “getting smart.”

Ever since I was in school, it has continually amazed me that teachers, parents, and employers think of being “smart” as a bad thing.

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How to Listen to a Boring Story

Missy and I have a sort of unofficial ritual of briefing each other on how our day was if we didn’t spend said day together. In a way, it’s like the day isn’t officially over until I’ve told her about it.

I know. That sounds nice.

Unfortunately, in practice, it means that if I have a bad day it’s not officially over until I’ve bummed her out too.

Note from Missy: Fortunately, we work in the same office space now. So those kind of days are far fewer. :)

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How to Discipline Your Employees

I have worked places where the employees would have worn evidence of their rebellion as a badge of honor. I remember a conversation with a coworker who told me with pride about how he was so awful to one supervisor that they put in for a transfer just to get away from him.

I’m pretty sure he still has that job. He certainly never got promoted.

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How to Express Gratitude for an Unexpected Gift

My brother came for a visit, saw the computer I was using to create the comic, and was so disgusted with it that he assembled a computer 10 times more powerful literally out of junk he had laying around his bedroom.  It was the most elegant combination of a very nice gesture and a tremendous personal insult I can possibly imagine.

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How to Save Money

They say that every time the blues man John Lee Hooker performed, he would insist on getting paid before the show, in cash. Then, during the show, the whole time he was performing, he would keep his pay for the gig and a loaded pistol in his hat.

I’ve always chosen to believe that Abe Lincoln followed the same policy.

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How to Upgrade Your Operating System

For the record, I only needed one computer program to make it look like I had some artistic talent.  Of course, it was a highly sophisticated surprisingly expensive program, and I had to use a great many of its more advanced and abstruse functions, but still it was just the one program.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was two.

Note from Missy: I feel like Windows operating systems followed the same quality peaks and valleys as the original Star Trek movies: every bad one followed by a good one, every good one followed by a bad one. By now, though, we may be in to the TNG years of Windows releases.

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