Here to Help
Here to Help
[Megan, standing next to Hairy, is addressing the reader holding her arms out. Cueball walks in from the right.] Megan: Our field has been struggling with this problem for years.
[Cueball holds his laptop high up in one arm above Megan's head while holding his other arm out as well. Megan has turned to look at him.] Cueball: Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with algorithms!
[In a frame-less panel Cueball sits on a chair at a desk with his laptop working on it, while Hairy and Megan looks on from behind.]
[Cueball, still sitting at his laptop, points at the screen. Megan raises her arms and four small lines above her head, on either side of her speech line, indicate her annoyance with Cueball.] Six months later: Cueball: Wow, this problem is really hard. Megan: You don't say.

This comic is a satire of computer programmers, who sometimes forget that not everything can be solved with an algorithm , or of the tendency to think computers are the answer to everything. In the first panel, Megan talks about how the field that she and Hairy work in has a difficult problem that many people have been working on. Cueball , believing that algorithms can solve their problem, tries to help. In the next panel, Megan and Hairy silently watch Cueball working on the problem on his laptop. Finally, six months later, Cueball concedes, and an exasperated Megan retorts sarcastically, pointing out that she had explained its difficulty six months ago within the timeline.
The title text furthers Cueball's apparent arrogance by showing a dialogue. Megan or Hairy says, "We TOLD you it was hard," referring to the first panel, but Cueball, still confident in his own ability's superiority, says, "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard." The joke is that Cueball believes that, even though he has just failed, it was his attempt which proved the difficulty, and not Megan and Hairy's work for years. The dialog references an exchange from the film The Imitation Game , in which Alan Turing's superior claims, "The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable," and Turing replies, "Good. Let me try and we'll know for sure, won't we?"
The satire, however, applies far beyond computer programmers.  It can be read as a political commentary, as in nobody knew health care could be so complicated. It is what we'd all like to see when well-meaning advice givers provide the "simple" solution to all our problems, or management provides glib advice from ten thousand feet.  It is a commentary on the universal tendency to see problems as simple because we don't know what makes them hard.
This comic calls back to 793: Physicists and possibly 1570: Engineer Syllogism in central theme.
[Megan, standing next to Hairy, is addressing the reader holding her arms out. Cueball walks in from the right.] Megan: Our field has been struggling with this problem for years.
[Cueball holds his laptop high up in one arm above Megan's head while holding his other arm out as well. Megan has turned to look at him.] Cueball: Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with algorithms!
[In a frame-less panel Cueball sits on a chair at a desk with his laptop working on it, while Hairy and Megan looks on from behind.]
[Cueball, still sitting at his laptop, points at the screen. Megan raises her arms and four small lines above her head, on either side of her speech line, indicate her annoyance with Cueball.] Six months later: Cueball: Wow, this problem is really hard. Megan: You don't say.
