Man in pink obviously knows he’s treated the woman badly. Rather
than stop doing that, he makes sure he’s warned in case someone
comes by who might avenge her.
I dunno’, but it looks to me like this is a ‘sexual misconduct in the workplace’ joke. Guy is a creep, knows that harassed co-worker has a big, mean brother, has an alert set up so he can get out of there when he’s about to get his head kicked in.
I hope this is the wrong interpretation. I don’t think it’s cool to make light of this situation, especially in this political climate. Well, in any climate.
Guy is…not quite a creep. Not for lack of trying…he’s always making (or attempting to make) jokes that are marginally off-color (or puns. Mostly puns). Mostly either he gets them wrong or she cuts him off and makes a much funnier clean joke out of his comment. I could see her griping about him to her brother, but not the griping making the brother actually angry…I suspect this is her making a (better) joke out of his comments/actions than he can manage, in a different form. Her smirk in the last panel indicates that to me.
BTW, in terms of power – he is the boss’s chief assistant; she’s the boss’s secretary. Technically, on the org chart, he’s way higher than her; in reality, the boss could do without him a _lot_ more easily than without her.
I’ve been working for big companies for most of the past 30 years. Secretaries stopped existing more than halfway through that. Bigshots now have “executive assistants” who officially can act on behalf of and make decisions in the name of the bigshot (as opposed to the unofficial way secretaries used to do it), and often move on to managerial positions themselves. I’m sure there are companies that are exceptions but I haven’t run into one for quite a while. Certainly the presidents/CEOs of companies I have worked for haven’t had secretaries for a long time.
“Secretaries stopped existing”
Nah. They were switched from being assigned to people to being assigned to departments. You’ll see this in work areas where people are dispatched to other places… a big part of their job duties are keeping track of who is where working on what, and tracking down needed resources for the workers in the field. I’ve seen some attempts to automate these functions, but usually they’ve failed because you want a human intelligence in the hub to notice trends and take independent actions.
I did a couple of big hardware refresh projects in a big bank within the last couple of years. Banks have lots and lots of vice presidents, and no, most of them don’t have secretaries, but some of them still do, or at least, did when I was there a couple of years ago. The bank VP who was manager of the facility I was in had one, which is a good thing because there was an entire department of people who all worked second shift, in a part of the building that was behind its own security door, and I didn’t have clearance to open that door. So the bank’s VP’s secretary had to go over and let me in so I could change out all their computers for shiny new ones in the daytime when I was there.
The administrative is Ms. Foxx.
(Didn’t mean to post yet)
The administrative assistant is Ms. Foxx. (As named in the picture linked below.)
I agree with jjmcgaffey on their history, the guy has always been annoying with his bad jokes / puns, and some of them have been suggestive, but not to the point that Stan is positing — the guy may fear he has stepped over a line and Ms. Foxx would have complained at least to her brother if not to HR — but we know she doesn’t take it that seriously although she doesn’t mind seeing him cower.
He’s a white guy, and Dustin is a POC. Sounds like just another day at the office to me.
Well, if it is Dustin from the comic strip of the same name, I wouldn’t run. Or maybe I would… non-self aware whining about first world problems and Generation Y is something to avoid.
Here they are again, in today’s (or yesterday’s?) strip.
1) I don’t understand it. Is his cooking plan just wrong? Or, contrariwise, more advanced or sophisticated than we would have given him credit for? Is there a subtext?
2) This is a pretty good example of what an episode featuring these two is like. (Aside from being a CIDU.) A little bit banter-y, and Ms. Foxx probably get the better of it, but nothing too questionable.
“I don’t understand it. Is his cooking plan just wrong? Or, contrariwise, more advanced or sophisticated than we would have given him credit for?”
Both. He’s trying something fancy, but doesn’t quite know how to do it.
I think Martha Stewart uses binder clips for that purpose.
[Rummages through Google Image search]
Mitch4: It’s not just that it’s more advanced than we would have given him credit for, but that using parchment paper for cooking is too frou frou’y for a man to be doing.
