#171: Precious Metals
Things were going swimmingly with this one, and it was ready several weeks ago, fully approved by the Committee & I’ve been looking forward to posting it bc St. Paddy’s is my kind of holiday. We don’t have a lot of panels that just sit around waiting for a scheduled slot, so it’s been sort of burning a hole in my social media pocket. So St. Patrick’s Day is here, it falls on a Sunday, and I’m enjoying a little alone time in the office, drinking my dark roast & watching the sun come up over the Olympics. I’m about to post, and all is well, until the alerts start flooding into my in-box. Brief aside: SynrSys Corp is a major client of McKinsey & Co. and at some point after the acquisition, they sent some consultants out here to see what big ideas they could come up with. After the Simpson’s thing & the class-action lawsuit, they pushed hard on creating an “Intellectual Property Violation Detection System” - software that would scour the web 24 hrs/day to make sure our panels weren’t being used illegally, & also to protect us from unwittingly violating anyone else’s IP. They didn’t build it, but they charged us $420K for the consulting service. Then Hanelore, of all people, mentioned that it didn’t sound that much different from just Googling something, which is free. So that’s what we use now for our IP violation detection system - Google Alerts. Nothing happened w this one until the big day arrives & all of a sudden this morning I have 30 alerts from around the world of people posting comics that look almost exactly like #171, with the exact same BitCoin joke in the caption. Now there’s no one here, and if I post the BitCoin joke that’s already been approved, we may end up with a 2nd class action lawsuit - or 30 more, who knows? And who’s going to be holding the bag then? I’m in a bit of a pickle. So I just changed the caption. This one is mine. I’m exceeding my authority posting this, and not by a little bit. It’s not approved, didn’t go through S-MCSS, but now canon. I’d probably be more concerned if I hadn’t been through the wringer last week. But let the chips fall where they may. -Ed.
