2012-02-15
Explanation
This comic reimagines office life from a cat's perspective. A cheerful boss gives a new employee a tour, describing the mundane realities of office work in the most alienating terms possible: "Here's the place where you sit all day," "Here's that thing you look into all day, and that other thing you mash your hands into," "I see you're wearing clothes, which is good because you have to wear clothes here all the time," and finally the supposed incentive: "If you do good work, you can work here for fifty years!"
The final panel reveals this was all a cat's nightmare, as two humans observe the sleeping cat and say, "Aww, look -- he's having a nightmare." The humor works on two levels: it highlights how bizarre and unpleasant the conventions of human work life would seem to a creature that values freedom and comfort, and it serves as social commentary on how modern office work, when described in stripped-down terms without the usual euphemisms, sounds genuinely nightmarish even by human standards.