Prototype printers and Requiem's Dream

I had to work full time in addition to being a full time student in order to afford art school. It was brutal. I had a job at Hewlett Packard testing printers and worked 12 hour shifts. I was assigned to a print-life test; a test to see how many pages the printers could print before the carriages wore out. This meant sitting in a large room, often alone, in front of a huge bank of printers and replacing ink cartridges and paper and clearing paper jams till the printers died. Hours would go by where there was nothing to do, but they had a strict "no goofing off" policy. Anyone caught on the internet or off-task could get written up or fired. I was literally watching ink dry. 

And yes, at the end of every day there were TPS reports

To keep my sanity I started a comic strip called "Requiem's Dream". It was a series of parables drenched in art school pretentiousness, but the story wasn't the point. I had a hard time with both composition and drawing dynamic poses, so I gave myself a challenge: In each frame, the viewpoint couldn't align with the horizon, and the pose of the character had to be dynamic. Bonus points for foreshortening. It was so difficult for me that sometimes a single panel could take over a day to draw. It was a fantastic exercise! I kept a stack of papers in front of me, and whenever I heard the door open I would shove the drawings under the stack so I wouldn't get into trouble. At this point I've lost the originals, and I only have a few of the scanned panels. Here are the ones that survived.

I worked at that job for 3 years until I made my first demoreel. I showed it to a co-worker. Randomly, his brother worked at a small cg studio down the street and after work he stopped by the studio to show his brother my reel. The studio's owner happened to see it and said to have me call him, which I did. He offered me a job and I peaced out of HP so fast that I left a trail of calibration pages twirling in my wake. I never had to spend another day dealing with broken prototype printers again. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.