I honestly thought I was being parodic with Andi’s boss, until I joined a subreddit where people share bad work experiences. Aaaaand holy crap, some employers are off their rockers.
↓ Transcript
TODD: Okay, girls, lets get moving on breakfast.
AMANDA: Uuuggh...
SELKIE: Why’re you sos groan-y today?
AMANDA: Because I was grounded from TV all weekend, then Mom yanked me out of bed at four in the morning.
SELKIE: Maybe she's a superhero, ands the Cat Signal went offs.
AMANDA: Shut up.
TODD: Amanda's mom got called into an "Emergency Meeting", Selkie. She had to go to work.
SELKIE: Superheroing IS work. Just sayings.
AMANDA: Dad, please. Don't make me deal with her without either coffee or candy.
AMANDA: Uuuggh...
SELKIE: Why’re you sos groan-y today?
AMANDA: Because I was grounded from TV all weekend, then Mom yanked me out of bed at four in the morning.
SELKIE: Maybe she's a superhero, ands the Cat Signal went offs.
AMANDA: Shut up.
TODD: Amanda's mom got called into an "Emergency Meeting", Selkie. She had to go to work.
SELKIE: Superheroing IS work. Just sayings.
AMANDA: Dad, please. Don't make me deal with her without either coffee or candy.
Background info / lore notes: Selkie's May 24th Birthday is actually the day she was dropped off at the orphanage. They had no other sources to derive a birthday from. Plo Quar wouldn't even kow becuse she was on the run when she had Selkie and didn't really have a way to track calendar passage. Therefore, Selkie's TRUE birthday is lost information. But no one's told her that because it's kinder to just let her have a dedicated day for herself.
Amanda i never felt close to someone who shares my name. Coffee first…or candy
I just started a new job this Monday. The last place I worked at was one of the most aggressive, toxic work environments I’ve ever experienced.
One boss likes to yell at women exclusively and often in front of their co-workers, sometimes to the point of tears. The 3rd time I went to HR they looked at me point blank and said, “But what did he do to you though?”
Any company that doesn’t realize that this kind of behavior can greatly damage moral across all levels isn’t a place worth working at.
That’s not even talking about the almost constant mandatory over time since the day I started working there, so almost five years ago. I remember one year we were working Christmas Eve, even though we didn’t have anything to do.
They teased us with a bonus 4 or 5 months ago and then out of the blue told us we weren’t getting it, even though they themselves said we were meeting all their sales goals. They claimed they needed to review the metrics for the bonus and left it at that.
I bet tbey also train you to do twice your job description too, I know the kind of company. If it were me, I’d be searching for a job and calling out sick for interviews, and once you have something lined up that compensates you appropriately for your skill, smack em with the two weeks notice and duck your head down for that two weeks to whether the yelling a bit longer. Find someone who’s kind enough to give you a reference there and dip asap.
Selkie is noted to have been dropped off at the orphanage May 24, 2002, stated both here and in comic 101. She would have been about three years old at that time, yes?
In comic 221, Theo is researching ‘Fish People’, and the link he misses but is highlighted to the readers claims ‘Merman Caught in Great Lakes! | Paranormal Weekly: 13Apr2002, roughly 6 weeks before Selkie was dropped off. I think the original setting of that was this was the murder that ended up starting the Civil War in Sarnoth, but the times don’t add up.
Is this an oversight, or something that hasn’t come up yet?
That’s a good point. Because Plo Quar was at the farm for awhile, too. We don’t know how long Sarnothi are preggers after they conceive before they lay their eggs, but even just accounting for Selkie’s age and not factoring in how long she was at the farm, there should’ve been at least a 3 year gap in time between then and Selkie being dropping off.
On page 38 Selkie says she’s been at the orphanage since she was 5, and Wu remarks that that’s been three years.
That… may very well be a timeline mistake on my part. The civil war predates Selkie’s birth, but was also still ongoing after Plo Quar fled.
You’ve been doing this a long time, so it’s understandable! I just was wondering, and figured it was just an oversight.
True story: I worked security in college during the second shift (4:00 – midnight). The boss at the time called an emergency mandatory 6 AM meeting for everyone. The night before someone was late coming in to relieve me so I didn’t land up getting more than 2-3 hours of sleep that night. (I have a medical condition that means when I don’t get enough sleep, I get physically ill. I tried to explain this to the boss but he didn’t care.) I was SO not safe to drive to work at 5:00 AM. It’s a miracle I didn’t run off the road or cause an accident! And the meeting was him yelling non-stop at us and telling us a how terrible we were at our jobs. I quit very soon after. There were a LOT of other reasons (including the boss reporting people to the INS/ICE if he felt they “might” be undocumented! 🤬 ) but, as much as I desperately needed the money, risking my life for an abusive, useless meeting was the final straw in a huge haystack.
Yes, welcome to being a middle-grade worker in the US! *UGH*
My previous job used to do this to us all the time, because they’d rather cater to upper management’s schedule than their actual employee’s.
They were constantly trying to get me to come in at what I consider unholy hours and I simply told them that if they wanted me there, they could schedule the meeting during my shift.
My shift supervisor could almost always tell me what happened in half the time it took than the actual meeting itself.
Way too many employers feel entitled to your life, in and outside of work. No thanks.
Who is giving an eight year old coffee? I don’t want to say coffee is “bad” for kids, but I certainly don’t think it’s great.
I see kids in middle school with those big ass cans of monster energy drinks. Maybe I am an old jerk, but I feel like those things should be 18+ to buy and consume.
