Frustrated Status
A thirteen-card 'away message' in which someone stuck on a math problem spirals into melodramatic despair, mocks standard problem-solving hints (draw a picture, work backwards, use the information you have), then cheerfully signs off.
Content note: Mock-morbid humor (tombstone, 'cause of death: math').
Use this cartoon
Free for classrooms, worksheets, slides and other non-commercial use under CC BY-NC 4.0, with credit to Ben Orlin.
Cartoon by Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings. https://cartoons.mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015-06-03-frustrated-status/ (CC BY-NC 4.0)Transcript
[1] "I'm sorry I can't reply to your email/text/call/messenger pigeon. I'm working on a math problem." [a pigeon]
[2] "'How's it going?' you ask. Well, if you wish to know, here's how it's going…"
[3] "I have laboured for many days and nights. How long, I know not. Time has become to me a meaningless charade." [a sad crescent moon]
[4] "I have slept only scattered, haunted hours. I subsist on scraps of paper, eraser scratchings, pencil shavings." [eraser shavings labeled "my only food"]
[5] "I've overflowed landfills with notebooks full of wrong turns and fruitless computations, and then I've decimated forests to create more paper and renew the treacherous cycle." [a sad tree]
[6] "I begin to doubt not only whether this problem can be solved, but whether any problem can. Perhaps all of existence is but a giant, erroneous equation, and in the final calculus of Armageddon, it all reduces to '2 = 1'." [a bearded, wild-eyed figure]
[7] "Oh, spare me your hints, your advice, your fortune-cookie wisdom and microwaved platitudes. The time for hints has long since passed." [an angry face]
[8] "'Draw a picture'? The pictures I've drawn could fill horrifying galleries, modernist exhibitions of despair and dead ends." [two figures viewing a canvas]
[9] "'Try working backwards'? My whole life is backwards. This work carries me upstream against time, towards a caveman state, until my soul coalesces into a primal, innumerate scream."
[10] "'Use the information you have'? All the information in my meager possession pales in the harsh neon glow of a single irredeemable fact: that I shall never solve this problem." [tombstone: "R.I.P. Me. 'I Never Solved It'"]
[11] "Never." A: "Cause of death?" B: "Math." [a figure lying beside a pencil and paper]
[12] "Even when the universe bloats and grays and washes up dead upon the shores of eternity, I shall still be here, banging my head against the nothingness, my empty eyes awaiting an answer that I know will never come."
[13] "Anyway, that's why I'm MIA. Get back to you soon!" [cheerful wave]