Toonstack Goes to the Office

Or do we?

Jun 05, 2022

Hi Team,

Offices. Cartoonists draw them all the time. Some of us go to them, work in them, know them intimately. Some of us have just heard that it’s a thing lots of people have to do so we listen to our friends’ gripes, google “office furniture,” and we’re off to the races.

I have worked in offices, but only a little bit. First, as a badly paid temp in fancy NYC startups, where, like the majestic ruby-throated hummingbird, I would spend the day attempting to eat twice my body weight in office snacks to make up for the low hourly wage.

Later, I did work in an office for over a year. I started in the summer and remember thinking “They’re paying me AND there is air conditioning? Don’t get hooked Kendra, don’t get hooked.” (I got a little hooked).

So for me, it’s a question of freedom vs air conditioning. But everyone has their own calculation to crunch. Let’s see how other cartoonists crack the office code.

-Kendra

Hilary Campbell

In my life I have worked in two WHOLE offices. One was a very small nonprofit situation where I never wore shoes. The other was a medium sized open floor plan warehouse where people who were not me were designing rollercoasters while I watched TCM and pretended to be busy. What I am saying is I have no idea what goes on in offices, but I think it would be wise to hire a dog.

Sofia Warren

For the first few years of my cartooning life, I was drawing on a Cintiq Companion 2, a portable tablet. I’d bought it because at the time I was commuting over two hours each way for my day job—entry-level production management for a comically (read: criminally) low salary— and the idea was to use all that time on the train to freelance, using this tablet. But the train was too shaky for animating, so instead I worked when I got home at 8pm, usually until around two in the morning. Then I got up at six, went to work, drank boggling amounts of coffee, dug my nails in my palm during afternoon meetings to stop from nodding off, and repeated the whole thing over again. After a few months of this, I noticed the bags under my eyes had grown considerably: they now occupied the majority of my face. Soon, they sagged into my mouth, and I couldn’t speak. The corporation told me it was fine as long as I kept answering emails, which I did. But then the bags spread to my torso, making their way down my arms until they swallowed my hands. At this point, no longer able to poke out “Let’s circle back EOD” or even enter little numbers into little spreadsheets, I quit.

Anyway, the point is that I drew this cartoon on that tablet, and I don’t think it ever did my drawings any favors— I hate how the lines look. And if you thought the point had something to do with the nature of work and wages and corporations and income disparity: LOL that’s so silly. Circle back never on that one!

Ellis Rosen

Now I've never worked in an office, so I don’t know about your fancy ‘casual Fridays’ and ‘constant bombardment of fluorescent light.’ Call me simple, but I like to deprive myself of vitamin D the old fashioned way: never leaving my bed covers. You office folks must think you're pretty great with your ‘being in more than one room during the day.’ Guess what? Folks have been spending all day in one room for centuries before office buildings came around. Hell, you have to share a kitchen. I got one all to myself! I never use it, but still. Anywho, at the end of the day we both yell and scream and rip our hair out when we try troubleshooting our printers, so I suppose we're all the same deep down.

Amy Kurzweil

Just circling back re: Ellis’s printer joke, see above. If you could ping me when the client wants to interface about next steps, I’ll be offline until my bandwidth flags the action items, if you know what I mean. Please advise.

Johnny Dinapoli

When I moved to New York City, my first job was at a talent agency in midtown. It was the biggest office I’d ever worked in, and I had two goals for my first day: don’t get fired, and don’t do anything embarrassing. At 5 PM, I hadn’t lost my job or spilled anything on my shirt, and thought I was in the clear. I smiled and waved bye to everyone as I got on the elevator. Our office was on the 8th floor, and in a matter of seconds, the elevator loudly broke and got stuck about five feet below where I got on. I know this because I could hear all my coworkers standing above me, laughing and taking about the poor new kid stuck in the elevator. To this day, I still get anxious whenever I’m in an office or when I’m stranded in an elevator for 45 minutes with Tom from the 10th floor.

More fun ways to avoid work.

If you’d like to give Mitra Farmand some money so she doesn’t have to work in an office anymore, go to her Etsy store and buy all the things.
Sign up for Kendra’s Urban Sketching Workshop in Manhattan on June 11th
Amy Kurzweil teaches cartoon classes on Patreon! Sign up now to get the recording of every past class, and join the next live class!
Listen to Hilary’s brand new podcast What’d You Do This Weekend?
Pre-order Sofia Warren’s book, Radical!
Order Send Help! a desert island cartoon collection by Ellis Rosen and Jon Adams, out now!
Have you checked out cartoonstock.com? Thanks to New Yorker cartoon editor emeritus, Bob Mankoff, this is the place to license and buy prints and merch of the best cartoons in the world, from The New Yorker, Wired, Airmail and...ToonStack!
Be sure to check out Shelby Lorman’s newsletter, Please Clap!
The same goes for Sofia Warren’s advice newsletter, You’re Doing Great!
See more cartoons from Ellis Rosen’s weekly Junk Drawer!

Toonstack Goes to the Office

Or do we?

More fun ways to avoid work.

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