Here’s Greg offering a little trick – this follow his last trouble with drinking too much tea during the day
Greg has a problem with the air conditioning, because of that he’s constantly wearing hot clothes – therefor he has to hydrate a lot more.
Anyway, his little trick won’t work if the calls are monitored, and could put Greg in a very tight spot during the next review.
But while he hasn’t be caught …

There was Barbara’s little trick a while ago, there is going to be more (can’t wait for Bob’s bag of tricks)

I remember once a colleague doing this, and getting back to the customer – to her surprise he said

“Can you put me back on hold, the music is really nice!”

She didn’t need to be asked twice…

New Episode (in color) ; it’s a revivification of the Episode 001 – but with a twist, because the Boss is played by the irreverencious Bob Prezkovic. The idea behind this strip is : “Doesn’t matter who is the boss, the position assumes that he has to play the bad guy”.

But no worry : This isn’t a real change in the comics hierarchy, Martin Bradford is still around, and Bob a tier2 – it’s just Jim Bishop having a bad dream in technicolor!

Don’t forget to join the “Call-Centre Grinder” facebook page

Last time it was Bob as an archer – now it’s Barbara O’Reilly and Jim Bishop running in the woods playing Robin hood.

I’m currently focusing on painting, and therefor I put aside the call-center comics, I also started a facebook fanpage (and you’re all welcome to join).

The Grinder Saga is on track again, the call-center management always trying to boost the employee’s productivity ; have found after analyzing statistics intensively, the culprit – toilet breaks are too long.

Restrictions have to be made, budget allocated, the management decision is to introduce soon “the productivity seats” (more information on the Grinder facebook page) – but the employees aren’t seeing this changes as beneficial as the management would.

After trying to break the employees reluctance by offering them a choice in the color of their new seats, some Tier2 agents (who would like to be kept anonymous) are starting to organize after a very long talk in the cafeteria, where the sentence “we can’t tolerate to be considered as cattle any longer” was used as a slogan — now more agents have joined a movement labelled as “Occupy Grinder“.

All made with Gimp – some with custom brushes, some with pre-defined palette, it’s all about experimenting.

Another Pixel-art picture, this one originally is 128×128 pixels, but has been zoomed in by 400%.

Last pixel-art was apparently breaking a lot of rules … But thanks to a few comments about perspective, consistency, and reducing the number of colors, hopefully this one is more in line.

mtPaint will have to wait – I had a look at Pixen earlier, seems to have a nice design interface.

Pixel-art is very demanding, it requires a lot of discipline … and it hurts the eyes like a barbarian entering a rage during a fight.

Today, I tried to use mtPaint  … it was love at first sight, from the first look I knew this would be a magnificent tool for pixel-art ; unfortunately mtPaint is also very difficult to use, I couldn’t figure how to use the layers – or simply draw a line … that’s why I switched back to Gimp – (which is not really a walk in the park for pixel-art – you have to change a few settings (anti-aliasing is an important one) then it’s all about pressing N (to get the pen tool) then selecting a color, then making a shape, selecting the area created, filling it with the color … select-all, pressing N … etc …)

It’s only the beginning, but I already have a desk, a chair, a paper basket, a computer, the phone and his headset, and a couple of characters ready to walk into that strange pixels universe.

The potential is quite exciting, because it could lead to small web-comics (an alternate version of call-centre Grinder), but why stop there ? this could easily lead to animation and maybe a game ?!

But first thing first, I have to tame mtPaint …

Strange title, I know … this is coming from the 80s movie  Escape from New York: “I heard you were dead” (an homage to the John Wayne film Big Jake).

Because the poster above was inspired by the movie poster obviously, the main difference is that Bob Prezkovic (Tier2) is replacing  Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) as the bad-ass hero with the eye patch.

Make yourself a favor and listen to the delightful “Escape from New-York” soundtrack – you will have psychedelic side effects, that’s guaranteed.

This poster is dedicated to all call-center agents that actually escaped!

NB : During a Powerpoint presentation, an explosion from a slide transition caused Bob an eye injury, that’s the reason he’s wearing a patch.

Damn Powerpoint blast effects.