My wife has a friend who, every time I make a “fancy” dessert, exclaims “Oh, wow, you’re like a Martha Stewart, ha, ha!” She’s not mean about it, it just always seems to tickle her that a man is making something “fancy.”
I use parchment paper for cooking, for instance frozen french fries or frozen pizza. Because usually I don’t have to clean the pan afterwards. I fold it to keep it from rolling up but I’ll have to try the bulldog clips.
“parchment”. Saying “parchment paper” is either redundant or wrong, depending on how pedantic you want to be.
Parchment paper seems to be a technical cooking term. It’s paper, rather than parchment, but a special type. If you want to argue with the cooks, I’m sure they’ll find plenty of computer terms which are “redundant or wrong”. (How can the computer in the penthouse be “down”?)
As evidence (rather than proof), Google gets almost 20 million hits on “parchment paper” and Wikipedia has separate pages for “parchment” and “parchment paper”.
In Germany, it’s called “baking paper”, and is an invaluable aid for all sorts of things in the kitchen.
Parchment per se is animal tissue. Parchment paper is actual paper that has been chemically treated to be tough and non-porous. I also use it to avoid cleaning pans.
I didn’t mean that literally no one is a secretary any more. That was (I hope) permissible hyperbole. Banks are weird, but there haven’t been any secretaries at the manufacturing, defense, construction, and utility companies I’ve worked at in the past few decades. Changing the title to “administrator” or “assistant” is not an accident, it’s a conscious choice to elevate the status of the position from “wage slave” to “colleague”. Not saying euphemisms work, but that’s the intent.
Sorry, this thread set off another line of rambling musing. I can see how long it is, and I’ve cut about half, and it’s still a lot of rambling. It’s also 5:00 in the morning, which may or may not be relevant. This material will not be on the final exam.
“I didn’t mean that literally no one is a secretary any more.”
“there haven’t been any secretaries at the manufacturing, defense…”
I spent less time there, but I also did a big refresh project in a manufacturing company that happens to ALSO be a defense contractor, and they also had “department secretaries” who had replaced secretaries to the managers of the departments. Another organization I spent time in is a large healthcare organization.
The other place I spent a lot time in is academia, where they have had “department secretaries” all along.
“Changing the title to ‘administrator’ or ‘assistant’ is not an accident”
I’m sure this is true, for the positions that were so elevated. But some of them weren’t
This trend went along with IT automation. We automated away a lot of the duties that used to go along with the job title of “secretary”, so fewer managers got them because they got word processing instead, and electronic scheduling of resources instead, or whatnot. For the tasks that couldn’t be automated, the secretary still needs to be there, so we cost-justified it by claiming that they worked for the whole group of people instead of just the one. And many of the tasks that remained the purview of secretaries involve working with the information technology that has so changed their lives.
The other change over my working lifetime is the large-scale folding of reception duties in on the secretaries (or secretarial onto the reception staff), so what used to be two separate, distinct job roles are now largely not.
I suggest that my work led me to fairly frequent contact with the secretaries who remain in these organizations, and your work put you with the managers, instead, who were increasingly expected to do their own work, and when they really did have more work that one person could or should do, they got assistants who were treated like a layer of management just because they were doing management work. If correct, this explains our vastly different perspectives on the changing workforce.
A final note: The job of “secretary” went full circle. Early on, secretaries were largely men, and their jobs were treated as important work, because it was. Then women entered the workforce, and started taking secretarial work, and entirely coincidentally the work was devalued, to the point where being called a “secretary” was demeaning and dismissive. Now that we’ve decided that women are actually people capable of doing the same work that men are, we’ve decided to change the job titles to escape the stigma of that past association, and qualified men AND women take on the job title of “assistants”, and the prestige varies considerably depending upon the work they actually do.
“Early on, secretaries were largely men, and their jobs were treated as important work, because it was.”
And in late 19th and early 20th century detective stories, part of their important work was to turn out to be the killer in a disproportionate number of “rich old coot found murdered in his study” cases. (Crooked lawyers were probably a distant second.)