I’m kinda with you on that, given that there are legitimate medical groups that advise against significant caffiene consumption in children. The Canadian government recommends no more than 62mg daily for an 8-year-old, which is like half a cup of coffee.
I’m even more with you on energy drinks. A handful kids may have actually been killed by those things, and thousands of teenagers definitely end up in the ER due to energy drinks.
Fun fact: Some energy drinks are labeled as supplements, so they don’t have to adhere to FDA limits on how much caffiene (or whatever else) food is allowed to contain. Some of those things have genuinely disturbing amounts of caffiene in them.
No one is giving her coffee. In Friday’s strip she asked for coffee when Todd gave her the pancakes, and he told her no. She is still trying to get coffee, because she’s a kid and that’s what they do. But no one is giving her coffee.
Also, she is nine. Had her birthday a couple of months ago.
I think that’s a pretty bad trope. Seeing kids want coffee has been fairly uncommon to me. Kids asking for it typically do because they’ve been already allowed to have it.
It may just be a figure of speech. I know a few people who don’t drink it at all, but who still regularly say things like “haven’t had my morning coffee yet”. It’s just something you say without really meaning anything, and it’s more than plausible that Amanda might have picked that up from the adults around her.
Haha I have never met someone who makes a comment like that and doesn’t drink coffee. Kind of ridiculous. At least change the addiction.
Don’t even think about talking to me until I’ve had my morning blunt.
Where I worked very few under 50 years drank coffee, but regularly used the excuse, “Haven’t had my coffee yet,” for rumpled clothing, bed-head, etc. in A.M. meetings.
A lot of people with ADHD (diagnosed or otherwise) self-medicate with caffeine because it’s one of the few unregulated stimulants in the US.
Amanda’s asking for “coffee or candy”. Since Todd’s already said no to coffee, my guess is she’s hoping for candy. Which she shouldn’t really have for breakfast either, but that’s not going to keep her from asking.
Maybe a cup of hot chocolate instead of coffee?
I let my kid have occasional sips or an espresso sized cup with milk since age 5 because that’s what my Mom did. When the grownups had coffee I had my cup, mostly milk with just enough coffee to color it. The ratio changed as I got older.
I’ve been giving her black coffee regularly since she was 8.
That’s when her migraines started.
As she’s at least the 4th generation of our family to get them I know that a non sugar, caffeinated beverage combined with tylenol is the fastest way to get rid of the headache.
Last year (age 12-7th grade) she was having them almost daily for a few months. We discovered that a small cup of coffee in the morning (after breakfast) made her likelihood of getting a migraine at school much smaller.
She now takes a small water bottle of iced coffee to school with her to finish in her first class and then drinks from a large water bottle of water for the rest of the day. The school nurse and her pediatrician both told the teachers it’s a needed item if we want her to stop missing class.
I agree with Delgarde. I say it all the time and I gave up drinking coffee over 30 years ago.
In Rhode Island (and, apparently, ONLY in Rhode Island, we have “coffee syrup, with which we can make “coffee milk!” No, I don’t get it either, I’m 66, and I’ve NEVER liked the taste of coffee.
Reading these job stories almost makes me grateful that I work at Walmart! They’ve had “cashier meetings,” but never useless ones, with nothing but yelling.
I LOVE coffeemilk! I used to live on the border of MA and RI and I miss it so much now that I’m living down south.
My friends send me a care package of Autocrat coffee syrup every year or so.
Coffee anecdatum: a dear friend and former lover needed coffee to get to sleep. As it happened[0], the coffee stimulated her nervous system enough that it was just operating just above the noise level.
[0] riff on a weekday morning radio show from CBC
Not uncommon for folks with low level ADD or ADHD
Jobsite anecdata: I had one boss who was just on the edge of being certifiably psychotic[0], and another who epitomized The Peter Principle[1]. Best job I ever had was in a tech startup which was a California subsidiary of Olivetti Telecommunications – completely collegial from top to bottom, and as Italian as it needed to be.
[0] hard core reprobate alcoholic at least, had a few episodes on the edge of irrational
[1] company downsized and he wound up supervising me but with inadequate experience. I *could* have done what he did, but he had no clue what I did nor what to do to facilitate my work.
Okay, I want to bring up something that’s been bothering me the last few strips, and it may be my experiences as a child who was also thrust into a few different blended family experiences, so please bear with me. It’s been a while that Amanda’s been living with Andi, and presumably spending some time at Todd’s too, right? If I’m correct, it’s been at least a couple of months. Why is she still sleeping on the couch? Firstly, I feel like social services would be checking in on that, and having a bed for the child is like… a basic requirement as far as I’m aware. Second (and thirdly), this cannot emotionally be good for Amanda. I know I felt “less than” my “step-siblings” (children of the lady my father dated/lived with for a while) when I didn’t have a bedframe (mattress on the floor), let alone being relegated to the couch. Todd of all people would understand that feeling and I have a hard time believing he would let Amanda spend months sleeping on the couch without coming up with SOME sort of solution, even if it was a temporary option, that wasn’t just leaving her on the couch. Nothing says “welcome, you’re family” like tossing the kid a blanket and a pillow.
But, like I said, I’m making some assumptions re: timeline and what’s happening “off screen”, and I’m sure that’s likely not even something Dave has thought of as it’s utterly unrelated to the plot :P. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I think it’s fairly rare for Amanda to spend the night with Selkie, and she has a bed in Andi’s home. (For a while, Andi was sleeping on the couch to give Amanda a bed; I’m not sure if that’s changed.)
The scene here maps more to “sleepover” than to “living arrangements”.