Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25141183-20140726081516/@comment-24330788-20140813032731

Don't shoot but, I really don’t think Benson was being all that unreasonable in this one. To start off with, at the beginning of the episode it was established that Mordecai and Rigby hadn’t finished a week's worth of work. I like Mordecai and Rigby; they're amongst my favourite characters of the show, but this is a week’s worth of chores that they are being paid to do, and they deny it to their boss's face when he calls them out on it! I’m sorry but if they were to do that at any other job they’d be fired way before it gets to that point.

Second, Benson gave them an ultimatum. Do the work that they should have finished last week and they could get their burgers. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that if they just put their heads down and powered through it, they could have ended buying those things. Let me reiterate that these were jobs that should have already been finished; they didn’t get any new ones. So that means when Mordecai and Rigby were shocked at the massive amount of boxes they had to move in Skip’s shed, it kinda meant they didn’t bother to open the door when they were originally given the task. Benson’s the park manager, it's his responsibility to make sure the other workers do their jobs, and he gets in trouble himself if that doesn’t happen. Sure he could have been “nice” and let Mordecai and Rigby buy those burgers before the sale ends, but does anyone honestly think they wouldn’t have gone right back to slacking (like they’d been doing the whole previous week) if he had? Just saying.

Third and lastly, if you look carefully Benson was never going to buy one of those burgers for himself. He didn’t place any importance on them like the others did. I say this because I think the part most people take issue with is when he ate Mordecai and Rigby’s share at the very end. He did that to push a point, not because he wanted the burgers for himself. One could argue that that makes it worse, but I looked at it more like a father who doesn’t see the 2am concert his children are begging to attend to be nearly as earth-shatteringly important as they’re making it out to be. To Benson having work done on schedule probably took precedence over some fast food that he never bought the hype into, it's just his way of looking at things. I'm not saying that's necessarily right or wrong, but it pays to see things from both points of view.