There was a tv series in the 1950s starring Ann Sothern called “Private Secretary”. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045435/reference
The term seems to have faded, but it reflects the contrast with one or another kind of “shared secretary”, e.g. when James says “They were switched from being assigned to people to being assigned to departments.” The ones assigned to people would have been the “private secretaries”. Though back at that time, I think the alternative kind of assignment would have the designation of “pool” somehow.
Parchment paper is to parchment as leatherette is to leather as Welsh rabbit is to rabbit as fool’s gold is to gold as football is to football.
“And in late 19th and early 20th century detective stories, part of their important work was to turn out to be the killer in a disproportionate number of “rich old coot found murdered in his study” cases.”
Surely the butler did it?
Actually, the butler hardly ever did it, even back then, and almost never later.
As a sidelight, I know of only three detective novels in the last eighty years or so, out of the hundreds I’ve read, in which a butler “did it,” and in one of those it turned out to be a con man posing on short notice as a butler. I’m trying to recall the 1930ish short story in which amateur detectives are pleased to discover the maiden name of the killer was “Butler,” thus confirming their presumptions. (This was, of course, meant for comedy.)
There would have been somewhat more Back Earlier ThanThen, but I don’t think there was ever a plethora, other than perhaps in dime novels. In proper novels, even circa 1900, murderous butlers and other servants were just too infra dig for a proper sleuth to long bother his brain cells about.
The butler did it in “Murder on the Orient Express”, but then again…
Is ‘parchment paper’ different from ‘wax paper’? It seems like it’s what I’d call the former in Brian in STL’s picture up there. I could do a search, but a lot of passion about this subject has been demonstrated here, so who better to ask?
Please don’t insert a link to help me. I won’t click on it. Call me old fashioned, but if possible, I would like a genuine, heartfelt and sincere explanation from someone in the know about baking accessories.
Stan. They are different. I don’t know the details, in usage, but the materials are different. Wax paper has was on it, but parchment paper doesn’t. I don’t think I’ve used either for cooking, but I’ve done quilting projects that were insistent that I use the right one.
They are VERY different. If you put wax paper in a 400 degree oven to bake a pizza or French fries, it will probably result in an impressive fire. Baking paper is not flame proof, but highly resistant, and can even be reused for a second run (depending on what it was used for, of course). The stuff I use is a German brand, but here’s a version that’s available on Amazon.
I can’t remember the last time I had a use for waxed paper. Making Rice Krispies treats, maybe?
For many of the uses of parchment paper, waxed paper works fairly well. Lining a cake pan for instance. When I open a package of block cheese, I wrap it in waxed paper and put that into a loose plastic bag for refrigeration. Something I saw on TV indicated that this helps prevent mold. I have not done any experiments to test this.
@ Brian – I’m sure the wax used for waxed paper is non-toxic (just as is the case for crayons), but I still don’t like the idea of heating it and having the hydrocarbons leeching into the food.
P.S. For some cheeses, limited airflow can be better than sealing it entirely.
“I can’t remember the last time I had a use for waxed paper.”
I use it to cover food I am heating in the microwave. Parchment paper would probably work just as well, but waxed paper is slightly cheaper (I thought it was a lot cheaper but it is not).
I actually use waxed paper more when woodworking. It’s just the thing when you are gluing things together and you want to protect something from being stuck to the glued pieces.
Thanks folks. I’ll never confuse the two again! Actually, I’d never heard of parchment paper before, so the two were never really confused in my mind. More precisely I guess, I’ll never confuse the two if the situation arises!
When Robert was working he had an “executive secretary” – I guess because he was the executive director. His first one was inherited from the prior exec director. When she moved away he made sure to find one just how he wanted (no, get your minds out of the gutter). He wanted one who would “take care of him” – correct his errors in letters and such, worry about him if he was not feeling well, etc. Basically a spare mom. He found one.
When I had my first cell phone two people had the phone number – Robert and her.
