Strangely, I don’t really remember having an aversion to talking on the phone until AFTER I spent a couple years working a Help Desk. Now? I *despise* talking on the phone!
I hoped that volunteering at a crisis line, spending time helping people by talking on the phone, would help with my aversion. I got better at answering phone calls, but making them? Still yikes.
My cryptonite: Taking a phone call on a landline without caller ID. When I call at least I can plan what to say. Some unknown stranger calling and I gotta figure out what they want? Hell no. Somehow my office phone got conveniently lost. (Man I’m lucky to work in a place where I can away with that XD)
I hate answering the phone at work when there’s an overflow or the people who normally answer are out. The new phones we got recently are hard to work, and I’ve dropped calls before. The owners of the company often want calls handled differently, and I’m always terrified I’ll screw up a message to them and get fired for something that isn’t even my main job )even though realistically that’d probably not happen.)
Depression, cynicism, and a dislike of phone calls are the normal results of working helldesk for more than, oh, a day or two.
I hear it fades in time, proportionally to how long you worked at it. I hope they are right, but given that I spent years on helldesk, I doubt it will.
Oddly enough I had the opposite experience. Having to do phone support helped me overcome that trepidation. Granted most of said calls were with people in the same company, but there are plenty of vendor calls too. Dealing with the general public still sucks no matter how you cut it, and they’re usually pretty furious by the time they get to me…
I only survived making calls because I had a list and was done when the list was done, though so help me if anyone answered, because I didn’t get any information about what the call was about (DISASTER).
If I had to make and take calls at random all day? Hey, here’s my two weeks’ notice!
Am I the only one that hates texting rather than calling someone? Texting is so impersonal and it can forever for someone to reply, making what should be a 1 minute phone call into several hours of waiting. Plus Texting just feel so . . .impersonal? Not quite sure what the right word I want to use there is.
Exactly! It’s impersonal! I don’t have to think about the human I’m interacting with on the other end as much. It’s much less anxiety-inducing. Also, you can reword and rewrite a text several times until you have the right phrasing. Hard to do that in a live conversation. And with my propensity for saying exactly the wrong thing, that is a life-saver.
They both have their uses. Calls can help “settle this, now” and also allow for longer deeper conversations with friends, where you’re actually paying attention to each other. (Not necessarily all the attention, especially when driving, which I disapprove of but they do anyway, but lots of attention.) Texting can help keep contact spread over a busy day, or allow more thought, much like a version of e-mail with short messages and crappy editors. Or let you keep in contact quietly, without disturbing people on the train or in a meeting or while eating at a restaurant.
What I find annoying is the way texting can veer between “almost like call” in a realtime cascade and “like email with hours between messages” without warning. If there’s been a hot exchange then I often try to give an indication of “I’m going to stop paying attention to you now”.
And of course these days most of my calls are scheduled or at least pre-cleared via text, rather than simply calling out of the blue.
Phone calls freak me out because I can hear the persons voice but not see their face. Since I’m likely autistic, I think it’s because I find it hard to know when to talk and in person I get more information from the person’s face etc. In text you always know when it’s your turn. Also you can’t really interrupt anyone by text so it’s much easier for me at least 🙂
Texting is just so inefficient compared to a call, at least for me. I don’t have much texting experience. At 59 and with no friends or relatives who text, I’m not likely to get any better at it. My only experience is at work, but as a touch-typist I’m much better at it with a full-sized screen and keyboard than fumble-fingering a phone. I’m also a stickler for spelling, and I can’t efficiently glance back and forth between suggested words and the keyboard.
There’s also an attitude component. Why text when you can talk? It’s faster and you can hear the tone of voice. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like making phone calls either but I dislike texting even more.
My immediate relatives have a tendency to make any phone call last at least 45 minutes if not an hour. I’m using an old-style flip phone where I have to press each number button multiple times to make a letter but I’d still rather do text.
I think the reasons you describe are why so many of us prefer texting over talking, actually. Many introverts do not want that sort of personal exposure – they prefer distant and impersonal, it feels safer.
yup. and the stress of being put on the spot like that means I’m more likely to forget something I wanted to say. and there’s no record of the conversation unless I try to write and talk at the same time (which adds even more stress and tends to make me sound like a hal-bot). I tend to repeat appointment details out loud now until I can find a pen and paper or something.
