As it says- I had a sh*tty week. This comic is basically a doodle to vent some frustration (parodying the character reveal screens for the new Super Smash Bros that came out this week) with a punchline grafted on.
Crunch time at work had me working tech support/helpdesk for a system I maintain and that’s supposed to be used to log information throughout the year. Everybody waits until the last minute, though, so I was working late and inundated with calls and email arriving in 5/10 minute intervals all day long, most of the week. There was a lot of frustration flying around the office, and a good chunk of it was being taken out on me, because that’s part of what people assume tech support is for.
Top that off with some tendinitis from overwork and a bad habit of tensing up way too much when I’m stressed out, so I was doing this in double wrist braces for a few days. At least they look kinda cool and street-fighter-ish.
Deadline’s passed and my wrists are feeling better after a few days of being stabilized, though, so the worst is over!
Wrist braces and roller blade gloves seem to be really popular with Capcom characters for some reason.
Mandy looks like a golem with those things on.
“MANDY … SMASH”
Sorry to hear about your bad week, hope the next one goes better for you. 🙂
Make a mii of yourself, Make a mii of the people needing a good punch to the face, set stock to 99, set damage ratio to 2.0, watch the bodies fly.
‘S some good stress relief, yo.
Not a bad plan! Seley-Mii is the best new Smash Bros character, too.
Yer Mii’s adorbs.
Nuf’ said.
… Can we see Fox’s?
Lovely.
He’s the only character I play.
‘Uncanny’ does not begin to describe the similarities between the personality Nintendo decided to give Fox McCloud and my own. At one point I had to put down the controller and walk away when the similar reactions I had with the character in ‘Adventures’ culminated with us saying the exact same thing at the exact same time.
I suppose it should be no coincidence the character chooses a similar fighting style.
Nintendo clearly puts some thought into the characters they design.
You guys have made my day two days in a row.
Suppose I could almost say the same about Ike and myself, with almost being the key word. I certainly had a synergy going with his fighting style in Brawl.
Kinda lost my touch though. Now I’m more accustom to the multitasking possition managment that you need to deal with when playing as Rosalina and Luma or Duck Hunt.
Fun fact: The term “Multitasking” originated from a computer’s ability to process multiple tasks at once. Studies show this is literally impossible for a human brain to do. We can split our attention, or switch back and forth between two things very rapidly, but we can’t focus on two things 100%.
That’s exactly how I felt when I switched from a cast to a splint after I broke my wrist three years back.
As well as every time after that when I had to put the splint back on due to tendinosis flaring up again.
You know, Seley is a cat. But that is the first time I recall seeing claws.
Seley is a -sweet- kitty! 😉 🙂 🙂
“Poor planning on your part does not automatically constitute an emergency on my part.”
…nah; we couldn’t get away with that one at IBM either…
I’ve never worked in tech support or a call center BUT I have worked at Office Depot selling computers.
Service is a TOUGH job …
I think/am told that every single year when this happens, but of course I’m not allowed to actually say it.
I know that feeling all too well. Not so much the pain in the wrists, but the pain in the asses that call in the day they need everything fixed right now despite having the issue for weeks or months. T.T
Good Tech Support people are the unsung heroes of our high-tech societies.
Decorate your wrist braces. Whatever you like: Swirls, dots, ponies, radiation symbols, biohazard symbols… Make them noticeable and maybe even warnings.
Did that the last time I had to wear one for an extended amount of time, actually…!
Nice. Next time make it yellow with black lettering: “Warning! Contents under extreme creativity!” or something like that.
The exact reason I stay away from office jobs. That and I just love working at a sawmill.
That’s crazy lol I got a tech support call from TMobile yesterday; I usually try to brighten up their day as much as possible because I understand that service industry sucks ass, even more so when the person on the other end can scream your ear off and you have to grin and bear the whole thing.
My jokes over the line are lame, but you can tell the TS person is thankful for it as they keep talking and eventually I have to tell them I am hanging up.
“Have nice day.”
“You too sir, have a great week and a great weekend and if you have any questions you can call back at this number and if you are in need of …”
oh, and by the way …
FORUMS! pleASE FOR DE LUV OFGAWWDD
The reason they’re not back up is largely because the forums were a maintenance headache for us. Frequent spambot attacks and shoddy security.
I’ve had a bit too much on my plate to put time into researching an alternative with a better reputation/better security. If you know of any (the one I abandoned was PhPBB) I’d be happy to hear suggestions.
