Why Dilbert Doesn't Suck (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love "The Office")
I grew up in a household that was headed by a high school Calculus teacher. This means the lifestyle that my family enjoyed as a whole was different than that of most families. Eight or nine months a year, when my dad got home from work, he would have to spend much of his time in the evening working, and as June approached, my dad, me, and my brother all looked forward to the same joyous end of the school year, at which point we could lounge around and do practically nothing for the next few months. (okay, I don't think my dad did that, but my brother and I sure did)
Because my mom didn't work outside of the home (notice the qualifier...she worked really hard at home), I had very little exposure to the typical lifestyle that most people have. Most adults go to work year-round, and they don't work in public schools. They work in offices in cubicles in front of computers, attend meetings, and read memos all day. That may be an oversimplification, but there's a lot of common aspects of office jobs that can be found everywhere. And yeah, public school has some of those aspects as well: you basically spend each day going from one meeting to another, listening to a different boss drone on about some crap for an hour, before you're released to get to the next one. (and heaven forbid you're ever tardy one of them) After six or seven meetings, they let you go home. These meetings are now the worst part of my workday...no wonder I hated high school so much.
But the business world seemed a far cry from the world of Office Space to me. Early on while I was in grade school, I attended public school, and my dad taught in public school. Because of this, I assumed that this was the norm...most people work in or attend public schools. The stuff of Office Space seemed like the exception that happened to people who went to college and chose to study lame subjects like business and management.
The truth is, most of us end up working in offices at one point or another. Failing that, you end up in a situation where you're not in an office, but the dynamics between you and your boss are the same. You might work in a gym, but you still have someone to answer to, and as you move your way up the ranks, you're likely to find yourself working in front of a computer in some way.
This inevitability dawned on me early on in college and, since I didn't have any better ideas, I ended up embracing the whole "business major" thing instead of running from it. Even as I did this, I still deluded myself, on some level, into believing that my life wouldn't deteriorate into slaving away in some cubicle. I'm not entirely sure what I did expect to happen, but while in school, it didn't matter. At that point in college, my current lifestyle as a constant partyer wasn't really threatened by any particular career choice. The ramifications of that decision were something that I would have to deal with later, and so I didn't give it much thought.
As with most things in life, that "later" eventually showed up, and I found myself doing accounting in a cubicle in front of a computer screen for an overwhelming forty hours a week. Suffice it to say, the binge drinking didn't end with college.
And I remember when Dilbert came out, as a cartoon show, when I was in high school. I despised it. It didn't seem funny to me. I think a large part of why I was so resistant to try and find humor in its subject matter is simply because I didn't want to accept that the horrors it was making fun of were real anywhere in the world. Of course, I was also not familiar with what things were really like in the typical workplace, so a lot of the humor was completely lost on me. But I think the reason I rejected Dilbert was more to do with my own personal theory of the "law of repulsion". (a little spin I put on The Secret's "law of attraction" which, if I may editorialize, seems like bullshit) If you hate something enough, maybe you'll never have to deal with it.
The hating didn't really work. I had the same feelings about "The Office" when it first came out. I didn't want to accept that show as funny because it felt like I was contributing to the problem. It felt like if I layed down and just laughed at these atrocities that I was in some way tolerating them. But, of course, there's really nothing any of us can do about them, save for running off and starting our own companies so we don't have to work for anyone else...and I don't see most of us doing that anytime soon.
The humor in Dilbert still isn't funny to me, because there's no tact to how the material is presented. It's just scribbled down and handed to us on paper. Engineers in cubicles with an annoying boss. It's uninspiring and unimaginative, like Garfield, but if people find humor in it, then that's okay. The Office is quite a bit more creative, more subtle, and each and every character on there represents a stereotype found in offices everywhere, one of which at least one of us has worked at some job.
