When You Assume
When You Assume
[Megan, standing left holding a hand up with the palm up while facing Cueball to the right.] Megan: You assumed? Megan: You know what happens when you assume- Cueball: I don't. Yet you're confidently asserting that I do. Megan: ...Oh. Hm. Cueball: Check and mate.

Prior to the events in this comic, Cueball has evidently told Megan that he made an assumption about something. Megan starts to respond with a takeoff on the modern proverb: "When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me." This proverb plays on the fact that the word "assume" may be broken down into the letters "ass", "u", and "me", and is intended to suggest that one should not make assumptions because they may turn out to be wrong and make those involved appear foolish.
However, when Megan evokes the proverb in the modified form "You know what happens when you assume", Cueball astutely points out that her phrasing itself is hypocritical in that it makes the assumption that he knows what happens when you assume. Megan stops to ponder Cueball's point, to which Cueball responds " Check and Mate ": a common phrase originating from chess — suggesting triumph or having successfully countered another person's argument to which there can be no retort. However, this would not make sense unless Cueball knows that assuming is bad, and he states in the comic that he does not know what happens when someone assumes. While Megan's tone of voice implies that when someone assumes, something bad happens, she does not state this explicitly, so Cueball would have had to assume that Megan was referring to something bad. However, Megan does not point this out, likely because she is too distracted by her own shame to notice that Cueball was also making an assumption.
Cueball's response demonstrates that, in life, we make assumptions almost every time we speak. This only tends to be problematic in the few instances where the assumption is wrong.
The title text is a play on the original "assume" pun, breaking down the word "assert", into "ass" and "ert", with "ERT" being an acronym for " Emergency Response Team ".
This comic follows a pattern similar to 1657: Insanity .
[Megan, standing left holding a hand up with the palm up while facing Cueball to the right.] Megan: You assumed? Megan: You know what happens when you assume- Cueball: I don't. Yet you're confidently asserting that I do. Megan: ...Oh. Hm. Cueball: Check and mate.
