#workplacement

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[roartowrecks]

more bullshit from the depths of my sketch files idk i've lost control of my life. sorry (i'm not)

[preservationofnormalcy]

I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.

You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!

[makingsenseofwhathappened]

Therapist: How's work going?

Me:

[angelsarecomputers]

been browsing through the images in the steam files for disco elysium and holy mother of dolores is this image perfection

[squarecloud73]

*I worship you Tumblr don’t remove it

…So about that leg pouch

[stump-not-found]

Lab Negotiations.

Ford says he traded some teeth to get his lab from Bill, but the truth is a lot stupider than that.

Supplementary backstory for Step IV of Theseus' Guide to Ruining a Perfectly Good Boat.

[sunflowershark]

“broken builds” this. “use the orb” that. you fools. the true best strategy to beat honour mode is to encourage safer and smarter decisions throughout your adventure by roleplaying as none other than faerun’s central authority on occupational safety and workplace accident prevention legislation

[stompandhollar]

jon, faking his age, newly promoted: i am doing such a good job at being the rational and steely academic

absolutely everyone in the archives: who is this 28 year old baby duckling and why is he already graying

[hattersarts]

Viv & Cleo comic from last year. cleos the company nepo baby and viv's her boss who used to work with her dad

[catchymemes]

[7frogsspeaks]

If you've never worked in a big corporate office you are missing out on half of Severance

Everyone seems to be talking about the setting of this show like it's a big mystery we're waiting on answers for, and I keep having to remind myself that this is the Unemployed Website because every single aspect of the severed floor is a direct parody of corporate office work. Some of it is pretty obvious to anyone (being a totally different person at work than you are at home, excessive surveillance, etc), but unless you've worked in one of these places there's a ton you're probably missing.

So, for those of you who (luckily) lack corporate office experience, here is a non-exhaustive list of real phenomenon Severence is referencing:

- Having absolutely no clue where anything is other than your department. A large corporate office truly feels like working in a brightly-lit, featureless labyrinth. You get lost so easily, and the number of turns and hallways in the opening scene is not that much more extreme than how I had to get to my department (which was over a 5-minute walk from the main entrance). It's common to draw new employees a map.

- Cult-like worship and constant quoting of the company's founder/founding family and core operating principles. Long-time employees will genuinely treat it like religious doctrine. It's scary.

- The relationship between departments. The different cultures, outrageous rumors, distrust, compete lack of understanding of who they are, how many of them there are, where they work, what they do, and generally treating them like a foreign country is barely even a parody. It's just really like that. Going to another department and seeing their equipment and work area (and being stared at by a bunch of people who don't expect a stranger to be there) might as well be walking into a room that's a hill with intimidating goat farmers.

- Other people's jobs being utterly incomprehensible. The department that had a room behind a wall next to mine apparently used it for filling backpacks with weights until the straps broke. Another department had someone whose job was to shine different lights onto pieces of fabric and record the color difference. One of my positions was measuring various pants 20 different ways and then taking notes while a specific person tried them on. Apparently a guy somewhere occasionally got paid to make watercolors of birds. Some people did finance. You get the idea.

- Only ever hearing from upper management (who are treated like a group of fickle, wrathful gods) through a nervous secretary and never hearing their voices/seeing their faces. You might know their names.

- Weird, uncomfortable, often ritualesque events that are treated like a big deal. The company I worked for, for example, would announce the employees of the year by having a committee of people with noisemakers and silly hats parade around the buildings until they got to the person's desk, and then take their photo to hang on the wall. People were not warned beforehand, it was a ~surprise~. This happened daily at random times for over a week each year, and long-standing employees got really into it.

- People genuinely fighting over all those meaningless, patronizing rewards like pizza parties, fancy pens, etc. Having an "employee of the month" mug, for example, is treated as an enviable status symbol. Presumably this is why corporations think this stuff will also work in the service industry (it doesn't because service workers are normal).

- Ridiculous conspiracy theories about the building, management, coworkers, or company history, peddled like gossip.

- New employees having a rough adjustment period where it feels like you're adapting to an alternate universe. Office culture is nothing like real life though it's closer if you live in white suburbia and have an HOA, so during most people's first time working in one they bump up against a lot of unspoken rules, weird taboos, and general culture shock. Most of this involves navigating strictly-enforced social hierarchies, verbal adherence to company ideals, and using only specific types of communication, and being chastised when you mess up. It 100% feels like being indoctrinated into a cult.

- Not understanding the purpose of the work you're doing, and only receiving vague answers, that it's "important", and that there's a big exciting deadline. No single department has access to the big picture for how everyone's jobs fit together to accomplish something, you'd have to work in all of them or in upper management to figure it out. The inner machinations and goals of the company are generally treated like a mysterious secret.

- Never seeing the sky. Window offices are a prized commodity since the buildings are so big, so unless you're a high-up manager or the company has gone to great lengths to add access to widows (most don't because it's really expensive) you likely won't see daylight until you leave, even if you travel around the building during the day.

And for the Lifetime Unemployment crowd, some more general job phenomenon:

- So. Many. Acronyms. And being expected to say them all with a straight face, even if they sound really silly.

- Coworkers effectively ceasing to exist the moment they leave the company, with zero explanation given for why they're suddenly gone unless there's a retirement party.

- Management giving ridiculously nit-picky feedback as a form of hazing/power play, especially to marginalized people.

- Upper management making sudden, drastic changes to your job expectations, physical workplace, or management structure with zero notice and penalizing you if you can't adapt immediately.

- The entire vibe of your job being dictated by who your manager is.

- Your coworkers acting like what happens at work is their entire life, and treating their home lives as something extra they do on the side.

- Having no clue who your coworkers are outside of work, and that information being largely treated as taboo.

- Being effectively locked in a sealed space with zero access to the outside world for the entirety of your workday, and being told that that's not weird or a problem– it's a benefit that helps you focus on your job.

Basically: There's no big mystery to the structure and culture of Lumon/the severed floor. Most of it is never going to get a canon "explanation" because the target audience already has one. It's all a parody.

EDIT: Reblogged with more office-specific ones and some photo evidence

[makingsenseofwhathappened]

[adastra-sf]

The Robot Uprising Began in 1979

edit: based on a real article, but with a dash of satire

source: X

On January 25, 1979, Robert Williams became the first person (on record at least) to be killed by a robot, but it was far from the last fatality at the hands of a robotic system.

Williams was a 25-year-old employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On that infamous day, he was working with a parts-retrieval system that moved castings and other materials from one part of the factory to another. 

The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.

"Using its very powerful hydraulic arm, the robot smashed the surprised worker into the operating machine, killing him instantly, after which it resumed its duties without further interference."

A news report about the legal battle suggests the killer robot continued working while Williams lay dead for 30 minutes until fellow workers realized what had happened. 

Many more deaths of this ilk have continued to pile up. A 2023 study identified that robots have killed at least 41 people in the USA between 1992 and 2017, with almost half of the fatalities in the Midwest, a region bursting with heavy industry and manufacturing.

For now, the companies that own these murderbots are held responsible for their actions. However, as AI grows increasingly ubiquitous and potentially uncontrollable, how might robot murders become ever-more complicated, and whom will we hold responsible as their decision-making becomes more self-driven and opaque?

[mortuarybees]

same people crying about ups drivers winning $42/hour are the same people who dismiss unions and say they just take your money and don't do anything for you. Bet you'd like $42/hour!!!!!!!