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Trenches comic: Tuesday Oct. 25, 2011
Bogey
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator mod
But I didn’t WANT time off!
10/25/2011 - Anonymous
I was a contractor working for a large game company at the time, had only tested one title and was just finishing up my second. I got the feeling that they were going to fire a bunch of us after the title was over, but my lead kept telling me not to worry and that I was too valuable to let go. After the game had finished, I was driving from work and my phone rings.
“Your services are no longer required.”
I was crushed. I was only getting paid $7.50 an hour and with all my bills I had no means to support myself. For a solid week, I was job hunting and sent out literally HUNDREDS of applications. Also, because I had only worked for that company for 7 months I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits.
I woke up one morning to my phone ringing. It was one of the other leads that I knew. “Hey, you want to work.” I leaped at the opportunity. I walked in the next day and the contract company rep stopped me and the following exchange took place:
Him: How’d you enjoy your week off?
Me: What?
Him: Yeah, we gave a couple of guys the week off for all the work y’all did.
Me: But… you called and fired me.
Him: Oh nononononono, that’s not what happened!
Me: Then why did you call and TELL me that my services were no longer required?
Him: Don’t worry about that, but we DO need you to refill out all your tax information.
Me: So you fired me?
Him: NO! Why do you keep assuming we fired you?
I decided to just stop and fill out the info for him again so I could come back from my “vacation.”
Bogey on
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The story is pretty great.
Good story.
At the very least, it seems like it should have come before the 10/18 comic, where he's (not) going home at the end of his first day.
In any case...in its own way, this may be my favorite Trenches Tale yet.
I personally could never work as a game tester, but this isn't limited to that job. This is any "at-will employment". Moral of the story? Get your degrees people, or if you're like me and don't have one, join the military. You can stand up for yourself and they can't fire you unless you do something illegal (drugs? murder?) or you can't pass a test (and they often give second chances for the latter)
Except they are doing the opposite. In reality they have rehired him, but the paperwork will reflect no firing or rehiring. I assume there is some cost of firing and rehiring that they can avoid by lying about it.
They needed the tax information redone, so there was obviously some paperwork involved.
Now, how that's communicated to the writer might be part of the problem, as might the system that encourages this behavior, but I don't really intend to try and defend those.
I assume that Isaac spent his first "work day" learning how to use SPDRweb. Boss Man wasn't going to let him see the product until he was certain he would at least know how to do his job.
I think some Langdell guy made a game by that title a few years back
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
I loved that show
I may be not remembering it correctly.
And the finest of space lawmen were the Galaxy Rangers. They had an awesome intro and never missed an opportunity to cash in on it at *least* once an episode.
If the president had any real power, he'd be able to live wherever the fuck he wanted.
You have to figure for every Epic, or Bioware, there are a ton of other companies who have no moral qualms about disposing of employees like that. As someone who is a contractor, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you are a disposable employee.
I think it's more refreshing actually - a salaried full time employee is practically the same as a contractor (in a at-will work state). The only difference is that term 'contractor' is more upfront about your employment prospects, and creates no illusions. It's still not fun, but at least they're upfront about it.
The fat guy put his favorite animé character on the home screen.
Because they do that kind of thing.
By weird shit, do you mean flat out lying to their face? Because that is what is being described in this story.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I paid for jokes, dammit!
However, I was thinking about this earlier, and I submit this does not necessarily have to be the case. Imagine there really was a Bravestarr game being made today. Since Bravestarr is an old, relatively obscure property with a small fanbase, I would make a couple of educated guesses about a game based on it:
1. The people making the game are probably fans of the property (because otherwise they wouldn't have chosen something so obscure), and thus would likely be more invested in doing a good job. This is not to say that I have to be, say, a fan of Spiderman to take pride in my work and do my best in working on a Spiderman game, but if I were a Spiderman fan I think the "care factor" would definitely be a notch higher.
2. The target audience of the game would have to largely be other fans of the cartoon, since the cartoon aired in the 80's, said fans would all definitely be adults, and I could probably safely assume that I wasn't dealing with a piece of licensed shovelware aimed at children. This is not to say that all games aimed at children are crap or that "grown-up" gamers always have higher standards than kids and teens. But I would like to think that since adults probably have less free time to devote to leisure activities like games and are also more likely to be somewhat jaded, their standards might be somewhat higher.
All of this basically to say: I have never watched Bravestarr, but I don't think there's any reason to assume a Bravestarr game would be poop. In fact, the reasons are just as strong to suspect it might actually be halfway decent.