Workplace Absurdity Creator Of Popular `Dilbert’ Comic Strip Is Keeping His Day Job Inside Cubicle 4s700r

Regular readers of comics pages recently witnessed the retirement of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” and may now be braced for the departure of Berke Breathed’s “Outland.”

But they may also have noted the presence of a relative newcomer named “Dilbert,” about a mouthless and hapless techno-nerd shaped vaguely like a shaving brush who performs an unspecified task at an unnamed company.

“Dilbert,” which first appeared in 1989, now runs in nearly 400 newspapers, including The Spokesman-Review.

Recent additions to its lineup of papers include The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News. There are now “Dilbert” books, T-shirts, coffee mugs and screen savers for sale.

The daily strip chronicles absurdities and atrocities of the hightech 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 here, east of Oakland, 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 nearby 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.

He currently works on a project that explores ways to connect businesses to the Internet. His girlfriend, with whom he shares his townhouse, works for another branch of Pacific Bell.

“I’ll probably quit fairly soon, but I couldn’t tell you when,” he said, taking a visitor with him to the mammoth Pacific Bell “campus.” The headquarters building, which houses 7,000 workers, has corridors nearly a quarter-mile long and acres of floor space crisscrossed with nosehigh partitions.

Adams’ cubicle is number 4S700R. He settles into it comfortably. A coworker has left him a “Dilbert” book to be autographed.

He signs, looks up, smiles and says: “You know, the amazing thing is that all of this - the drawing, the speaking, the interviews, the autographs - it feels like breathing, it’s so natural.

“My old life - no amount of getting used to it would have made it right.”