I’d prefer Amber to not cheat for Walky, especially since he said he wanted to face the consequences to be fair to Sal, but I’ll support just about any bad behavior right now if it will get their ship to sail.
Amber is not the type of girl to do something so dishonest!
*happily watches Amber fake academic records and break into a building to steal the hard copies*
I wonder if we’ll see amber and amazigirl have an argument. Like, i imagine its like the other personality watches from within and waits their turn. Or maybe it’s a really mindful disassociation.
What’s amazi-girls event horizon of shit amber could do that’ll get her to come out of turn.
It depends. Right now it seems to me like they are not co-hosting or co-conscious and they aren’t sharing memories any more, so it is unlikely for Amazi-Girl to know this is happening right now.
Interesting. And here I was thinking that this may be a healthy development for Amber. She (kinda, sorta) took credit for Amazi-Girl’s heroics (“this body”) and now she doing Amazi-Girl type stuff while she is clearly Amber. I thought it was a sign of integration.
Integration would, to my understanding, require accepting Amazi-Girl’s thoughts as her own. Amber was always capable of doing this stuff before and claiming credit for things an alter does is not the same as accepting they are part of you. Since Amber and Amazi-Girl are not communicating well right now, it would be highly unlikely for Amazi-Girl to be integrating right now or to accept integration right now.
…Sort of. That’s not quite it, to my understanding. There’s two models of integration for one.
The ‘fusion’ model as I call it (all alters in one) requires basically a lot of talking out issues between alters and respect for each one and what they’d bring to the whole before they act as one. It’s also, on average, the model easier to split up again.
And the ‘committee’ model, which doesn’t entail all the alters ‘becoming’ one. It does require they be communicating, sharing memories and more or less working towards a common goal (even if they have different feelings about and ideas regarding how best to go about it and why they want it).
Neither of these involve denying an alter’s existence and considering their actions and thoughts ones own. That’s actually likely going to make it worse.
Unlikely. Remember that a day ago in-strip time we saw AG talk through the suit while Amber was antagonizing her, after AG started taking control while Amber was sleeping which Amber doesn’t remember. Both of these are very, very bad signs they’re dissociating from each other further.
Also, based off the endlessly patient and thorough commentary of people in the comments with DID, ‘integration’ in terms of ‘now there’s only one person in your head now and you’re Cured Forever!’ isn’t really a feasible or good long-term solution in this sort of situation. It’d more likely lead to more blackouts because, near as I understand it, anything that changes your neural pathways so much you split is pretty much permanent, so forcing an alter to go away would just make them ultimately force their way out.
It’s been made clear that Amber doesn’t remember what Amazi-Girl’s doing any more. It’s likely, but not entirely clear that it works the other way too, since we haven’t actually seen Amazi-Girl since before the stabbing.
This is true, it is possible that when Amazi-Girl is conscious again that she WILL know what Amber has been doing and just doesn’t at this very moment in time. There are a lot of aspects of DID that can be variable.
Tried to think of a good pun to follow that one with, but the only one that comes to mind is terrible and stupid. Guess I’m just gonna have to phone it in
I read this comment first and thought, “Oooh, is there drama happening?”
Then I read up a couple comments, and I realized there was no drama, only puns.
I was thinking overday that if Amber had just passed along a “trouble ticket” about the grading system’s vulnerability to the responsible parties, that might win her a reward big enough to pay off some of her tuition. All this cloak-and-dagger
Walk on eggshells and analyze
Every particle of difference
Gets like mountains in our eyes!
(You say) You’re unscrupulous!
You say (You’re naive!)
Syncronized like magic–Good Friends, you and me!
I have seen it happen where a student warned our department about a fairly obvious security flaw and then, instead of the thanks that were due him, instead most of the people in my department were all, “That guy hacked us!” and wanted him punished. We all know what happens to all good deeds…
You could have got hI’m off of academic probation by just getting him to go to the nearest college counselors office. I mean getting him off of probation won’t bump him up a grade either way but damn Amber why the hard way?
So it occurs to me that Jason still doesn’t know he has been fired, the school has no actual proof that he was sleeping with a student, and since Sal isn’t likely to say anything he could come back if he kept his mouth shut. But if the school thinks that Jason was altering Walky’s grades, and both Walky and Jason get in trouble for this, not only will Sal blame Walky, it could cause problems for Jason, Walky, and eventually Amber too.
