370
Posted on April 13, 2018 at 10:47 am by Gene Ambaum
Characters: Jane
↓ Transcript
Patron: I demand an apology for what you said in storytime.
Jane: You’ll have to wait until I’m back on the clock.
Patron: You seem very sure of yourself.
Jane: I am. It helps when dealing with children.
Patron: I think we’d both be happier if I sat in the lobby during storytimes.
Jane: But then you’d miss important lessons about how to encourage early literacy. And I’d still be able to hear your phone calls.
Patron: How about I sit in my SUV?
Jane: As long as you promise to close the windows and park across the street.
Jane: You’ll have to wait until I’m back on the clock.
Patron: You seem very sure of yourself.
Jane: I am. It helps when dealing with children.
Patron: I think we’d both be happier if I sat in the lobby during storytimes.
Jane: But then you’d miss important lessons about how to encourage early literacy. And I’d still be able to hear your phone calls.
Patron: How about I sit in my SUV?
Jane: As long as you promise to close the windows and park across the street.
I find this particular comic remarkably nuanced. The casual reader sees the confrontation implied in the previous strips come to fruition. But there’s more here to see.
I don’t know what position the authors take on smoking, or how such discussions have affected them. But I see a smoker, on her break, speaking to someone about their annoying habit that pollutes the air unnecessarily (with noise) and requests increasingly draconian concessions that they remove themselves and their noise to a further and more enclosed place. While my family isn’t a proponent of public smoking (for allergic asthma, I’ll add) I can see both sides of this argument playing out. Is she blind to the arguments once made against public smoking and making her demands out of ignorance, thus showing that either side can be equally uncivil in discourse? Or is she fully cognizant of those earlier discussions, and applying them in a satirical manner that may or may not escape the cell-phone abuser? Does the cell-phoner realize this correlation, or is she equally ignorant? On what level do these two protagonists understand that they are reenacting a debate thirty years old with positions neatly reversed?