Still Pumped From Using The Mouse (1996)

Stereotyping at its best--- intelligent, light, funny!: "Dilbert" lovers will see more of Scott Adams' comic commentary on the lives of technical personnel, the marketing group, management and everyone else in the work culture. As always, Dilbert and his circle of socially-handicapped peers in the technical profession live absurd ways at work and lead boring lives elsewhere. The pun and punch is when the characters seem to do or say something wrong and a problem occurs, and what they resort to in response is usually impractical or otherworldly, almost always hilarious and downright funny. It's a great show-- how Adams half-despises people, half-worships his dog, and half-murders members of the rodentia family. Beyond that, it's all for laughs.

As I read this volume of Dilbert while listening to the Blue Man Group's album The Complex, it occurred to me that they were essentially dealing with the same theme, but from two entirely different angles. I think, on the whole, I prefer Adams' surreal and humorous take. Of course, just about every strip Adams has produced has its own absurd brilliance, so the comparison may not be entirely fair.

I have seen people struggle with the juxtaposition of workplace strips next to clearly absurdist humor involving talking rats being transported to other dimensions, egocentric dogs scamming idiots, and dinosaurs hiding behind the furniture, but I believe that this is the mark of the true brilliance of Adams' work. By placing these sorts of elements alongside the brutally honest strips about pointy-haired bosses, annoying coworkers, and insane workplace rules, Adams highlights just how silly the modern workplace has become. The strips in which Dogbert tries to conquer the world, or bilk idiots out of their money in many cases seem downright reasonable compared to the idiocy that Dilbert has to put up with when trying to deal with his job. And the thing that makes this juxtaposition work is that Dilbert's struggles in the workplace are not far removed from a reality that most people who have spent time in the cubicle driven working world are familiar with. By making the surreal seem reasonable in comparison with the familiar, Adams manages to highlight what a truly strange place we have let our workplaces become.

No one parodies the workplace better than Adams. Very few strips of any kind are as good as Dilbert, and this collection is a fine representation of what makes it such good reading. Anyone who has ever sat in a cubicle and wondered how in the world they got from childhood dreams about being a fireman, astronaut, or cowboy to compiling a database of product requirements for a boss who will never even look at the end product will find Still Pumped from Using the Mouse both amusing and depressing at the same time.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. ( )

I have read and reread this Dilbert book many times.

These strips are plenty familiar to anyone working as a techie in today's world. Dilbert is my hero, if not my alter-ego. ( )

The frustrating thing about this strip is that there are too many great ones to pinpoint, and there's very little real continuity in the thing, so what do I say? Just that there is a fairly high danger each morning that the "Dilbert" strip will make me snort milk out my nose. ( )