Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 31, 1995 TAG: 9501310108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANDY MEISLER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: DUBLIN, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
``Dilbert,'' which first appeared in 1989, now runs in nearly 400 newspapers - an amazing achievement for a zero-sum medium in which breakthroughs are rare.
Recent additions to its lineup of papers include The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News and the Roanoke Times & World-News. There are now ``Dilbert'' books, T-shirts, coffee mugs and screen savers for sale.
The daily strip chronicles absurdities and atrocities of the high-tech workplace, examples of which are sent by readers through E-mail into the souped-up Macintosh of Scott Adams, a formerly obscure middle manager who draws ``Dilbert.''
Now, Adams is frequently paid for giving talks at business gatherings; in the past few years, his annual income from ``Dilbert'' has hit six figures. Still, he keeps his day job.
Adams is a pale, bespectacled and, by all accounts, happy 37-year-old who proudly prints his Internet address on each of his strips.
Before going to work each morning, he spends two hours peering into his home computer, perusing his E-mail (he gets 50 to 100 messages a day) and reading public messages posted on the ``Dilboard,'' a bulletin board on the America Online network devoted to discussion of his strip, which is itself available to Internet users.
Dilbert doesn't complain out loud, Adams said, because he thinks himself isolated by his absurdist observations.
Seated in the workroom of his sparsely furnished suburban townhouse, Adams said: ``That's the amazing thing I found when I went on line a couple of years ago. I heard from all these people who thought that they were the only ones, that they were in this unique, absurd situation. That they couldn't talk about their situation because no one would believe it. Basically, there are 25 million people out there, living in cardboard boxes indoors, and there was no voice for them. So there was this pent-up demand.''
When not staring rhapsodically at his own computer monitor, Dilbert, wearing a curled-up necktie and white button-down shirt with a brace of pens in the breast pocket, absorbs abuse from the idiots, incompetents and lunchroom egotists who surround him.
He has more than enough intelligence to realize the shortcomings of his supervisors but nowhere near enough gumption to puncture their outrages: fitting him with an ``employee location device'' that looks suspiciously like a dog collar; announcing an innovative corporate shake-up that places him beneath the janitor in the chain of command; awarding him a promotion ``with no extra pay, just more responsibility,'' because ``it's how we recognize our best people.''
Which is not to say that in Dilbert's world the unsayable always goes unsaid. The football-shaped Dogbert, Dilbert's nominal pet, is a wisecracking Greek chorus to his master's comic masochism. (In his spare time, Dogbert makes millions by, among other schemes, masterminding a hostile takeover of a cat food company and launching the ``Dogbert Static Network,'' licensing ``programming'' for vacant channels.)
The strip's success does not seem to have caused Adams problems at work, where his off-the-rack suits and 1991 Nissan blend in perfectly. For nearly two decades he has been a denizen of the very environment he lampoons, toiling anonymously in his own cubicle on obscure corporate projects.
For reasons even he doesn't fully understand, he has kept his $70,000-a-year job as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell's Orwellian headquarters in San Ramon.
``I could take you down the hall and show you people just like me,'' he said.
``This guy just published a book, and this woman is a part-time symphony conductor. In fact, most people are being squeezed in their little cubicle, and their creativity is forced out elsewhere, because the company can't use it. The company is organized to get rid of variants.''
His co-workers' faces and suggestions pop up in his strip with regularity; his bosses, he said with wonder, have shown a capacity to not recognize their own foibles when they are being exposed daily at the breakfast table.
``There were days when stuff would happen and I would literally lose control of myself,'' Adams said.
``I'd see the things that I was doing and the things that were going on around me and I'd laugh so hard that tears would come down my cheeks. I would hold myself in the fetal position, just thinking of the absurdity of my situation and that I was getting paid for it.''
Adams's talent is to turn this potentially grim subject into daily doses of user-friendly humor.
It is ``a great strip,'' said David Talbot, the art and features editor at The San Francisco Examiner, which has been running it for several years.
``It's relevant,'' he added. ``It speaks to a lot of our readers' nightmares.''
Talbot compared Adams' work at Pacific Bell to Franz Kafka's at an insurance company.
Frequent topics of Adams's satire are the ever-changing, ever-trendy new management theories - each with its own buzzwords and euphemisms like ``re-engineering'' and ``rightsizing'' - adopted by his and his E-mail correspondents' companies.
Adams has his own theories as to why they fail:
``First, all of that stuff like `total quality' and `worker empowerment' are things that make a lot of sense - and smart people will implement them in a few specific areas where they work. But then the theory becomes a religion. People try to implement it everywhere because, well, you gotta get on board. So it gets misapplied.
``Secondly, there aren't that many smart people. So the guy who wrote the book would know how to do it, but he doesn't work at your company. So I think it's just people being dolts, basically. And there's no idea that's so good you can't ruin it with a few well-placed idiots.''
by CNB