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"This
has happened to me many times. It gets to be one o'clock and
I think to myself, 'God, I'm tired-I'd like a nap1'"
It's 1 p.m. and the question is, do
you know where your favorite cartoonist is? If he's Scott
Adams, creator of the corporate comic strip "Dilbert,"2
try looking on the floor of his home office near San Francisco.
That's right, the floor.
"I don't even bother walking
to the couch, because there's nobody going to come in and
see me. When I wake up I ask myself if I feel like working,
and if I do, I get back in the chair and I work. If I don't,
I do something else."
It's a work environment far removed
from the character Dilbert's world of cynica l, conniving,cubicle-dwelling
engineers reporting to a dunderhead boss.3
Many people think being head of what
43-year-old Adams calls "the 'Dilbert' Empire" is
either absurdly easy or unimaginably hard. Both are wrong,
he says.
"They look at it and say, 'Gee,
it's crudely4 drawn, so he's a bad artist, and
I'm a bad artist, too. All he's really doing is saying my
boss is stupid, and I could do that. His only contribution
to the cartooning world is he did it first, and damn it, I
thought of it first, except I didn't act.'"
"I can't tell you," Adams
says, "how many people have written to me to tell me
that 'Dilbert' was their idea. Not by name, but that they
had an idea of a cartoon about the workplace.If I hadn't done
it first, they would have been the one with the huge cartooning
empire." The other camp can't conceive
of producing a cartoon strip seven days a week,5
Adams says. "If you look at Michael Jordan leaping 48
inches in his prime, that was hard because you can't do it.
But it's not hard for him because he can do it."6
"Cartooning is the same way in
the sense that if you can't do it at all, it looks impossible."
But just as Jordan is wired to leap, Adams says he's pre-programmed
to draw, "so it's easy to me."
Long overnight to success
Adams was no young phenom7
in the cartooning world. Growing up in Windham, a town in
New York's Catskill Mountains8, he applied at
age 11 to the Famous Artists School9 and was
rejected faster than a Dilbert plea for a pay raise. The
youngster was a year short of the minimum age requirement.10
His cartooning career thus quashed
in boyhood, Adams earned a bachelor's degree in economics
from Hartwick College11 in Oneonta, New York,
then moved to Northern California, where he worked in offices
and among people like those he lampoons12 in"Dilbert."
For seven years, starting in 1979,
Adams was employed by San Francisco's Crocker Bank13.
He was a teller ——robbed twice at gunpoint ——and a computer
programmer, financial analyst, product manager and commercial
lender.
As he left the bank in 1986, he
earned an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley14.
Adams worked in technology and financial
jobs at Pacific Bell15 for nine years. All the
he was doodling, and from those scribbles emerged a composite
of his co-workers, a while, nerdy but well-meaning engineer
dubbed Dilbert by a colleague.16
A couple of years after going to
work at Pacific Bell, Adams drew 50 sample "Dilbert"
strips and mailed copies to the major cartoon syndicates17.
United Media18 offered a contract a few weeks
later, and Adams accepted.
Adams says he tinkered and toyed
with Dilbert like a plastic surgeon transforming a favorite
patient. Finally, "Dilbert" debuted19
in 1989. But Adams continued to work for PacBell for another
six years.
"It was because of a combination
of benefits I was receiving," he says. "One was
a paycheck.The first several years of the strip, I needed
it because 'Dilbert' was not so big that I could have lived
in the way I wanted to.
"Second, I had no idea the
strip would last, because 19 out of 20 strips don't make
it beyond a few years.
"Third, I was getting material
from my day job. These were very complementary activities.If
you're sitting in a business meeting and somebody's doing
something that is just comically absurd, it's energizing
because you're thinking to yourself, 'Hey, this would make
a great cartoon.'And then when you're doing the cartoon
and mocking your workplace, you're feeling good because
it's getting it out of your system."
Society still needs Dilbert
Adams has a good insight into today's
society and he knows it.The author of Dilbert says he has
everything to gain when the economy hits a pot hole20.
After all, a decade ago, when former President Bush was
struggling on the domestic front, Adams single-handedly
turned the word "corporate downsizing" into a
punch line21. After all, "whenever there
is an unhappy employee, they will be feeding me information
for Dilbert."
Wall Street's unprecedented bull
run22 forced Adams to switch gears in the late
1990s. How can you write comic strips about your nincompoop23
boss in the good times ?nbsp;when workers are no longer
trapped in their jobs?
Luckily for Adams, even in good
times, work still sucked.24 Americans still need
ed Dilbert. "The Dilbert principle still applies. The
dumbest people are promoted to management because competent
people are needed to do the real work," he says.
"But with people changing jobs
more frequently, and the world growing more complicated,
you have dumber and dumber people doing harder and harder
things——so for me, thank God, the workplace is still miserable."
1．nap：小睡，打盹。
2．strip：（报刊上的）连环漫画；“Dilbert”：“迪尔伯特”，是反映西方公司管理和各种荒诞言行的系列漫画，作者笔下的迪尔伯特为现代大公司里的普通白领，一位倒霉透顶却总是忍气吞声的工程师，他的世界里满是日常生活的荒诞不经，是后工业时代白领生活的写照。
3．这样的工作环境与其笔下人物迪尔伯特所在的那个世界全然不同，那个世界里工程师们蜗居在格子间里，愤世嫉俗、互耍阴谋，还得听命于一个笨蛋老板。removed：远离……的，
与……无关的。
4．crudely：粗陋地，不成熟地。
5．另一群人则难以设想一个礼拜七天都用来画漫画。
6．你看迈克尔·乔丹在他的黄金时期能跳到48英寸，因为你做不到你就会觉得那很难，但乔丹能做到，他就觉得不难。
7．phenom：<美口>杰出人才。
8．Catskill Mountains：凯司吉尔山，位于美国东北部，以其纯净的水源而著名。
9．Famous Artists School:
1948年成立于康涅狄格州的韦斯特波特城，由12位著名画家和插图画家联合创办，其中包括被称为“童军艺术家”的美国著名插图画家诺曼·洛克威尔(1894
——1978 )，他们重视质量教学，向学生传授自己的绘画经验和技巧。教学主要通过通信方式，这样学生在自己家中就可以研习。
10．他被学校拒绝了，比迪尔伯特要求加薪遭到的拒绝还要快。因为这位年轻人比入学规定的最低年龄小一岁。
11．Hartwick College：哈特威克学院。
12．lampoon：嘲讽，讽刺。
13．Crocker Bank：克拉格银行。
14．加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校。
15．Pacific Bell：美国一家提供电信线路设备的大型电信公司。
16．他信手乱涂乱画，在那些涂鸦之作中产生了他的同事们的合成体，一个呆板而好心的工程师，被一个同事命名为“迪尔伯特”。
nerdy：讨厌的，乏味的。
17．syndicate：（向各报纸或期刊出售稿件供同时发表的）稿件辛迪加。
18．United Media：联合媒体，世界领先的娱乐与资讯公司。
19．debut：初次登场。
20．pothole：凹坑，涡穴。hit
a pothole 指经济“遇阻、受挫”。
21．punch line： (故事，戏剧，笑话等中的)妙语。
22．bull run：牛市走向。
23．nincomoop: 傻子，笨蛋。
24．幸运的是，就算在经济形势好的时候，工作仍会令人失望。suck：<俚>令人失望，令人生厌。
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