It seems unlikely since for them to know the grades were changed, they’d have to notice the hacking.
If they notice the hacking, they’d have to notice it was on a day he didn’t show up to work.
Plus, they’d need to know why he would change those grades and no one else’s.
I guess it’s possible. I just don’t see it.
Alright, this is just getting patently ridiculous.
There’s no way a new TA assigned to a class in the middle of a semester would care enough to double check the grades using hard copies when there’s a digital record. We do not care that much at all.
Granted, the fact that the previous TA was fired due to sexual impropriety would probably lead the faculty to believe that grades may have been used as leverage against students, so they’d want the hard copies to be kept. But still, the student probably has the hard copies, so the only records they’d have access to are the TA’s digital records.
Now I’m wondering if the mysterious disappearance/alteration of Walky’s grades coinciding with Jason’s firing is going to lead someone in the faculty to mistakenly conclude that Walky was the student Jason was sleeping with.
Even if she does or suspects it, Amber would be likely to leave nothing to chance. She’s come to care about Walky in some capacity, and we know she can be pretty determined to help people she cares about. Half-measures aren’t in Amber’s vocabulary with this kind of thing.
If the cameras are as well-monitored as those in and around my apartment block, several are pointed at her right now with the operators reading books and newspapers and all the recording options off (as regularly changing the tapes is too much like work).
As Regalli said, they haven’t even had mid-terms yet.
I got into private tutoring when I was what you would probably call a sophomore, because the professor teaching fresher economics sent people to me for remedial coaching when they had failed the whole course once and then failed the mid-term on repeat.
They all got distinctions at the end of the year. (And I got to eat without washing dishes.) A distinction is the second-highest of five passing grades: distinction average puts you on the Dean’s List.
Freshman coursework is not hard, so long as you (a) don’t panic, and (b) apply yourself steadily and calmly to your work.
Which in fairness, Walky isn’t doing. But he could learn, he needs to learn, he’s not actually going to improve gradeswise or not avoid probation unless he DOES learn or Amber continues hacking (bad idea which Amber has to be aware of,) and it’s better he learns now rather than crash within three semesters. His grade is salvageable, unless Professor Rees has some ridiculously screwy awful weighting system.
I mean, knowing tenured faculty who haven’t done actual work in decades, that’s possible, but this bad would be impressive.
Also, academic probation only actually goes into effect after final grades for the semester, and we’re in early October.
In all seriousness, this isn’t awful unless she gets caught, though that’s a big if. This is a significant breach of trust alright, and I’m not sure if I want it to backfire or not. Walky doesn’t deserve the crossfire. Mostly.
It’s possible Amber could get caught, but it’d practically have to lead to a time skip for all of the repercussions, or it’d lead to Amber being effectively written out of the comic. Neither strikes me as terribly likely at this juncture.
It’d be like if one of the cast got injured more seriously than Joyce’s wrist or her toe. They’d be in a cast for possibly until the end of the comic, due to the passage of time.
Chekhov’s copies. They only exist so Amber has a reason to do this. So what will she find? Guessing Jason’s dismissal letter, so further plot can happen. So does this lead to Sal, her semi nemesis? Does it lead to her getting caught? Will they think she is the student Jason slept with and she can deny it? Tune in next week. Same bat time same bat url.
It’s just occurring to me, why hasn’t Sal noticed Walky isn’t going to class? Or has she never had to deal with him doing this sort of avoidance panic thing before?
She probably doesn’t care. He is able to make his own choices about going to classes and she probably just expects him to be continuing his old method of making it through without effort.
Like how she says “this body has hopped a speeding car.” Just a nice touch, since in her mind it wasn’t HER who hopped the speeding car — it was Amazi-Girl, who was using that body at the time.
I hope Sal finds out somehow that Walky’s math grades are worse than hers. Not to dump more on Walky – who is making a good and hard decision – but because I think Sal deserves to know that she’s observably, quantifiably “better” in some way, especially because she went the extra mile to improve (not that it went perfectly)! But – Sal deserves some external feedback that she is valuable and can be successful and acknowledged in ways that Walky isn’t.
I don’t think that would make a difference.
To me, Sal doesn’t have a problem with her view of herself compared to Walky. She already knows she’s more mature than him and that he can be an idiot.
She also has this cool image that people associate with her and even seems to have a better friend in Marcy than Walky has in Billie. In most areas of life, she’s on par or better than him, and probably realizes it, assuming she cares to keep score.