Shows always take place in offices...why is that? What about a corporate gym? An auto factory? Surely there's the same bureaucratic nonsense going on in those places, the same dynamics between the same types of people, that we could be entertained on unfamiliar territory. I suppose it's because the majority of us are driving into industrial parks and sitting in cubes all day...we're the largest demographic. And I suppose if we really want escapism, Baywatch would be a much more interesting choice.
Because my mom didn't work outside of the home (notice the qualifier...she worked really hard at home), I had very little exposure to the typical lifestyle that most people have. Most adults go to work year-round, and they don't work in public schools. They work in offices in cubicles in front of computers, attend meetings, and read memos all day. That may be an oversimplification, but there's a lot of common aspects of office jobs that can be found everywhere. And yeah, public school has some of those aspects as well: you basically spend each day going from one meeting to another, listening to a different boss drone on about some crap for an hour, before you're released to get to the next one. (and heaven forbid you're ever tardy one of them) After six or seven meetings, they let you go home. These meetings are now the worst part of my workday...no wonder I hated high school so much.
But the business world seemed a far cry from the world of Office Space to me. Early on while I was in grade school, I attended public school, and my dad taught in public school. Because of this, I assumed that this was the norm...most people work in or attend public schools. The stuff of Office Space seemed like the exception that happened to people who went to college and chose to study lame subjects like business and management.
The truth is, most of us end up working in offices at one point or another. Failing that, you end up in a situation where you're not in an office, but the dynamics between you and your boss are the same. You might work in a gym, but you still have someone to answer to, and as you move your way up the ranks, you're likely to find yourself working in front of a computer in some way.
This inevitability dawned on me early on in college and, since I didn't have any better ideas, I ended up embracing the whole "business major" thing instead of running from it. Even as I did this, I still deluded myself, on some level, into believing that my life wouldn't deteriorate into slaving away in some cubicle. I'm not entirely sure what I did expect to happen, but while in school, it didn't matter. At that point in college, my current lifestyle as a constant partyer wasn't really threatened by any particular career choice. The ramifications of that decision were something that I would have to deal with later, and so I didn't give it much thought.
As with most things in life, that "later" eventually showed up, and I found myself doing accounting in a cubicle in front of a computer screen for an overwhelming forty hours a week. Suffice it to say, the binge drinking didn't end with college.
And I remember when Dilbert came out, as a cartoon show, when I was in high school. I despised it. It didn't seem funny to me. I think a large part of why I was so resistant to try and find humor in its subject matter is simply because I didn't want to accept that the horrors it was making fun of were real anywhere in the world. Of course, I was also not familiar with what things were really like in the typical workplace, so a lot of the humor was completely lost on me. But I think the reason I rejected Dilbert was more to do with my own personal theory of the "law of repulsion". (a little spin I put on The Secret's "law of attraction" which, if I may editorialize, seems like bullshit) If you hate something enough, maybe you'll never have to deal with it.
The hating didn't really work. I had the same feelings about "The Office" when it first came out. I didn't want to accept that show as funny because it felt like I was contributing to the problem. It felt like if I layed down and just laughed at these atrocities that I was in some way tolerating them. But, of course, there's really nothing any of us can do about them, save for running off and starting our own companies so we don't have to work for anyone else...and I don't see most of us doing that anytime soon.
The humor in Dilbert still isn't funny to me, because there's no tact to how the material is presented. It's just scribbled down and handed to us on paper. Engineers in cubicles with an annoying boss. It's uninspiring and unimaginative, like Garfield, but if people find humor in it, then that's okay. The Office is quite a bit more creative, more subtle, and each and every character on there represents a stereotype found in offices everywhere, one of which at least one of us has worked at some job.
Shows always take place in offices...why is that? What about a corporate gym? An auto factory? Surely there's the same bureaucratic nonsense going on in those places, the same dynamics between the same types of people, that we could be entertained on unfamiliar territory. I suppose it's because the majority of us are driving into industrial parks and sitting in cubes all day...we're the largest demographic. And I suppose if we really want escapism, Baywatch would be a much more interesting choice.