'Dilbert' gets darker

During the whole dotcom era, I couldn't get people to complain [about workplace woes], because they thought if they weren't already billionaires, it must be their own fault.... Suddenly it's OK to blame other people again. We're pretty sure it's our management that's bad, or the government, or somebody is making our life miserable again. But that, of course, means good times for "Dilbert."

What benefit do we gain from making fun of common office experiences?

Everybody seems to like company in their misery. The biggest thing that I heard when Dilbert started getting some notoriety, is that people felt that they weren't alone anymore. I think it puts a little bit of a damper on management's otherwise unrestrained ability to do stupid things, because I hear a lot of people say, "My manager asked this question before he rolled out this potential program, he said, 'If I do this, is it going to appear in a Dilbert comic?' " And if everybody says yes, then you rethink it.

Does the cynicism in Dilbert make people feel there's nothing they can do about their problems?

There's a whole book written on that very topic; it's called "The Trouble With Dilbert." Somebody wrote a scholarly book about how Dilbert was actually making the world worse because employees would accept their fate with laughter, rather than rising up against their repressors.

What's your response to that?

I'm trying to imagine some guy coming to his cubicle in the morning and thinking, "I think I'm going to stage a sit-in in the CEO's office. Oh, wait, there's Dilbert - ha, ha, ha - I guess I won't." I'm just not seeing that happen.

A lot of people probably sit around wondering, "How can I get out of this cubicle?" Any advice for them?

Most of the people I worked for were also trying to run a side business from their cubicle. In fact two of the people who I was cubicle neighbors with [at Pacific Bell] also published books. My boss did, and a guy who was on the other side of the cubicle wall. He was in marketing. He ended up murdering a guy and then going to jail and then writing a book after he got out about his prison experience.

Of course, you're not recommending that as a course of action....

Not the murder part. What I'm saying is ... almost everybody was trying to run a second business, and some of those might take off.

During your 16 years in a cubicle, did you wish you had something like Dilbert to read? Is that what it grew out of?

No, not really. It kind of happened organically. I started doing the strip about more general life stuff, and people wrote and said, "Oh, give us more stuff in the office, we like that best."

Was there a dearth of material looking at workplace issues with a jaded eye?

Yeah, I think the only windows on the working world, at least the popular ones, were management-approved ones, you know, like management or financial magazines. And no employee is going to give a real opinion to a reporter, because it's the end of your job.

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