My #ScottAdams Story
In the 1990s, I worked as an office temp. I logged a lot of hours in a lot of different offices, and I had an instant and accurate way to sense how dysfunctional and toxic a workplace was as soon as I walked in.
I took note of how many #Dilbert comics were pinned up, and where.
If I saw one or two #Dilbert comics scattered around, I knew people had their gripes and complaints about their co-workers, but it was nothing too serious.
1/9
If virtually every cubicle had more than one #Dilbert comic pinned up, I knew everyone working there disliked each other. The atmosphere probably wasn’t going to be too terrible for me as a temp, but I wouldn’t want to work there permanently.
2/9
Whenever I saw a disproportionate number of #Dilbert comics in one cubicle, I knew to avoid that person. They were clearly the asshole in the office, and they were usually on a hair trigger. I once saw a cubicle that was practically wallpapered with Dilbert comics, including several where he had labeled the characters with co-workers’ names, and then pinned them on the OUTSIDE of his cube. Yikes! Steer clear of that dude!
3/9
If there was even one #Dilbert comic pinned up to a communal bulletin board, watch out! The hatred went from workers up AND management down.
God forbid someone had used the photocopier to enlarge it; that meant they wanted everyone to see how much they hated everyone.
In this last situation, I would usually call my agency at the end of the day and ask if they had any other assignments.
If I saw Dilbert plush toys, I’d just tell my agency I couldn’t continue the assignment.
4/9
The #Dilbert gauge never failed me. The more Dilbert comic strips I saw, the nastier the place was.
I worked at a one place where Dilbert was banned. Specifically, just Dilbert. Sounds extreme, but the bosses knew exactly what #ScottAdams was peddling, and they didn’t want any.
That office ran smoothly and was among the nicest.
5/9
So #Dilbert was my canary in the coal mine. I can’t think of another comic strip that functioned like this. Cathy was drawn almost exactly as badly as Dilbert, but the only thing I learned from seeing that strip in an office was the person pinning it up had body image issues. Peanuts meant the person had self-esteem problems. (Or, contrarywise, they identified with Snoopy.)
6/9
So I guess the moral here is: #ScottAdams was a thin-skinned, egotistical monster who wrote and badly drew a hateful comic strip called #Dilbert, and all his “humor” punched down, and he used sock puppet accounts to brag about his own genius, and was a racist, and he thought Donald Trump was great...
7/9
...but for all that, if I were forced – I donno, at gunpoint, maybe -- to utter one nice word about #ScottAdams, I guess I’d say that for a few years, he was...
USEFUL.
8/9
Further reading: “The trouble with #Dilbert : how corporate culture gets the last laugh”
by Norman Solomon
https://archive.org/details/troublewithdilbe00solo_0/mode/2up
9/9
(OOPS: I wrote this on LibreOffice, and missed a paragraph when cutting/pasting to Mastodon... here it is...)
If anyone had ever pinned up a Mutts strip or Zippy the Pinhead or Nancy, I would have wanted to hang out with them in the lunchroom. Even Tumbleweeds might have been a welcome change. Sadly, it was almost always fuckin’ #Dilbert, all the way down.
10/9
@slowtiger I miss UserFriendly. Completely expunged from the Internet as far as I can tell.
I pinned this one up and used it as a reference, frequently. Super-useful for what I was doing.
@tnt one day at my last job, the principal engineer used https://xkcd.com/974/ in a presentation as a bit of self-deprecating humour. The following day, we find that our boss has printed out the comic and pinned it up in the office meeting room.
From one engineer to another, that comic's a relatable joke; when your boss is using it, it comes across as patronising. This was the turning point where I realised my boss wasn't all that cool - eventually, he was the reason I left that company.
I remember reading Dilbert when I was at Uni in the late 1990's.
After I did one internship, I realised how true-to-life some of his observations were, and decided that corporate life was not for me. :D
I stopped reading Adams after he outed himself, but this Chrimbo, my partner gave me a Dilbert calendar, as it had been recommended by Amazon as a gift for me.
The latest cartoons were even worse than I had realised.
Just right-wing talking points raised as humour... :|
I saw the same thing happen with Dave Sim when he was writing Cerebus.
Another interesting creative author, who turned to misogyny and hate. :(
@celeduc @toriver @BillySmith @ridetheory
You mean Ayn Rand.
@tanepiper @toriver @BillySmith @ridetheory Yeah, looking at batman with a critical eye ruins the fun of him. A large metropolitan city that is full of crime on every corner and unable to keep people safe because of corrupt local government and impotent local police.
Their only hope? A billionaire willing to take the law into his own hands and punch the problem straight in the face.
Plenty of Americans have internalized that world view just a bit too much.
@toriver @BillySmith @ridetheory
Yeah. Miller was always a right-wing Freak.
Like, capital-F Freak.
He had a good comic, early on (Ronin), but he let his own self through more and more, and it was toxic.
@BillySmith @ridetheory Similar timeline for me. In school I related to the "engineer like math more than business" sorts of jokes in there because I was always motivated by learning about new stuff.
Once I graduated and got a job? Eh... They were no longer funny. You see some of the "tropes" in real life, and they get less funny. It turns out people aren't 2 dimensional. The grumpy folks who like to deploy those labels in real life? Not so nice. :-\
@BillySmith @ridetheory I just checked some of the later ones.
Wow... That's beyond terrible.
@ridetheory My own Dilbert cartoon posting history was my first job out of U in 1993. The shop was founded by ex-IBM VPs, which says most of what one needs to know.
Those earlier comics were apropos and biting. And also very much demonstrating exactly the toxicity you're talking about.
I stopped reading it long before he went outright whacko. But not before getting introduced to the fact that the Elbonians were both satire at outsourcing... and the start of his racist crap.
@ridetheory old enough to have always thought about the other Scott Adams from early home computer game days 😜
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