[TRENCHES] Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - Treasure
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Treasure
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/treasure
It Ain’t All Fame and Fortune
AnonymousSubmitted by: Anonymous punter for the MN Vikings, first initial Chris, last initial Kluwe
You want to hear some shit? Let me tell you about my average day. It starts off with waking up at 6:45 in the morning, which is waaaaaay before the sun comes up, which means it’s cold. Real cold. So cold that the steering wheel heater in my BMW takes at LEAST five minutes to warm up. Sometimes I even have to hit the three zone seat heater, which is not a step I take lightly. That thing chews right through ultra-premium gas.
Once the climate problems are dealt with, I have to fight my way through ten, maybe fifteen minutes of light traffic. Occasionally there’s an accident, some person in an Oldsmobile or something, and I have to drop down to 55mph. Let me tell you, there is nothing more depressing than driving past a broken down minivan filled with screaming children, and you can only do 55. Just awful.
Finally I get to work. My clothes are freshly laundered and hung in my locker, but the industrial strength drying machine they use sometimes shrinks my pants and I have to ask for a new pair. They always give me some, but it’s just so humiliating to actually have to talk to the equipment managers. Rarely, they’ll make eye contact, and what am I supposed to do then? Acknowledge them? Pretend to remember their names?
After that disaster, the only way to calm myself down is to head up to the cafeteria and order some freshly made pancakes and scrambled egg whites, but the kitchen staff create a very hostile environment. They also put out biscuits, gravy, waffles, hashbrowns, thick cut bacon, thin cut bacon, sausage patties, a fruit and yogurt bar, a cereal stand, croissants, english muffins, bacon, and fully made breakfast sandwiches. How am I supposed to look at all that and eat healthy at the same time? Some people just don’t get it.Once breakfast is out of the way (and I’ve been forced to bus my own dishes over to the dishwasher), it’s time for meetings. These last for an agonizing forty five minutes before I can finally escape, and if I fall asleep during the meetings I get yelled at. It’s so unfair - don’t they know how early I had to wake up? Then I have to somehow find a way to fill the next two hours before lunch; usually the only option is to play dominos, but sometimes I lose and that really sucks. It’s super hard to stay focused in at work once you lose a domino game. It can ruin your entire day.
After lunch (with its measly selection of four different entrees, three side courses, a salad bar, a sandwich bar, a dessert bar, and an ice cream freezer) there’s another hour of dead time that I’m supposed to fill. Usually I’ll sneak into the equipment room and read the paper, but the couch there is getting old and the dryers are moderately loud so it’s a less than ideal environment. It’s really hard to focus on the crossword puzzle with a dryer rattling around. Other times I’ll go take a nap in the lounge, but there’s only the two couches so if it fills up quickly it’s a real bummer.
Then comes the worst part of the day: practice. I have to actually put on my cleats and go punt a football for THIRTY MINUTES.
Thirty minutes. I’ll let that sink in a little bit.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m done when the punting ends either - then I have to go inside and pretend to lift weights so I can sit down. The coaches don’t let us sit down on the field, and I think you’ll all agree that that’s basically indentured servitude. I’m considering filing an OSHA complaint.
After all that grueling work, practice finally ends and I have to hurry up and head home at three so I can avoid traffic. Exhausting. My only relief is to sit on the couch and play games until midnight to unwind from the stress.
So when you video game testers think you have it hard, in your air conditioned rooms with your fancy electronics, take a minute and think about us poor NFL punters. We deal with the real shit, out in the real world. Our trenches run deep.
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God forbid someone out there SOMEWHERE isn't suffering as much as you are.
Edit: But seriously... This was a terrible selection. I'd rather read about underpaid college students being forced to sit in a cramped room with no air conditioning directly across the hall from the only toilet in the building, than read pretend-whining from some overpaid athlebrity who thinks his story will somehow bring joy to my day.
Also, this strip looks fantastic. The shading is sublime.
I have to wake up and sit in front of my 5k dollar PC and turn it on. It takes about 30 seconds to get to the desktop! And some crazy guys in this forums told me that's too long for a SSD! How I manage to keep living with a SLOW BOOTING PC is something I don't understand. Then I have to go to my cushy job that starts 10am and consists in reading! I LOVE READING, so I might be killing my joy by doing it at work! this is so cruel
but the worse part is that I need to rest from looking at my 10 work emails and I open the 100% free Trenches comic and I find some stupid bullshit reason to bitch and moan about the comic or the trenches post, and I feel so angry I need to come to the forum and I see that people already bitched and moaned before me!!! That only makes me angrier, so I feel like crying. my life is just so bad!
