[TRENCHES] Thursday, August 16, 2012 - Phonics

Geth

Phonics
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/phonics

Advancement Lies

Anonymous

Part of the sales pitch was “get your foot in the door, work hard, and move up!” Turns out testers were privately thought of as gophers just there to do whatever bitch-work no one else wanted. The mentality was “if you were good enough to do anything other than test, then you wouldn’t have been hired as a tester.” Yet these same people loved to talk publicly about how testers are “the designers and artists and programmers of tomorrow!” Funny what you learn at a release party when people start drinking.

Henroid

"Oh, I knew/know a ______" is pretty inane as far as conversation material goes. Good work Cora.

DiannaoChong

Also interrupting your interviewer.

theResetButton

Cora's clearly in the right because Isaac is an awful per- *the cabin depressurizes, sucking me out of the plane*

Gyral

Oh that Issac. He's such a card.

Taramoor

Henroid wrote: »

"Oh, I knew/know a ______" is pretty inane as far as conversation material goes. Good work Cora.

To be fair, I don't know where/what the Schmaurnyaarks are, but they sound remote enough that even a single Isaac would be out of place.

agilemania

They obviously can't hire him. He doesn't have a Trench nose.

theResetButton

On a more related note, I work with a Polish guy whose name is pronounced "wise men", but whenever he's asked, he says it's "Smith".

IamTooch

My summer term at Schmaurnyaark Institute of Technology was fun and rewarding, especially Smithing 103, even though Rochester refused to give me credit for it, saying it wasn't part of the engineering core curriculum. Still I made some lifelong friends. There are a lot of Fjorns but luckily each one I knew had a different nickname: "Fjorni," "Flossi," "Æðburt," and "Ted."

The best part was you could catch a ferry to Inner Qwghlm (which wasn't that far away), and get well and truly hammered for cheap. Unfortunately the crossing back was usually pretty harsh on the stomach.

Griswold

IamTooch wrote: »

My summer term at Schmaurnyaark Institute of Technology was fun and rewarding, especially Smithing 103, even though Rochester refused to give me credit for it, saying it wasn't part of the engineering core curriculum. Still I made some lifelong friends. There are a lot of Fjorns but luckily each one I knew had a different nickname: "Fjorni," "Flossi," "Æðburt," and "Ted."

The best part was you could catch a ferry to Inner Qwghlm (which wasn't that far away), and get well and truly hammered for cheap. Unfortunately the crossing back was usually pretty harsh on the stomach.

Make sure to drop in on Harriet Qrtt while you're there. Lovely lady.

Gaslight

IamTooch wrote: »

My summer term at Schmaurnyaark Institute of Technology was fun and rewarding, especially Smithing 103, even though Rochester refused to give me credit for it, saying it wasn't part of the engineering core curriculum. Still I made some lifelong friends. There are a lot of Fjorns but luckily each one I knew had a different nickname: "Fjorni," "Flossi," "Æðburt," and "Ted."

The best part was you could catch a ferry to Inner Qwghlm (which wasn't that far away), and get well and truly hammered for cheap. Unfortunately the crossing back was usually pretty harsh on the stomach.

I infer you must have been to the Schmaurnyaarks before the decades of internal tension boiled over into bloody civil war and ethnic cleansing. Count yourself lucky.

Poor Jerry probably fled the violence and civil unrest in his home country and came to the United States, land of opportunity, trying to fulfill his dream of working in the video games and technology industry. All he wanted was a lowly testing position, all he wanted was a chance. And now Cora has dashed his hopes within the first 30 seconds of the interview.

The bitch.

Hardtarget

ugh see, this is what I've been talking about the last couple strips. Cora is literally a horrible person, she basically just committed a crime. There are no protagonists in this story, everybody is a self-serving dick, nobody i shaving any sort of character arc, I just don't get where this is going.

Darkewolfe

Hardtarget wrote: »

ugh see, this is what I've been talking about the last couple strips. Cora is literally a horrible person, she basically just committed a crime. There are no protagonists in this story, everybody is a self-serving dick, nobody i shaving any sort of character arc, I just don't get where this is going.

What? It's not a crime to not hire someone because they associated with someone with a bad business reputation. That's actually a pretty reasonable reason not to hire someone.

yurnamehere

Hardtarget wrote: »

ugh see, this is what I've been talking about the last couple strips. Cora is literally a horrible person, she basically just committed a crime. There are no protagonists in this story, everybody is a self-serving dick, nobody i shaving any sort of character arc, I just don't get where this is going.

Are "people who know Isaac" a protected class?

Ramen Empire

Unhired for knowing Isaac. Seems legit.

Fallingman

I do not understand why a protagonist cannot be a bit of a dick some of the time.
And I do not know why it seems to be an issue every single strip.
It's also a comic. It's like Dilbert. If you didnt have people doing wildly inappropriate things, it wouldn't be funny.

Aurich

Whell Mike and Jerry built this insane empire on two protagonists that are unmitigated assholes, so I guess they were probably thinking their readers would be okay with these kinds of characters.

That said, Cora's behavior here is pretty mild.

TabooPhantasy

I am under the impression that some of you have never been on the "Interviewer" side of an interview.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Gaslight

For the record, I think what Cora did here is pretty questionable, although I can sort of understand her reasoning. And I actually do find this comic mildly funny, though I admit part of that is just because Schmaurnyaarks makes me giggle and I think we should keep this thread going until the next comic Tuesday just making up facts about the history and culture of the Schmaurnyaarks.

But I'm glad to see some people really taking Cora to task, as if Isaac had done something like this the whole thread would have been "OMG Isaac is such a jerk" again while Cora and most of the other characters seem to have largely been getting a pass.

Hardtarget

JusticeforPluto wrote: »

The problem isn't that Cora is being a dick, as lots of shows/comics/movies have unlikable protagonists. Its that (at least for me), there's no joke, just Cora being a terrible person. I feel sorry for this guy because he just lost a job because Cora is insane (or her logic for being mad at Issac is at least). She didn't even do it in a funny way, like show him a picture of Issac sleeping at his desk while asking "This Issac?"

exaaaactly! also ya sure, lots of shows have unlikeable characters but usually every so often somebody does something that shows they have a soul, hell or maybe even a couple side characters are likeable. Here, so far, nobody in the cast is likeable at all, everybody is a dick, and things just keep getting worse.

wonderpug

Cora's sin is leaving out a comma in her last speech bubble.

Gaming-Freak

You know what's worse than Isaac's sad joke? The fact that Cora didn't know how to pronounce "Jerry".

yurnamehere

Gaming-Freak wrote: »

You know what's worse than Isaac's sad joke? The fact that Cora didn't know how to pronounce "Jerry".

Just because it's pronounced "Jerry" doesn't mean it is spelled anything like it.

MichaelLC

What I find more curious is why she didn't use Issac's pronunciation from the last comic. Is it a different interviewee?

Jortalus

MichaelLC wrote: »

What I find more curious is why she didn't use Issac's pronunciation from the last comic. Is it a different interviewee?

Do you think you'd actually remember that pronunciation if somebody said it to you? I think the joke is that she has no idea what's going on with the whole Shemnasidsck thing. Like that <---

MichaelLC

Sure, "Jerry" is very to pronounce, .

I guess I thought from what we "know" of Cora, she would want to get it right. Would seem even odder if she gets it wrong then still blames Issac.