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Maandag, Nick – Facility Integrity

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Facility Integrity

I read plenty of comics for this website that I enjoy, as it would be silly to keep going as long as I have if I hated comics. But perfect comics are rare, and this one is damned near perfect, outside of possibly that title, but even that is perfect once you know what it means. This comics starts simply enough, with a manager of some sort starting a meeting by saying “pooping.” It’s hard not to be instantly intrigued, and it turns out that this guy has just completed a study that shows that productivity in his office is being wasted by 4% because of all the time spent in the crapper. This leads him to conclude that the only way to address this problem is to ban pooping during office hours, magnanimously leaving them the lunch hour for their daily poop. Naturally, the question of enforcing this comes up, which leads to the hiring of a few security guards: one for each of the restrooms, and one outside the office to make sure nobody tries to sneak out to use other facilities during business hours. When I describe this book as perfect, I mean specifically in his use of corporate speak and the ideas that are considered logical only in the office world, as he has that nailed. There are the office drones who dream of hitting the lottery (and put up with almost any indignity because of that false hope), the varying opinions of the temps who are hired as security guards (the one outside the office was clearly living for the moment that he eventually gets to “save the day”), and the cold way in which this whole idea is described as a good and necessary thing (down to the manager berating lesser employees for not coming up with this themselves). Even while writing this I’m thinking of several little moments that’s probably best for you to discover, but trust me when I say that this book is packed full of them. Honestly, the corporate world will probably find a way to make this idea work eventually, so when they do we can all look back at this book as the prophetic masterpiece that it is. Meanwhile, it’s a hilarious work of fiction showing how badly things can go wrong when “productivity” is the only concern. $10

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