Just because something is satirical doesn't mean it's automatically funny. Hell, this almost seems like a satire of the pulled Tale from the Trench where some guy complained about how testers have it way better than him (he was a criminally underpaid and overworked pilot, if I recall correctly).
Like, I can see this being satire of tales they get submitted about "it's so hard to be me, guys" when their jobs aren't all that difficult, but that doesn't make it something that's inherently funny. The most interesting thoughy I had when reading this tale was honestly "What did Chris Kluwe do to get a reputation for whining about his job?" I don't recall any kind of controversy there, so it seems really odd to specifically pick that one guy out. If he actually had a habit of complaining about his job conditions, I'd find this "tale" a bit more entertaining.
EDIT: I'm not even certain if any of the posters above you didn't get that it's satire. Two are just statements expressing shock, and one pretty clearly says that it's running on for a long time just to get to a punchline; that sounds more like "I don't find this funny" than "I don't get it."
This isn't a Story from the Trenches, isn't interesting to read and isn't even funny. There was another story a while ago where someone talked about their pilot job, how bad it was, how even though it was bad it was awesome and how noone else had a right to complain about their job if it wasn't worse than his job. I do not understand how either of these stories fit into the Tales of the Trenches format, which is supposed to be about stories from the game development industry.
But it sounds like somebody who really has no idea what the person actually does.
Maybe I could make up a tale about some guy who gets to play video games all day for a job, and then somehow finds a way to complain about it.
It doesn't address the firings without warning (which isn't unique to video game development, but it happens in a particularly douchey manner frequently). It doesn't address communication between departments being a goddamn mess. It doesn't address following through on an expectation of the job and being yelled at for it or possibly fired for it.
I'm gonna stop there. I'm sure lunch breaks and commutes and such aren't actually all that bad even for the low-end guys in video game making / testing (and I know there are stories to the contrary but I mean in general). But this story? Someone missed the point by a huge, huge margin.
And Mary deserves a more visible credit.
Also, hey, Trenches is back.
http://blogs.twincities.com/outofbounds/2012/10/01/out-of-bounds-blog-no-14-problems/
Oh my god...he mentions crosswords at the end there too!
THE HUMANITY!
Oh I understand satire, it's just I also understand what bad satire is. That's pretty much the worst of it.
Look, it's cool to be a dick about Trenches in general, but don't fuck with the Kluwe. This guy is one of the few ambassadors we have, bridging the gap of foosballs and orccrafts.
I think what The Trenches (and @ChrisWarcraft ) are expressing is that The Trenches isn't necessarily a legitimate bullhorn for the misery VG testers suffer. It isn't a site for VG tester rights, or even community action and organization*. It's entertainment. It's a dark humor venue based on those stories of woe others have suffered. And no matter what job you have, everyone has a story from their profession (satirical or not) that's completely fucked up, and when told amongst your peers, they all start to share similar stories. We laugh at them, and nod comfortingly, and share with the group ourselves. It's cathartic -therapeutic even, and sometimes, it's God dammed hilarious.
* It took me a while to get that. I hope something like that does exist, for professional career development amongst VG testers. If not, someone should get on that.
Kluwe is awesome. He even answered my question about how cool and manly Jared Allen was.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Yeah, but going to a sports forum, mentioning Ken Levine, and getting pissy when nobody there realizes who he is,
it was a boring, bland story that everyone got by the second sentence that droned on for, what, something like 10 paragraphs on subject matter that most people here don't actually care about. Just because it's satire doesn't mean it can't be bad.
Believe me, if Ken Levine came on here and babbled on for a page about some asinine story nobody cared about, I wouldn't care about that either. I'd be a little less annoyed because at least he's connected with games, but bad is bad.
(though I doubt Mr. Levine would be as boring as that story :-))
This story is hilarious, twesterm
(Also remember that the Internet is completely serious business and anything you say to me I will accept wholeheartedly without reservation and it will change my life for the better thank you so much for thinking of my well being you guys are the best but not quite as cool as the really cool kids at NeoGAF but you're pretty darn close (run on sentence))
I need some pancakes, though.
I don't even know how american football works, but you're a pretty cool dude in my book. Loved your tale. (I kinda understand what punters do, though)
And we're totally like a million times cooler than NeoGAF, thanks you very much.
EDIT: Holy fuck I just read his post about same-sex marriage (http://blogs.twincities.com/outofbounds/2012/10/01/out-of-bounds-blog-no-14-problems/) This guy is now officially my favorite internet person!
Did you forget your password at first and have to have your assistant retrieve it for you?
EDIT: Wait...loate registered April 2004? And that was his first post?
Wait, not as cool as NeoGaf?
Dead to me.
That story is magical