I’m a fan of Simple Machines Forum, or SMF. You’ll still have spambot problems no matter what forum software you use. If you’re running a VM or physical box, a good login failure/intrusion detection firewall can go a long way. As a linux sysadmin, I prefer Config Server Security & Firewall, since its basically just a wrapper for iptables. I turned on every IP blacklist, which killed 99% of the bots at the firewall.
From there you can also add extensions that will trip up the bot’s auto-registration. Things like questions that ask you “Are you Human?” and require you to tick a check box, or ask you three times 11 (having to convert a word to a number to answer a math problem trips up the bot).
I’ll look into SMF at some point. In my experience even the “are you human” logic questions get beaten.
I admit I’m definitely dragging my feet on this. No matter what technical tricks you employ, a forum will need vigilance and maintenance, and I’m seriously questioning if that’s a responsibility I want to pick up again.
Share the responsibility with the readers! What if our little community had a forum where people who have made enough comments over enough time (or some other metric) had some kind of mod privileges there? If a community as big and ridiculous as Wikipedia can get by fairly well mostly on volunteer editing, why can’t these kinds of smaller communities do something similar? Just a thought.
Shoot, that’s such a cool idea I’m tempted to start writing some code right now.
Oh, also, when you say “shoddy security”, what kind of thing were attackers successfully pulling off? I never saw the site vandalized or anything.
Deputizing the readers is its own can of worms, I’m afraid.
Mostly the frequent spambot attacks / flood registration, though one of the times the site went down may have been an attack against one of the registration pages for PhPBB.
I’ve got a few leads for forums, I’ll keep you guys posted if it goes anywhere.
Fighting games are a good vent, but going around and punching people in the face is better (especially annoying butts who deserve it).
Venting yields awesomeness … and I’m okay with that
this comic looks awesome, I’m sorry your week was horrible.
I was also unaware that you were a fan of Smash Bros. We should trade friend codes and have a friendly match sometime (that goes for everyone that wants to though)
Oh, I was in that spot for a couple years – I helped create the system and then being tech support was part of my job. And deadlines… once we were taking the system down early on Friday so we could do the normal weekend processing and then do some significant maintenance, so I was going to be working most of the weekend. Naturally we put out LOTS of announcements of the early shutdown on Friday – with the announcements beginning early Monday, and repeated at about 5-minute intervals for the last hour on Friday. Thirty seconds after shutdown I got a call from someone wondering why the system wasn’t up, and could we bring it back up as she was about to start entering her unit’s expense data for the week. The announcements? Oh, she never reads those.
She actually complained to her boss that I was “too polite.” Well, yeah. Being rigidly polite makes it easier to not say what you’re thinking.
My understanding is that when she told her boss what I was “too polite” about, he… was less polite. But a bit later he called my boss and said nice things about me. And my boss passed it on.
Oh, and wrist braces. The medical ones are expensive, and not durable. Once you have the stiff splints from a pair, go to a shop that sells skateboarding/roller-skating gear (Toys-r-Us is where I went) and buy a pair of skaters’ wrist braces. About half the price, better looking, and more durable. But you may want to remove the splints from the skateboarding braces and replace them with the ones from the medical braces.
Well….. it’s so late here that it’s started to get early and I’ve just read your comic from start to, well here.
I’m impressed and…. I think I might be a closet furry. I’m finding the female characters…. distracting. lol
For a new ‘free’ MMO, try a thing called Onigiri, spelled just like the food.
As said previously, good comic, I’ve added it to the huge number of other web comics I read on a regular basis, you are in good company, but notice I’m not saying which ones, I don’t want to advertise them here. 😉
Just noticed Stoli on the donate pic. lol!
HMMMmmmm…..I can be a bit slow on the uptake at times as I have no idea when you changed them, but I absolutely LOVE your new avatars at the top of the page header. You as the uber-artist and ‘Tool-Time’ Fox. :^D
They look great and your style and skills have just skyrocketed. *Two silver-clawed thumbs UP!*
Huh, I thought I was the only person that saw braces as video game character gear.
Yeah, I can sympathize all too well with this one. Let’s just say I’m having a hard time getting some abusive and demanding clients out of my head right now….but thankfully, Smash Bros to the rescue!
I’ve found that the “Burnout” series is also great for venting frustration.