It’s how other people view her compared to Walky, specifically her parents that could boost her self esteem. So they would have to be the ones to know that Sal had better math grades, and they would also need to show that they appreciate her more and/or value him less because of it (preferably the former).
… but, now that you mention it, the lack of backpacks on this campus is weird. I assume willis just didn’t want to draw them. they’d probably have driven him insane with all the zippers and pouches and stuff.
We’ve seen characters with backpacks before; off the top of my head, there was that early-ish comic where Mike was surreptitiously taking others’ (quite heavy) math books and slipping them into Walky’s backpack when he wasn’t looking, and another one from around the time of Amazi-Girl and Danny breaking up, where the former confronted a thief making off with some nameless student’s backpack. There’s probably a few others as well.
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[/Mission Impossible theme]
(wow, Amber has the same Kryptonite I do!)
I quit/was fired from my last 9-5 partly because I hated talking on the phone.
Strangely, I don’t really remember having an aversion to talking on the phone until AFTER I spent a couple years working a Help Desk. Now? I *despise* talking on the phone!
I hoped that volunteering at a crisis line, spending time helping people by talking on the phone, would help with my aversion. I got better at answering phone calls, but making them? Still yikes.
I have to make, like, three of them on monday that I was going to do this week. and I seem to have accidentally a depression again. >.< waaaah.
Hey, I have accidentally a depression again too! Solidarity high-five!
*jedi hugs*
Hey, I accidentally had a depression last week! *Offers more jedi hugs* Still a few phone calls waiting to be made…
My cryptonite: Taking a phone call on a landline without caller ID. When I call at least I can plan what to say. Some unknown stranger calling and I gotta figure out what they want? Hell no. Somehow my office phone got conveniently lost. (Man I’m lucky to work in a place where I can away with that XD)
For me it’s talking on the phone in Italian. I’m okay but not fluent, and taking away the body-language cues makes it just too hard.
I hate answering the phone at work when there’s an overflow or the people who normally answer are out. The new phones we got recently are hard to work, and I’ve dropped calls before. The owners of the company often want calls handled differently, and I’m always terrified I’ll screw up a message to them and get fired for something that isn’t even my main job )even though realistically that’d probably not happen.)
My job is to make and take calls, and I’m getting pretty good at it.
You know the saying “Don’t take it home”? Well, I DON’T. Good luck getting me to call someone socially – I don’t do that kinky pervert stuff.
Depression, cynicism, and a dislike of phone calls are the normal results of working helldesk for more than, oh, a day or two.
I hear it fades in time, proportionally to how long you worked at it. I hope they are right, but given that I spent years on helldesk, I doubt it will.
Oh, I forgot the paranoia. But that usually doesn’t set in until around week three.
Oddly enough I had the opposite experience. Having to do phone support helped me overcome that trepidation. Granted most of said calls were with people in the same company, but there are plenty of vendor calls too. Dealing with the general public still sucks no matter how you cut it, and they’re usually pretty furious by the time they get to me…
I only survived making calls because I had a list and was done when the list was done, though so help me if anyone answered, because I didn’t get any information about what the call was about (DISASTER).
If I had to make and take calls at random all day? Hey, here’s my two weeks’ notice!
Amber’s a sneak
And hopefully not a lot of people will look at the building.
They’re all instagramming the raccoon climbing the next building over.
No Amber
Amber: makes bad decisions, can’t make phone calls
I feel so seen.
This is why Batman has a Bat-Signal instead of just giving the Commissioner a secret phone number. The conversations were too awkward.
He’d only say “I’m Batman” and he’d disconnect whenever Commissioner Gordon looked away.
Advice for college students: if your help puts your friend at high risk of expulsion, find another way to help.
Especially when they specifically indicate they do not want this help. And particularly not without telling them so they know to watch their ass.
Check the title.
I guess Amber had to make up for walky’s excessive smartness in the last comic 😉
oh god, calling anyone on the phone? *nervous sweat*
keep climbing that building, Amber
I mean, the only phone calls we’ve seen in the comic are…
…Blaine calling Amber.
…Becky calling Joyce as she’s being chased by a gunman.
…Carol calling Joyce to say that she supported Toedad.
Oof.
Well, we’ve also seen less terrifying calls between Becky and Joyce.
