crisis
Original: crisis on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Employee (a young man): BOSS! I'm having a crisis!
Boss (an older man with glasses): What?
Panel 2:
Employee: Humans weren't meant to live like this! In gray-beige cubes, tapping away on plastic boards, making trivial adjustments to things we don't understand JUST TO LIVE! We were born on the savannahs of Africa!
Panel 3:
Boss: By God, you're right. We shouldn't be here in the corporate world. We should be in small bands ruled by powerful men who offer food and trinkets in exchange for loyalty and service.
Panel 4:
Boss: Actually wait.
Employee: Huh. Huh.
Panel 5 (both figures shown as black silhouettes against a dark background):
Boss: I guess this'd be a bad time to give you this attendance certificate and 10 dollar Starbucks card.
Employee: I mean, I won't say no.
Votey:
Boss (drawn loosely): FYI it's a used Starbucks gift card.
Employee (a young man): BOSS! I'm having a crisis!
Boss (an older man with glasses): What?
Panel 2:
Employee: Humans weren't meant to live like this! In gray-beige cubes, tapping away on plastic boards, making trivial adjustments to things we don't understand JUST TO LIVE! We were born on the savannahs of Africa!
Panel 3:
Boss: By God, you're right. We shouldn't be here in the corporate world. We should be in small bands ruled by powerful men who offer food and trinkets in exchange for loyalty and service.
Panel 4:
Boss: Actually wait.
Employee: Huh. Huh.
Panel 5 (both figures shown as black silhouettes against a dark background):
Boss: I guess this'd be a bad time to give you this attendance certificate and 10 dollar Starbucks card.
Employee: I mean, I won't say no.
Votey:
Boss (drawn loosely): FYI it's a used Starbucks gift card.
Alt text
A five-panel SMBC comic. A young office employee bursts in declaring to his older bespectacled boss that he's having a crisis. He rants that humans weren't meant to live in gray-beige cubicles tapping on plastic keyboards making trivial adjustments just to survive—they were born on the savannahs of Africa. The boss agrees: they shouldn't be in the corporate world, they should be in small bands ruled by powerful men who offer food and trinkets in exchange for loyalty and service. Then he pauses: "Actually wait." In the final panel, both men appear as black silhouettes; the boss says, "I guess this'd be a bad time to give you this attendance certificate and 10 dollar Starbucks card," and the employee replies, "I mean, I won't say no"—the joke being that the modern corporate perks the employee just railed against are exactly the food-and-trinkets tribal arrangement they described. Votey (bonus panel): a loosely sketched face of the boss adding, "FYI it's a used Starbucks gift card."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.