Hurricane Comics

After hurricane Irene hit where I live we were out of power for a few days. During daylight I doodled some comics on sketch paper using a marker that was running out of ink.

Comic 1: A few days before the hurricane arrived my dad decided since he had time off that we would repair the garage. So he started tearing all the shingles off, ripping off the tar paper, and then went and ordered all the supplies needed to fix it. When he decided to do this I vividly remember the weather stations mentioning concern about the hurricane hitting our coast. I mean, really, just that fact that they mentioned a hurricane hitting Florida should have been a clue that maybe we should have waited till a better time to fix the garage roof -- the roof we've been mentioning needed to be repaired for almost thirteen years. Anyway, we rushed a good three days putting new boards on the edge that had been rotting, rolled out new tar paper, and put new shingles on it. It was kinda scary being up there considering it would bend under my weight.

Comic 2: Once the power officially cut out our neighbor pulled his generator out. It was about ten minutes after everything went dark that it started to get noisy. The next day was even noisier because everyone who had a generator was using theirs. You could have sworn a dirt bike rally was going on.

Comic 3: During the storm our neighbor's large oak tree uprooted and fell down, luckily not hitting anybody's house. We all rushed outside to see the damage(yes, it was raining like crazy. No, we didn't care.) I started jumping around in the huge puddle that formed on the driveway because I'm easily amused like that.

Comic 4: While it was too warm in my room, there wasn't very much light, and I was sweating to death, the only thing I felt like doing was eating and exercising. We had a lot of stuff in the fridge that none of us wanted to go to waste, so I ate a lot of it. Especially the yogurt.

Ms. Pacman

Ever since I was around three years old I've loved videogames. Most guys like videogames, I guess. So whenever I see an arcade machine, I want to play it, even if it's a really simple game without any mission other than to increase your score. While working at the restaurant they had three arcade machines inside. The first one was a golfing game that nobody ever played(Who wants to play that? Unless of course it's Neo Turf Masters.), the game next to that was Operation Wolf, which wasn't calibrated correctly so it played horribly. And the last game; the money maker; the gender confused sensation of the 80's; Ms. Pacman!

That wasn't my actual score, but it's close

I'm not amazing at Ms. Pacman, not compared to people who are really into it, but compared to anyone who played the machine at the restaurant I was a mad man. Sometimes I wondered how the joystick on the machine even functioned, to be honest. All these older men and women would come in and treat the joystick as if they were having an arm wrestling match, bashing it left and right as hard as they could to make Ms. Pacman move. Those joysticks function on microswitches. The harder you press doesn't mean the faster she'll move. Most people who came in were really awful at Ms. Pacman and it's not really that shocking that it was so easy to beat their high scores every day.

SHORYUKEN

Doing the same monotonous tasks over and over again, every day you work, for hours on end will begin to wear on your after a while(Unless, of course, you have severe OCD issues and work in a factory creating the berrings that go inside ballpoint pens, or something of that nature). This is why some of us find things to liven the atmosphere so as to prevent the impending doom known as mental insanity. I probably already have some of that already, but working at this place I feel increased the level of it, for a while there, at least. Anyhow. . .

At the register, especially when Frank was manning it, the receipt slips would keep printing out, and since most customers didn't want them, Frank would let them constantly print out until this long strip of paper would be hanging off the front of the register. One day I looked at it and, considering I like Street Fighter, noticed it had an uncanny resemblance to Ryu's headband. An idea sparked, causing me to snap it off, tie it around my forehead, and thus becoming a total geek. I yelled to Frank so he would look over at me to see what was up. I started yelling "HADOUKEN!" and "SHORYUKEN!" while doing the moves(I wouldn't attempt TATSUMAKI SENPUKYAKU in that kinda small space)to which Frank repeated his typical phrase, "Awww jeeeeez", while laughing quite amused.

You have to make things enjoyable sometimes, I suppose. The owner probably wouldn't have found it funny, but what did he find funny? Not much.