And wasn’t there one where Mike answered Joyce’s phone with “All hail satan” to both mess with her mom and to help her avoid lying about Becky.
And where Walky masterfully handled the panicked return call after that.
Clearly Walky’s into that kinky pervert ‘social’ stuff.
Not really, but he can step up when he needs to. It’s one of the things I like best about Walky’s character.
*sigh* Goddammit Amber.
exactly. >.<
Oh, Amber.
Am I the only one that hates texting rather than calling someone? Texting is so impersonal and it can forever for someone to reply, making what should be a 1 minute phone call into several hours of waiting. Plus Texting just feel so . . .impersonal? Not quite sure what the right word I want to use there is.
Distant? Inconsequential? Like the person was an afterthought?
Exactly! It’s impersonal! I don’t have to think about the human I’m interacting with on the other end as much. It’s much less anxiety-inducing. Also, you can reword and rewrite a text several times until you have the right phrasing. Hard to do that in a live conversation. And with my propensity for saying exactly the wrong thing, that is a life-saver.
They both have their uses. Calls can help “settle this, now” and also allow for longer deeper conversations with friends, where you’re actually paying attention to each other. (Not necessarily all the attention, especially when driving, which I disapprove of but they do anyway, but lots of attention.) Texting can help keep contact spread over a busy day, or allow more thought, much like a version of e-mail with short messages and crappy editors. Or let you keep in contact quietly, without disturbing people on the train or in a meeting or while eating at a restaurant.
What I find annoying is the way texting can veer between “almost like call” in a realtime cascade and “like email with hours between messages” without warning. If there’s been a hot exchange then I often try to give an indication of “I’m going to stop paying attention to you now”.
And of course these days most of my calls are scheduled or at least pre-cleared via text, rather than simply calling out of the blue.
Phone calls freak me out because I can hear the persons voice but not see their face. Since I’m likely autistic, I think it’s because I find it hard to know when to talk and in person I get more information from the person’s face etc. In text you always know when it’s your turn. Also you can’t really interrupt anyone by text so it’s much easier for me at least 🙂
Naw, you ain’t the only one. I have trouble expressing my emotions through text alone.
Texting is just so inefficient compared to a call, at least for me. I don’t have much texting experience. At 59 and with no friends or relatives who text, I’m not likely to get any better at it. My only experience is at work, but as a touch-typist I’m much better at it with a full-sized screen and keyboard than fumble-fingering a phone. I’m also a stickler for spelling, and I can’t efficiently glance back and forth between suggested words and the keyboard.
There’s also an attitude component. Why text when you can talk? It’s faster and you can hear the tone of voice. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like making phone calls either but I dislike texting even more.
My immediate relatives have a tendency to make any phone call last at least 45 minutes if not an hour. I’m using an old-style flip phone where I have to press each number button multiple times to make a letter but I’d still rather do text.
I think the reasons you describe are why so many of us prefer texting over talking, actually. Many introverts do not want that sort of personal exposure – they prefer distant and impersonal, it feels safer.
yup. and the stress of being put on the spot like that means I’m more likely to forget something I wanted to say. and there’s no record of the conversation unless I try to write and talk at the same time (which adds even more stress and tends to make me sound like a hal-bot). I tend to repeat appointment details out loud now until I can find a pen and paper or something.
I’d prefer Amber to not cheat for Walky, especially since he said he wanted to face the consequences to be fair to Sal, but I’ll support just about any bad behavior right now if it will get their ship to sail.
Tired, and with the shipping bit at the end I read that first part as saying you’d prefer Amber to not cheat on Walky.
Amber is not the type of girl to do something so dishonest!
*happily watches Amber fake academic records and break into a building to steal the hard copies*
I wonder if we’ll see amber and amazigirl have an argument. Like, i imagine its like the other personality watches from within and waits their turn. Or maybe it’s a really mindful disassociation.
What’s amazi-girls event horizon of shit amber could do that’ll get her to come out of turn.
It depends. Right now it seems to me like they are not co-hosting or co-conscious and they aren’t sharing memories any more, so it is unlikely for Amazi-Girl to know this is happening right now.
Interesting. And here I was thinking that this may be a healthy development for Amber. She (kinda, sorta) took credit for Amazi-Girl’s heroics (“this body”) and now she doing Amazi-Girl type stuff while she is clearly Amber. I thought it was a sign of integration.