10 years after he quit, she is still there and they are still in communication online – we also run into her and her husband once in awhile at one of the restaurants we go to.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Man in pink obviously knows he’s treated the woman badly. Rather
than stop doing that, he makes sure he’s warned in case someone
comes by who might avenge her.
I dunno’, but it looks to me like this is a ‘sexual misconduct in the workplace’ joke. Guy is a creep, knows that harassed co-worker has a big, mean brother, has an alert set up so he can get out of there when he’s about to get his head kicked in.
I hope this is the wrong interpretation. I don’t think it’s cool to make light of this situation, especially in this political climate. Well, in any climate.
Guy is…not quite a creep. Not for lack of trying…he’s always making (or attempting to make) jokes that are marginally off-color (or puns. Mostly puns). Mostly either he gets them wrong or she cuts him off and makes a much funnier clean joke out of his comment. I could see her griping about him to her brother, but not the griping making the brother actually angry…I suspect this is her making a (better) joke out of his comments/actions than he can manage, in a different form. Her smirk in the last panel indicates that to me.
BTW, in terms of power – he is the boss’s chief assistant; she’s the boss’s secretary. Technically, on the org chart, he’s way higher than her; in reality, the boss could do without him a _lot_ more easily than without her.
I’ve been working for big companies for most of the past 30 years. Secretaries stopped existing more than halfway through that. Bigshots now have “executive assistants” who officially can act on behalf of and make decisions in the name of the bigshot (as opposed to the unofficial way secretaries used to do it), and often move on to managerial positions themselves. I’m sure there are companies that are exceptions but I haven’t run into one for quite a while. Certainly the presidents/CEOs of companies I have worked for haven’t had secretaries for a long time.
“Secretaries stopped existing”
Nah. They were switched from being assigned to people to being assigned to departments. You’ll see this in work areas where people are dispatched to other places… a big part of their job duties are keeping track of who is where working on what, and tracking down needed resources for the workers in the field. I’ve seen some attempts to automate these functions, but usually they’ve failed because you want a human intelligence in the hub to notice trends and take independent actions.
I did a couple of big hardware refresh projects in a big bank within the last couple of years. Banks have lots and lots of vice presidents, and no, most of them don’t have secretaries, but some of them still do, or at least, did when I was there a couple of years ago. The bank VP who was manager of the facility I was in had one, which is a good thing because there was an entire department of people who all worked second shift, in a part of the building that was behind its own security door, and I didn’t have clearance to open that door. So the bank’s VP’s secretary had to go over and let me in so I could change out all their computers for shiny new ones in the daytime when I was there.
The administrative is Ms. Foxx.
(Didn’t mean to post yet)
The administrative assistant is Ms. Foxx. (As named in the picture linked below.)
I agree with jjmcgaffey on their history, the guy has always been annoying with his bad jokes / puns, and some of them have been suggestive, but not to the point that Stan is positing — the guy may fear he has stepped over a line and Ms. Foxx would have complained at least to her brother if not to HR — but we know she doesn’t take it that seriously although she doesn’t mind seeing him cower.
He’s a white guy, and Dustin is a POC. Sounds like just another day at the office to me.
Well, if it is Dustin from the comic strip of the same name, I wouldn’t run. Or maybe I would… non-self aware whining about first world problems and Generation Y is something to avoid.
Here they are again, in today’s (or yesterday’s?) strip.
1) I don’t understand it. Is his cooking plan just wrong? Or, contrariwise, more advanced or sophisticated than we would have given him credit for? Is there a subtext?
2) This is a pretty good example of what an episode featuring these two is like. (Aside from being a CIDU.) A little bit banter-y, and Ms. Foxx probably get the better of it, but nothing too questionable.
“I don’t understand it. Is his cooking plan just wrong? Or, contrariwise, more advanced or sophisticated than we would have given him credit for?”
Both. He’s trying something fancy, but doesn’t quite know how to do it.
I think Martha Stewart uses binder clips for that purpose.
[Rummages through Google Image search]
Mitch4: It’s not just that it’s more advanced than we would have given him credit for, but that using parchment paper for cooking is too frou frou’y for a man to be doing.