Toasty

I'm warm blooded, like most mammals. The problem is, I'm REALLY WARM BLOODED. If it's a winter day, snowing outside, with people bundled up to the point where they look like the Michelin man, I'll be outside in a wifebeater shirt shoveling the driveway while complaining about sweating too profusely. So with that in mind I'll explain what it was like in the restaurant I worked for. The fans on the ceiling would be on, yet they didn't push any air around. It's not like there was very much cool air to circulate anyway. Speaking of which, we weren't allowed to have the door opened in the shop to cool it off and then the air conditioning really didn't do its job at cooling the place down, especially not in the back where we worked.

The scary part is that the other store I would work at sometimes didn't have any air at all, period. I was told that during summer time the owner wouldn't let them open the door and they didn't have any fans to use. Who in their right mind would even want to step foot in that place during summer? That would be like entering a sauna to have lunch.

With Frank I could never understand his wardrobe when he would come into work. It made sense since this was in early February and there was snow out on the ground, but he would keep his hoodie on even when the shop was becoming insanely warm. There were a few times where he got to the point where he had to take his hoodie off, but by that time I was like a melted ice cream cone on piping hot asphalt.

Allergy

Some foods bother me, such as turkey, duck, artichokes, and certain additives put in processed foods(like preservatives). One of the perks of working at a restaurant is that we were allowed to make ourselves half a sandwich for every shift we worked. The big problem though. . .

is that most of it made me sick. It was a progressive sickness. The more times I had sandwiches from the there the sicker I began to feel. At one point I thought it was perhaps one sandwich, the philly steak to be exact, since after reading the ingredients in the meat slabs I concluded it was barely edible. So I changed what sandwich I ate and I didn't feel quite as sick, yet eating there kept increasing my nasal woes. After a while I decided to take one of the sandwiches home and let my family look at it, smell it, taste it. We concluded it smelled a lot like rancid oil, that the breadwas gross, and that it was probably best that I stopped eating the food. Since I couldn't eat the food there, aside from fries, I had to bring my own lunch/dinner with me instead, which almost defeated the purpose of being there since we weren't paid enough.

Brain Fog Mishaps

Do you ever get brain fog? Such as those times where your mind is trying to figure out what you're doing, yet all you can manage to form in your mind is white noise from a television? While working at this place I started to feel this way due to multiple causes, one of which I will mention later. While in this seemingly inebriated state I couldn't focus properly and simple tasks started to feel like attempting to solve theoretical mathematics while buzzed during a rock concert.

For some reason my mind forgot which way was off and which way was on. I turned it the wrong way, thus causing the impending doom, known as the hose snake, to release its soaking venom all around the room. Seriously, it went all over the place, splashing water around the shelf across from it, which luckily didn't do any significant damage.

Jobs Are For Working, Why Are You Taking a Break?

With any job I've had the first thing on my mind when I get there is to immediately get to work, help whoever else is there, clean the shop, and whatever other duties are required of me. What I can't stand are people who come in and try not to work at all. What I can't stand even more is people who do this and don't get reprimanded for their behaviour. You may remember when I spoke about a certain lazy person before who was like this.

Frank said Weasel was bad about doing this, yet it wasn't his place to say anything about it. Supposedly they were going to fire the guy, but when the owner fired every other person working for him before they ended up understaffed meaning they had to keep him. Ironically while I was working there two other employees ended up being fired, including a manager, and the sad part is that those individuals actually worked. So sack two better employees and keep one really bad one. Ah, lovely logic at work, I must say.

Smoothies

If I walked into a store and they had a sign up stating they sold a product, yet when I asked about they told me they only have it maybe four months out of the year I would be a bit annoyed or confused.

I'm still not sure why the owner wouldn't allow anybody to take it down. Maybe it was hard to take down? Perhaps it was permanently stuck in the panel? All I know is that it was annoying always having to tell people that they couldn't order it because it was only a seasonal item. You'd think with as many requests as we received for it the owner would serve it all year long anyway.