Integration would, to my understanding, require accepting Amazi-Girl’s thoughts as her own. Amber was always capable of doing this stuff before and claiming credit for things an alter does is not the same as accepting they are part of you. Since Amber and Amazi-Girl are not communicating well right now, it would be highly unlikely for Amazi-Girl to be integrating right now or to accept integration right now.
…Sort of. That’s not quite it, to my understanding. There’s two models of integration for one.
The ‘fusion’ model as I call it (all alters in one) requires basically a lot of talking out issues between alters and respect for each one and what they’d bring to the whole before they act as one. It’s also, on average, the model easier to split up again.
And the ‘committee’ model, which doesn’t entail all the alters ‘becoming’ one. It does require they be communicating, sharing memories and more or less working towards a common goal (even if they have different feelings about and ideas regarding how best to go about it and why they want it).
Neither of these involve denying an alter’s existence and considering their actions and thoughts ones own. That’s actually likely going to make it worse.
Unlikely. Remember that a day ago in-strip time we saw AG talk through the suit while Amber was antagonizing her, after AG started taking control while Amber was sleeping which Amber doesn’t remember. Both of these are very, very bad signs they’re dissociating from each other further.
Also, based off the endlessly patient and thorough commentary of people in the comments with DID, ‘integration’ in terms of ‘now there’s only one person in your head now and you’re Cured Forever!’ isn’t really a feasible or good long-term solution in this sort of situation. It’d more likely lead to more blackouts because, near as I understand it, anything that changes your neural pathways so much you split is pretty much permanent, so forcing an alter to go away would just make them ultimately force their way out.
It’s been made clear that Amber doesn’t remember what Amazi-Girl’s doing any more. It’s likely, but not entirely clear that it works the other way too, since we haven’t actually seen Amazi-Girl since before the stabbing.
This is true, it is possible that when Amazi-Girl is conscious again that she WILL know what Amber has been doing and just doesn’t at this very moment in time. There are a lot of aspects of DID that can be variable.
Amber does things the hard way a lot, doesn’t she?
It’s a trait of those with anxiety, I’ve observed. Particularly those with OCD, or approaching it.
…It has never occurred to me, but you’re totally right.
WELP that explains most of my life
Ah, good, so laser grids are still a possibility.
….
I feel called out on that phone thing right now…
That joke was a ringer.
Tried to think of a good pun to follow that one with, but the only one that comes to mind is terrible and stupid. Guess I’m just gonna have to phone it in
You need to dial it back a bit.
Why? Was there a problem with his tone?
I read this comment first and thought, “Oooh, is there drama happening?”
Then I read up a couple comments, and I realized there was no drama, only puns.
And the puns are off the hook.
Must be a kniPhone glitch.
Thank you for reminding me of the whole knife/phone thing.
Amber: prefers talking with knives to talking on the phone
I don’t think that app-lies here
I think he was looking at it out of con-text
Oops, meant that to be replying to cbwroses
Good call.
SAME
…. oh, hey, I made an accidental pun.
Regardless of intent, it rang true.
I guess punning is in your blood by this point. It’s habitu-call.
I guess it’s my calling. And, seeing how it’s spread to so many people so far away from me, it’s obviously telecommunicable.
What do the medical texts say about this?
Next strip: Zsa Zsa Gabor leans out a window to chat with Amber.
+1 true believer!
Or Lurch.
“Return to your harpischord, Citizen.”
I was thinking overday that if Amber had just passed along a “trouble ticket” about the grading system’s vulnerability to the responsible parties, that might win her a reward big enough to pay off some of her tuition.
All this cloak-and-dagger
Walk on eggshells and analyze
Every particle of difference
Gets like mountains in our eyes!
(You say) You’re unscrupulous!
You say (You’re naive!)
Syncronized like magic–Good Friends, you and me!
I thought she didn’t have any trouble with tuition because the courts forced Blaine to pay for all of it.
Since when do colleges reward telling them their it security is shit?
I have seen it happen where a student warned our department about a fairly obvious security flaw and then, instead of the thanks that were due him, instead most of the people in my department were all, “That guy hacked us!” and wanted him punished. We all know what happens to all good deeds…
Yep.
Oh no, I’m relating to Amber, this is probably bad.
Talking on phones is weird and I don’t like it either.
Amber, Supervillain
You could have got hI’m off of academic probation by just getting him to go to the nearest college counselors office. I mean getting him off of probation won’t bump him up a grade either way but damn Amber why the hard way?