My wife has a friend who, every time I make a “fancy” dessert, exclaims “Oh, wow, you’re like a Martha Stewart, ha, ha!” She’s not mean about it, it just always seems to tickle her that a man is making something “fancy.”
I use parchment paper for cooking, for instance frozen french fries or frozen pizza. Because usually I don’t have to clean the pan afterwards. I fold it to keep it from rolling up but I’ll have to try the bulldog clips.
“parchment”. Saying “parchment paper” is either redundant or wrong, depending on how pedantic you want to be.
Parchment paper seems to be a technical cooking term. It’s paper, rather than parchment, but a special type. If you want to argue with the cooks, I’m sure they’ll find plenty of computer terms which are “redundant or wrong”. (How can the computer in the penthouse be “down”?)
As evidence (rather than proof), Google gets almost 20 million hits on “parchment paper” and Wikipedia has separate pages for “parchment” and “parchment paper”.
In Germany, it’s called “baking paper”, and is an invaluable aid for all sorts of things in the kitchen.
Parchment per se is animal tissue. Parchment paper is actual paper that has been chemically treated to be tough and non-porous. I also use it to avoid cleaning pans.
I didn’t mean that literally no one is a secretary any more. That was (I hope) permissible hyperbole. Banks are weird, but there haven’t been any secretaries at the manufacturing, defense, construction, and utility companies I’ve worked at in the past few decades. Changing the title to “administrator” or “assistant” is not an accident, it’s a conscious choice to elevate the status of the position from “wage slave” to “colleague”. Not saying euphemisms work, but that’s the intent.
Sorry, this thread set off another line of rambling musing. I can see how long it is, and I’ve cut about half, and it’s still a lot of rambling. It’s also 5:00 in the morning, which may or may not be relevant. This material will not be on the final exam.
“I didn’t mean that literally no one is a secretary any more.”
“there haven’t been any secretaries at the manufacturing, defense…”
I spent less time there, but I also did a big refresh project in a manufacturing company that happens to ALSO be a defense contractor, and they also had “department secretaries” who had replaced secretaries to the managers of the departments. Another organization I spent time in is a large healthcare organization.
The other place I spent a lot time in is academia, where they have had “department secretaries” all along.
“Changing the title to ‘administrator’ or ‘assistant’ is not an accident”
I’m sure this is true, for the positions that were so elevated. But some of them weren’t
This trend went along with IT automation. We automated away a lot of the duties that used to go along with the job title of “secretary”, so fewer managers got them because they got word processing instead, and electronic scheduling of resources instead, or whatnot. For the tasks that couldn’t be automated, the secretary still needs to be there, so we cost-justified it by claiming that they worked for the whole group of people instead of just the one. And many of the tasks that remained the purview of secretaries involve working with the information technology that has so changed their lives.
The other change over my working lifetime is the large-scale folding of reception duties in on the secretaries (or secretarial onto the reception staff), so what used to be two separate, distinct job roles are now largely not.
I suggest that my work led me to fairly frequent contact with the secretaries who remain in these organizations, and your work put you with the managers, instead, who were increasingly expected to do their own work, and when they really did have more work that one person could or should do, they got assistants who were treated like a layer of management just because they were doing management work. If correct, this explains our vastly different perspectives on the changing workforce.
A final note: The job of “secretary” went full circle. Early on, secretaries were largely men, and their jobs were treated as important work, because it was. Then women entered the workforce, and started taking secretarial work, and entirely coincidentally the work was devalued, to the point where being called a “secretary” was demeaning and dismissive. Now that we’ve decided that women are actually people capable of doing the same work that men are, we’ve decided to change the job titles to escape the stigma of that past association, and qualified men AND women take on the job title of “assistants”, and the prestige varies considerably depending upon the work they actually do.
“Early on, secretaries were largely men, and their jobs were treated as important work, because it was.”
And in late 19th and early 20th century detective stories, part of their important work was to turn out to be the killer in a disproportionate number of “rich old coot found murdered in his study” cases. (Crooked lawyers were probably a distant second.)
