2012-07-10

A three-line office comic. A burly, long-bearded man in a white dress shirt and blue tie stands over a coworker seated at a computer monitor (a man with reddish hair and glasses). In a caption box, the bearded man rants in epic-hero style: "My spear will cleave your head from your body! Your children will be my slaves! Your lands will be burned. And your wife will work the loom in my household, far away from her ancestral shores." The seated coworker replies meekly, "Okay, next time I won't tie up the printer for so long." The bearded man thunders, "See that you do not!" The caption reads: "Achilles had trouble adjusting to office life." The joke is the mismatch between Homeric battle-rage and a petty office dispute over printer hogging. Votey (aftercomic): a banner reading in mock-Homeric verse, "Sing, o Goddess, the disgruntling of Achilles, son of Peleus" — parodying the opening line of the Iliad.