Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

unfinished-business

2017-10-01 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
unfinished-business
Votey panel for unfinished-business
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A ghost has returned to the living world because of "unfinished business," which is a standard trope in ghost stories. When the ghost arrives at what appears to be his old office, his former colleague tells him that everything on his desk has been marked urgent but nobody noticed his absence. The ghost, presumably expecting his unfinished business to be something dramatic or meaningful, is instead confronted with the banal reality of workplace bureaucracy -- his work piled up and nobody cared enough to notice he was gone.

The ghost then declares "Fine! Whatever! I'm moving beyond eternity then!" -- choosing to permanently leave existence rather than deal with the office work. His colleague, rather than being alarmed by this cosmic decision, dismissively says "I don't know what HR can do to help" -- treating the ghost's departure from all existence as a routine HR matter. The final panel shows a figure (possibly the devil or an afterlife administrator) saying they have assigned the ghost "an office in hell," implying the afterlife is just more of the same corporate drudgery.

The Humor

The comic works by collapsing the boundary between the supernatural and the mundane office environment. Every element of the ghost story -- unfinished business, haunting, crossing over -- is reinterpreted through the lens of corporate culture. The joke captures the specific horror of realizing that your workplace would not even notice if you literally died, combined with the existential dread that bureaucracy might extend beyond death itself. The colleague's complete lack of reaction to a ghost in the office is itself a commentary on how desensitized office workers become to their surroundings.

View History (1) Original Comic
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