Dilbert turns to alternative ways to survive the modern-day workplace in this gut-busting collection of comic strips following Optimism Sounds Exhausting. What do the arts of yoga, feng shui, and Irish dance have in common? They can’t save you from a gnawing dissatisfaction with your job. Luckily, our favorite office cog has a few tricks up his sleeve. Armed with a wearable brain stimulator and ingestible nanorobots, Dilbert discovers how to outpace stress, boredom, and sitting-induced early death. He may be a cyborg with a fake personality, but meetings are more tolerable than ever.“Once every decade, America is gifted with an angst-ridden anti-hero, a Nietzschean nebbish, an us-against-the-universe everyperson around whom our insecurities collect like iron shavings to a magnet. Charlie Chaplin. Dagwood Bumstead. Charlie Brown. Cathy. Now, Dilbert.” —The Miami Herald“Confined to their cubicles in a company run by idiot bosses, Dilbert and his white-collar colleagues make the dronelike world of Kafka seem congenial.” —The New York Times“In every major company, Dilbert is plastered all over. He reflects the human condition of this generation of workers.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Adams was born in Windham, New York in 1957 and received his Bachelor's degree in Economics from Hartwick College in 1979.
He also studied economics and management for his 1986 MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
In recent years, Adams has been hurt with a series of debilitating health problems. Since late 2004, he has suffered from a reemergence of his focal dystonia which has affected his drawing. He can fool his brain by drawing using a graphics tablet. On December 12, 2005, Adams announced on his blog that he also suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that causes the vocal cords to behave in an abnormal manner. However, on October 24, 2006, he again blogged stating that he had recovered from this condition, although he is unsure if the recovery is permanent. He claims to have developed a method to work around the disorder and has been able to speak normally since. Also, on January 21, 2007, he posted a blog entry detailing his experiences with treatment by Dr. Morton Cooper.
Adams is also a trained hypnotist, as well as a vegetarian. (Mentioned in, "Dilbert: A Treasury of Sunday Strips 00).
It's been 20 years since Scott Adams has worked in a real office building, and it's starting to show. For a long time he coasted on submission of stories from readers and some of his genuine abilities as a comic writer, but he's clearly scrounging the bottom of the barrel for material that's all very disconnected as a result. Also, these comics are from the election year, and it's hard for his awful real life political personal to not shine through.
I'm not giving this a star rating because I don't feel like I know Dilbert well enough to tell if this is a relatively strong or weak collection. I enjoyed it, got to know the characters and style of the comic, and felt it was a reasonable size, nicely presented. Some of his social commentary (particularly the strips featuring the robot) is really insightful, but much of it isn't terribly interesting. It would be a good book to keep on the coffee table in your office lobby.
I haven’t read a Dilbert collection yet that I didn’t love, and I’ve read A LOT of Dilbert collections. I like this one because there weren’t a bunch of repeats from other collections —everything was new to me. Lots of LOL moments.
Pure entertainment, I read it in a day today. Some of them are excruciatingly consistent like office hours, but I found myself laughing and grinning at the brilliance.