Oh wait no scratch that I miss read she’s still kind of changing his grades I think?
I don’t condone this behavior, but couldn’t the break-in be done at night?!
When I was a teenager, I loved talking on the phone.
20 years later, I can’t stand it.
Are Uggs really the best boot for scaling walls?
I feel this, Amber.
The definition of #relatable.
I love Amber so much but she worries me also so much
So it occurs to me that Jason still doesn’t know he has been fired, the school has no actual proof that he was sleeping with a student, and since Sal isn’t likely to say anything he could come back if he kept his mouth shut. But if the school thinks that Jason was altering Walky’s grades, and both Walky and Jason get in trouble for this, not only will Sal blame Walky, it could cause problems for Jason, Walky, and eventually Amber too.
It seems unlikely since for them to know the grades were changed, they’d have to notice the hacking.
If they notice the hacking, they’d have to notice it was on a day he didn’t show up to work.
Plus, they’d need to know why he would change those grades and no one else’s.
I guess it’s possible. I just don’t see it.
What if they had backups on an excel sheet or something? Not the school system but their own office computer?
Not only do they not have proof, they don’t even have probable cause.
We’ve already seen that Jason has been replaced, so I can only assume that he failed to show up to his hearing and lost his job by default.
Aaaaand Amber keeps calling me out. (The talking on the phone part, of course. Not the hacking. You guys can’t prove anything…)
True, it is hard to make anyone answer these days.
Little does she suspect that Walky is on Double Secret Probation.
Alright, this is just getting patently ridiculous.
There’s no way a new TA assigned to a class in the middle of a semester would care enough to double check the grades using hard copies when there’s a digital record. We do not care that much at all.
Granted, the fact that the previous TA was fired due to sexual impropriety would probably lead the faculty to believe that grades may have been used as leverage against students, so they’d want the hard copies to be kept. But still, the student probably has the hard copies, so the only records they’d have access to are the TA’s digital records.
The only things given back to students are the original grades. Would those be considered copies?
Now I’m wondering if the mysterious disappearance/alteration of Walky’s grades coinciding with Jason’s firing is going to lead someone in the faculty to mistakenly conclude that Walky was the student Jason was sleeping with.
Does Amber know that?
Even if she does or suspects it, Amber would be likely to leave nothing to chance. She’s come to care about Walky in some capacity, and we know she can be pretty determined to help people she cares about. Half-measures aren’t in Amber’s vocabulary with this kind of thing.
Amber is going to go on another type of suspension.
That definitely looks easier than calling someone on the phone. So does bomb defusal.
Amber is no slouch in the “secret fighter for justice*” herself
*) Or whatever this is
Ok…no security cameras around getting this Adam West stunt?
If the cameras are as well-monitored as those in and around my apartment block, several are pointed at her right now with the operators reading books and newspapers and all the recording options off (as regularly changing the tapes is too much like work).
I find it fascinating that Amber seems to get interested in people as soon as Dorothy breaks up with them. Let’s see if the pattern holds.
Occasionally, Amber reminds us that she and Amazi-Girl are often different people. It’s a disturbing thing when she does so.
Meanwhile, it is confirmed that Walky’s grades are that bad.
As Regalli said, they haven’t even had mid-terms yet.
I got into private tutoring when I was what you would probably call a sophomore, because the professor teaching fresher economics sent people to me for remedial coaching when they had failed the whole course once and then failed the mid-term on repeat.
They all got distinctions at the end of the year. (And I got to eat without washing dishes.) A distinction is the second-highest of five passing grades: distinction average puts you on the Dean’s List.
Freshman coursework is not hard, so long as you (a) don’t panic, and (b) apply yourself steadily and calmly to your work.
Which in fairness, Walky isn’t doing. But he could learn, he needs to learn, he’s not actually going to improve gradeswise or not avoid probation unless he DOES learn or Amber continues hacking (bad idea which Amber has to be aware of,) and it’s better he learns now rather than crash within three semesters. His grade is salvageable, unless Professor Rees has some ridiculously screwy awful weighting system.
I mean, knowing tenured faculty who haven’t done actual work in decades, that’s possible, but this bad would be impressive.
Also, academic probation only actually goes into effect after final grades for the semester, and we’re in early October.
… Amber. Amber, no. This is THE WORST POSSIBLE OPTION.
