Cubicles That Make You Envy the Dead

Book excerpt: Dilbert’s company is on the brink of a 21st-century transformation, choosing between a distraction-friendly open office plan or soul-crushing cubicles. As fresh a look at the inanity of office life as it brought to the comics pages when it first appeared in 1989, this new Dilbert collection comically confirms to the working public that we all really know what’s going on. Our devices might be more sophisticated, our software and apps might be more plentiful, but when it gets down to interactions between the worker bees and the clueless in-controls, discontent and sarcasm rule, as only Dilbert can proclaim. “The cartoon hero of the workplace..” —San Francisco Examiner “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 “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