I’m No Scientist, but I Think
Feng Shui Is Part of the Answer: A “Dilbert” Collection. By Scott Adams.
Andrews McMeel. $19.99.
Year after year, things just
get weirder – and more understandable at the same time – in the world of Scott
Adams’ Dilbert. The comic strip is a
kind of Kafka for the post-industrial age, with “knowledge workers” whose
knowledge is largely irrelevant to the people who actually run things and make
the workers’ lives into a series of unending frustrations, small and large (and
sometimes extra-large). Unlike Kafka’s feckless and doomed protagonists, the
characters in Dilbert have nothing as
final as a horrible, lonely, demeaning death to look forward to: they are
doomed to continue in the same unending hamster wheel of meaningless work
pretty much forever. It is not Hell, exactly, but neither is it Purgatory,
since that comes with some hope, however faint, of eventual release. There is
no such hope here – and that explains the ways in which Adams’ characters have
changed over the years, becoming more and more assertive in their misery
through full awareness of the fact that what they say and how they behave will
make no more difference than how they feel.
The deliberately
surrealistic elements of Dilbert fit
this not-quite-alternative world well: the robot co-worker who shows up at
meetings, is always on the verge of taking someone’s job, occasionally reads
news headlines, and becomes less-well-adjusted when given an artificial soul; bright
red Catbert and his endless human-resources schemes to make the human
characters’ lives worse; the bullet-headed (and, thanks to a compliant Board of
Directors, bulletproof) CEO; Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, somehow a
far more fitting overseer of this domain than an out-and-out devilish prince of
darkness would be; and of course the Pointy Haired Boss, long ago revealed to
be Phil’s brother, his hair resembling the devil’s horns and his personality
leaving open the possibility that perhaps there is an out-and-out devil here
after all – a singularly unintelligent one, to be sure, but also one of
unceasing, small-scale, nitpicky malevolence. Dilbert hits the nail on the head
when, in one strip here, he reminds hyper-cynical Dogbert that “my life is an
endless string of useless tasks orchestrated by idiots.” Yep, that about covers
it.
The latest Dilbert collection uses plenty of
up-to-the-minute jargon and fads to make its usual demotivating points.
Demotivation is the literal effect when the company injects nanorobots into
Wally’s blood to make him a better employee: his anti-work-ethic bloodstream
destroys them all. On the Dilbert side of things, Adams’ title character begins
each day with a suitable corporate affirmation: “Gaaaa!!! My life is
meaningless and nothing I do will ever matter!!!” (He then starts to work, with
his usual diligence and misplaced determination.) Super-competent Alice is
asked by the Pointy-Haired Boss to mentor girls interested in STEM careers, and
refuses because it is sexist to ask a woman to do the task – so the PHB gets
Wally to do it instead, and he creates gender balance by telling boys “to
pursue restaurant work because it’s a better way to meet women.” Perpetual
intern Asok, who is from India, is accused by the PHB of being a terrorist
because of his skin color – and when he responds that the PHB is being racist,
the PHB reasonably (for him) asks, “Is it more of a sympathizer situation?”
Speaking of which, a coworker asks Dilbert for advice when her son wants an ear
piercing, and Dilbert says it seems like no big deal; then the son wants a
small tattoo, and Dilbert says that seems all right if it doesn’t show; and so
on until the son joins the ISIS murder cult and Dilbert says he “forgot to
mention that I’m not good at giving advice.”
In these strips and many
others, Adams shows that he keeps up with the news and the latest corporate
babblespeak: one Sunday strip is packed in all its panels with such terms as
“uberize the slide deck,” “trans-domain kick-off,” “disintermediating,” and
“growth-hack the analytics.” Everything, no matter how meaningless, filters
down to the hapless pawns in the Dilbert
universe, skewed just enough to fit their miserable world and make it just a
bit more rotten. But Adams always makes sure that readers understand this is
the business world, which has its own
skewed ways of handling reality – for instance, when Dilbert runs tests that show
the company’s product underperforming competitors’ in nine measurements out of
11, the PHB says, “Give the two good ones to Marketing. We can’t be more honest
than that.” And when the PHB refuses to give Dilbert a raise, he explains that
Dilbert’s performance was only average, based on comparing him “to imaginary
people doing your exact job.” That certainly sounds corporate.
In recent months, Adams has
given guest artists a chance to draw Dilbert
when Adams has taken time off – a neat, Wally-ish way of doing even less work
than usual while still getting full credit for meeting all deadlines (Adams
still writes the “vacation” strips). Readers can judge for themselves how well
this works in I’m No Scientist, but I
Think Feng Shui Is Part of the Answer, which contains strips by John Glynn,
Eric Scott, Josh Shipley and others. Readers who prefer any of these drawings to
Adams’ own will have to wait for Adams’ next vacation (actually a chance to
rest his drawing hand) to see more of them. Interestingly, although the quality
of the cartooning has never been a major attraction of Dilbert, these “vacation” strips do show that Adams’ style has
evolved to a point where it is instantly recognizable and not easy to surpass,
or even approximate. Once a “niche” comic strip, Dilbert has turned into something more: a strip that seems to
encapsulate the modern feeling of being on an endless, demeaning treadmill at
work, with no way off and no way out because, after all, every other company
has just as endless and demeaning a treadmill of a workplace as yours. If Adams
did not make the situation so funny, it would be at least pathetic, at most
genuinely chilling – which is to say, Kafka-esque.
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