And it’s not even fucking midterms yet!
…AG’s going to take control at the worst possible time, isn’t she?
Amber no
In all seriousness, this isn’t awful unless she gets caught, though that’s a big if. This is a significant breach of trust alright, and I’m not sure if I want it to backfire or not. Walky doesn’t deserve the crossfire. Mostly.
It’s possible Amber could get caught, but it’d practically have to lead to a time skip for all of the repercussions, or it’d lead to Amber being effectively written out of the comic. Neither strikes me as terribly likely at this juncture.
It’d be like if one of the cast got injured more seriously than Joyce’s wrist or her toe. They’d be in a cast for possibly until the end of the comic, due to the passage of time.
More significantly, WALKY’s going to be in trouble if she gets caught, and its his grades she’s futzing with, and he specifically told her not to.
Chekhov’s copies. They only exist so Amber has a reason to do this. So what will she find? Guessing Jason’s dismissal letter, so further plot can happen. So does this lead to Sal, her semi nemesis? Does it lead to her getting caught? Will they think she is the student Jason slept with and she can deny it? Tune in next week. Same bat time same bat url.
*checks up on Twitter, pattern recognition intensifies*
*does not actually know the author personally so sends generic positive vibes in Willis’ direction*
BTW, much of this scene was cribbed directly from the script of War Games. Jus’ sayin’.
It’s just occurring to me, why hasn’t Sal noticed Walky isn’t going to class? Or has she never had to deal with him doing this sort of avoidance panic thing before?
She probably has as much awareness of his problems and issues as he had of hers. Someone else will have to bring it up first.
She probably doesn’t care. He is able to make his own choices about going to classes and she probably just expects him to be continuing his old method of making it through without effort.
Amber is becoming a horny Sombra! That would be a good slipshine story though.
Like how she says “this body has hopped a speeding car.” Just a nice touch, since in her mind it wasn’t HER who hopped the speeding car — it was Amazi-Girl, who was using that body at the time.
I hope Sal finds out somehow that Walky’s math grades are worse than hers. Not to dump more on Walky – who is making a good and hard decision – but because I think Sal deserves to know that she’s observably, quantifiably “better” in some way, especially because she went the extra mile to improve (not that it went perfectly)! But – Sal deserves some external feedback that she is valuable and can be successful and acknowledged in ways that Walky isn’t.
I am of course assuming that Sal is not to the point where she is on academic probation.
I don’t think that would make a difference.
To me, Sal doesn’t have a problem with her view of herself compared to Walky. She already knows she’s more mature than him and that he can be an idiot.
She also has this cool image that people associate with her and even seems to have a better friend in Marcy than Walky has in Billie. In most areas of life, she’s on par or better than him, and probably realizes it, assuming she cares to keep score.
It’s how other people view her compared to Walky, specifically her parents that could boost her self esteem. So they would have to be the ones to know that Sal had better math grades, and they would also need to show that they appreciate her more and/or value him less because of it (preferably the former).
I’m pretty sure Walky’s going to figure this out at some point. HE knows his own grades. He’s a bright kid, he can do the ma-…
…. nevermind.
I got my Dina magnet today! Putting it on my car for now.
I didn’t because depression… but they’re still in stock 🙂 and I just fought my way through paypal’s bullshit and finally ordered one. yay 🙂
Just had a thought… where was she keeping that rope? In her pockets?
Hammerspace!
… but, now that you mention it, the lack of backpacks on this campus is weird. I assume willis just didn’t want to draw them. they’d probably have driven him insane with all the zippers and pouches and stuff.
We’ve seen characters with backpacks before; off the top of my head, there was that early-ish comic where Mike was surreptitiously taking others’ (quite heavy) math books and slipping them into Walky’s backpack when he wasn’t looking, and another one from around the time of Amazi-Girl and Danny breaking up, where the former confronted a thief making off with some nameless student’s backpack. There’s probably a few others as well.
yeah… the first half dozen random comics I looked at had none, but then I clicked some more and found them. they do exist, just very sporadically.
Schrodinger’s backpacks.
They exist when they’re plot useful. Or funny.
Maybe she went back to her dorm first? Bit of a short time skip between panels?
She may have strategically placed packs of supplies on various school building rooftops.
Amazi-Girl is always prepared.
And Amber knows all her secret caches.
Probably.
Uh-huh.