Great, and not so great, Expectations – The Daily Cartoonist

I’m always surprised when I stumble across one of those Captchas that wants you to click on picture boxes. It’s like getting into a car and realizing it has a choke, except that you never get into a car with a choke unless you’re at an antique car show.

Which is to say, it’s like being at an antique website show.

I’m getting used to sites sending a verification code to my phone, though I’d find it annoying if I didn’t do 98% of my surfing on a desk top. The odd thing is, when they send the code to my phone, it pops right up, but if they send it to my email, it arrives when it arrives and often not at all.

There’s a subconscious sense of timing people develop about repetitive experiences, the most common being stopping at a red light. You have a subconscious sense of how long the light should be red before it changes, even at an intersection you’ve never driven through.

Similarly, we develop expectations about how a website should function and it doesn’t involve clicking on picture boxes any more than it involves phoning in to AOL.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Rhymes with Orange gives me a small case of the collywobbles, because in the period after I had a paper shot out from under me but before I got a gig with the Denver Post, I applied for a job at a chain bookstore. Or almost did.

Turns out they constantly had “Come work with us!” posters up, even if they weren’t hiring, but you had to take a multipage psych test on the corporate website. As I plowed through it, I became aware that they were trying to sort out the people who loved books and enjoyed talking about them from the people who would just STFU, stock the shelves, do inventory and ring up the purchases.

It was McDonalds without the paper hats and greasy fryer hoods. Which, BTW, was a point in their favor, but I didn’t bother completing the application.

As for a new generation that has rarely even seen an enclosed mall, much less hung out in one, the Buckets reminded me that one of my boys worked at the mall for a time among a network of mall employees who would alert each other when someone was leaving a decent job, of which there were very few.

So the kids would start in some retail hell-hole and eventually climb to better times, some of which were okay but none of which were all that swell.

I gave him a copy of Norm Feuti’s Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee’s Handbook, which was the basis of Norm’s brilliant strip Retail and, I thought, a darkly funny incisive analysis of how that stuff works.

My son’s response was that, while absolutely accurate, reading it made his stomach hurt.

If you read the RWO strip, you’ll understand why malls fell apart as seen in Buckets and if you want to play CSI and track the gory details, get Norm’s book.

It’s kind of astonishing, given how the mall developers treated the stores and how the stores treated their employees, that they existed in the first place.

Though lordy don’t we love to shop. Even cynical xkcd enjoys shopping, as long as he can narrow his list to things of interest.

In ancient times, the marketplace was where you went to interact with the members of your community and perhaps pick up some eggs or vegetables.

Note, however, that we had “Market Day,” not “Market Every Day.” Part of being a modern wage slave involves the constant task of shoveling the money out the door as fast, or perhaps faster, than it comes in.

Niklass Erickson lives in Sweden, and this outsider’s look at ourselves cracked me up. I like kangaroos as well as wallabies and pademelons, but while the big boomers can defend themselves, none of them are paranoid.

So he invented a breed that is, and I doubt he was thinking of Canadians.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Tuesday is Tax Day, and I suppose there will be the usual rush of filers trying to get their returns postmarked before midnight. There ought to also be the usual rush of cartoons of people awash in paper trying to figure out their returns, but maybe the computerized tax prep programs have cut back on that IRL.

Which it should, since whether you’re filing W-2s or 1099s, you put in a little info and the program says “You mean this one?” and up pops the form. Even those of us who are self-employed get help with our Schedule Cs, because the program asks how much we spent on office supplies and so forth.

For most people, there’s no reason to hassle over it, and there was a proposal to set up free filing systems, though the Red Meanies moved to squelch the program. I don’t know why, but the same bullies who claim that migrants don’t pay taxes are now invading the IRS personal files to identify, terrify and deport the millions who do.

Under which circumstances, I get a laugh out of cartoons about how the upper one percent avoids paying their taxes. It’s a new way to chuck a snowball at Count Uptoten in his top hat.

We need Rose to grow up and be the smart person who keeps the world honest, and we need Wallace to make sure she recognizes what’s worth dealing with.

I kind of wish the Snug Harbor gang aged in real time, because they’re gonna be hell on wheels in high school, and I’d love to watch.

Juxtaposition of the Day #3

GoComics seems to have solved the sign-in glitches for their new site, but they’re still not always getting that black plate uploaded, and this time, going to ArcaMax or Washpo didn’t solve things.

Maybe by the time you see this, they’ll have fixed it or DD Degg will have magically found the missing plates. Keep checking.

Meanwhile, dig the other colors.