Has Dilbert Lost It?
by Paul McGoldrick
Some comic giants (comic as in the comic strips) have been icons for some of us. Gary Larson's The FarSide, a five-year-old who never grew up (Calvin and Hobbes), and Dilbert are among them. In fact, it is amusing to visit offices where the next generation of employees has rediscovered the first two, lamented, strips. But both of those particular cartoonists knew one important thing - when to get out, before the quality went down.
Dilbert has been high-tech's satire of itself. You could see in Dilbert and his fellow engineers the distress over management's fickleness: The poor logic in budget management, the poor organization of project control, the variable jerk reactions of the corner office, the fears of cutbacks, layoffs, failure - they all were prominently displayed by the man who as a PacBell employee was not actually an engineer.
Scott Adams' inventiveness quite clearly came from his own work environment. Whether his own - or some other - boss at PacBell was pointy-haired I have no way of knowing, but we certainly recognize the engineers and we recognize the clashes with the marketing departments: "What they heard, and what we heard" are not at all unfamiliar events between marketing and product development. And, initially, we looked forward to receiving Scott's newsletter; It was a rather intermittent event but it was, generally, hilarious. It's different now. When I see one pop up in my e-mail box now I see a marketing exercise directed at me.
The strip is still a must-read - even if for the occasional winning day - but it is getting less and less so. The downhill started, I believe, with the invention of Elbonia, a country with no environmental responsibility and no future which could do business with whatever it is that Dilbert's company tries to produce. Then we have had weird consultancy types all looking like Dogbert, then we had strange new employees who had growths or major personality problems.
These characters do not look like anybody I know in real life, and despite any held belief in a company's "Equal Opportunity" statements, we know very well such people would never get past the first stage in the HR office.
So what's going wrong in Dilbert's world? Scott Adams now relies on inputs from his reading public. He receives the gist of the situation from a reader and then he interprets the story for a, hopefully, fun-filled ending. Some of the situations are funny, some of the stories are funny - but they're now unreal.
Twenty years ago you could leave copies of a newspaper - well known for its technical recruitment section - on your desk to send a message to your boss that you were not happy. Five years ago people could pin up a strip featuring the pointy-hair boss to tell your own boss he/she was a twit. Today you cannot do that anymore.
When the cartoon was new and the author was hungry it was great. Now
it is ponderous and labored. I am not suggesting that Scott Adams should
jack it all in and retire - although that is an option. But if he wants
to regain my respect, and my consistent laughter, he needs to go back to
work.