TITLE The Bastich By Hart: Summer "Vacation" Part 5
PANEL 1 (BASTICH hides behind a cubicle wall near MTN. DEWD, who is sitting at his workstation.) MTN. DEWD: Hey, 'Stich. What's up.? BASTICH: Oh, nothing much, Dewd... just running for my life... MTN. DEWD: That's pretty rough. What happened..?
PANEL 2 (BASTICH tells his story while two inset images appear in thought bubbles.) BASTICH: Well, the day started out okay...
INSET 1 (A COWORKER points to BASTICH.) COWORKER 1: Thanks for setting those file permissions for me, Bastich. I guess that makes you our new Windows NT Guru... BASTICH: Uh... Sure...
INSET 2 (BASTICH leans over a COWORKER's workstation as she thanks him.) BASTICH: (Voiceover) ...but things started getting weird... BASTICH: I see the problem... there's a missing semicolon in your code here. COWORKER 2: Thanks, Perl Guru!
PANEL 3 (BASTICH speaks to MTN. DEWD.) BASTICH: ...now I'm the official Korn Shell guru, C guru, HTML guru, CGl guru, JavaScript guru, you name a tech buzz-word I'm the stinkin' "GURU"..! I need to lay low so this can pass before my immense incompetence catches up with me..!
PANEL 4 (A crowd of COWORKERS can be seen approaching from a distance, waving at BASTICH.) COWORKER 3: There he is! COWORKER 4: I've got a ksh question. BASTICH: Oh no…! Here they come..! MTN. DEWD: Step aside, 'Stich... it's time these freaks learned why I've been appointed...
PANEL 5 (The COWORKERS approach as MTN. DEWD raises his hands in a martial arts stance.) MTN. DEWD: The official guru of WHUP-ASS! COWORKER 5: C help needed... COWORKER 6: How do you initialize a pointer in JAVA?
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
In the installment, Bastich doesn't appreciate being appreciated.
This idea of being unofficially designated a "guru" seems to be universal. I jokingly griped about it with this strip, but it felt good to be sought out by people because I was good at something. Far better than being chased down the corridors amid cries of "what did you break THIS time!?".
"CGI" is listed among Bastich's guru titles. This is for Common Gateway Interface, not Computer Graphics Imagery which I think is a much better-known meaning of that acronym. Mothership was busy making boring business software, not rendering the next Jurassic Park sequel.
Java famously doesn't have explicit pointers, so the question about initializing one is kind of a nerd in-joke. Pointers were a major source of bugs in languages like C, so hiding their complexity was one of the big selling points of Java when it first hit the scene.