There was a tv series in the 1950s starring Ann Sothern called “Private Secretary”. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045435/reference
The term seems to have faded, but it reflects the contrast with one or another kind of “shared secretary”, e.g. when James says “They were switched from being assigned to people to being assigned to departments.” The ones assigned to people would have been the “private secretaries”. Though back at that time, I think the alternative kind of assignment would have the designation of “pool” somehow.
Parchment paper is to parchment as leatherette is to leather as Welsh rabbit is to rabbit as fool’s gold is to gold as football is to football.
“And in late 19th and early 20th century detective stories, part of their important work was to turn out to be the killer in a disproportionate number of “rich old coot found murdered in his study” cases.”
Surely the butler did it?
Actually, the butler hardly ever did it, even back then, and almost never later.
As a sidelight, I know of only three detective novels in the last eighty years or so, out of the hundreds I’ve read, in which a butler “did it,” and in one of those it turned out to be a con man posing on short notice as a butler. I’m trying to recall the 1930ish short story in which amateur detectives are pleased to discover the maiden name of the killer was “Butler,” thus confirming their presumptions. (This was, of course, meant for comedy.)
There would have been somewhat more Back Earlier ThanThen, but I don’t think there was ever a plethora, other than perhaps in dime novels. In proper novels, even circa 1900, murderous butlers and other servants were just too infra dig for a proper sleuth to long bother his brain cells about.
The butler did it in “Murder on the Orient Express”, but then again…
Is ‘parchment paper’ different from ‘wax paper’? It seems like it’s what I’d call the former in Brian in STL’s picture up there. I could do a search, but a lot of passion about this subject has been demonstrated here, so who better to ask?
Please don’t insert a link to help me. I won’t click on it. Call me old fashioned, but if possible, I would like a genuine, heartfelt and sincere explanation from someone in the know about baking accessories.
Stan. They are different. I don’t know the details, in usage, but the materials are different. Wax paper has was on it, but parchment paper doesn’t. I don’t think I’ve used either for cooking, but I’ve done quilting projects that were insistent that I use the right one.
They are VERY different. If you put wax paper in a 400 degree oven to bake a pizza or French fries, it will probably result in an impressive fire. Baking paper is not flame proof, but highly resistant, and can even be reused for a second run (depending on what it was used for, of course). The stuff I use is a German brand, but here’s a version that’s available on Amazon.
I can’t remember the last time I had a use for waxed paper. Making Rice Krispies treats, maybe?
For many of the uses of parchment paper, waxed paper works fairly well. Lining a cake pan for instance. When I open a package of block cheese, I wrap it in waxed paper and put that into a loose plastic bag for refrigeration. Something I saw on TV indicated that this helps prevent mold. I have not done any experiments to test this.
@ Brian – I’m sure the wax used for waxed paper is non-toxic (just as is the case for crayons), but I still don’t like the idea of heating it and having the hydrocarbons leeching into the food.
P.S. For some cheeses, limited airflow can be better than sealing it entirely.
“I can’t remember the last time I had a use for waxed paper.”
I use it to cover food I am heating in the microwave. Parchment paper would probably work just as well, but waxed paper is slightly cheaper (I thought it was a lot cheaper but it is not).
I actually use waxed paper more when woodworking. It’s just the thing when you are gluing things together and you want to protect something from being stuck to the glued pieces.
Thanks folks. I’ll never confuse the two again! Actually, I’d never heard of parchment paper before, so the two were never really confused in my mind. More precisely I guess, I’ll never confuse the two if the situation arises!
When Robert was working he had an “executive secretary” – I guess because he was the executive director. His first one was inherited from the prior exec director. When she moved away he made sure to find one just how he wanted (no, get your minds out of the gutter). He wanted one who would “take care of him” – correct his errors in letters and such, worry about him if he was not feeling well, etc. Basically a spare mom. He found one.
When I had my first cell phone two people had the phone number – Robert and her.
10 years after he quit, she is still there and they are still in communication online – we also run into her and her husband once in awhile at one of the restaurants we go to.