Scott Adams became acquainted with the corporate world working at a San Francisco bank and at Pacific Bell. He began drawing the character Dilbert for the amusement of his Pacific Bell co-workers. Photo: Special

Web-posted September 2, 1996

  Comics not all fun and games

Scott Adams shares the life inside his mind in cartoon strips, book

By Joe Garofoli
©Contra Costa (Calif.) Times

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - Scott Adams could go a whole day without talking to anyone, and never be bored. The stuff that sprints through what his girlfriend calls ``his twisted little mind'' is that entertaining.

Save for 1-and-a-half days in Las Vegas, he has never taken a vacation. He finds travel understimulating, ``compared to, say, watching television.'' He finds reading painful because he is dyslexic. Besides, spending an hour reading someone else's thoughts is not nearly as interesting as ``creating something, even if it only remains in your mind and doesn't go anywhere.''

Human contact? An hour a day is fine. At 38, Mr. Adams has developed an interior world that is so fascinating he has no need to leave it. It is a world of parallel universes, perpetual motion machines and new theories of gravity. It is where he plays in a futuristic Dilbertland theme park or designs a high-tech city in which everything is recyclable.

Dogbert ©1996 Scott Adams - United Feature Syndicate

And to Mr. Adams, it is an island infinitely more stimulating than the mundane mainland of small talk.

``In most cases,'' he says, smiling, ``what I'm thinking is more interesting than what people are saying.''

Arrogant? So it seems. But the more you learn about the creator of ``Dilbert,'' the more that observation reveals about a man who is fast becoming one of the nation's top satirists. Spend time with him and you realize why he might be having a better time inside his head than out.

Fortunately, he is willing to share. We get a daily peek into Mr. Adams' inner world through ``Dilbert,'' a cartoon strip that appears in The Augusta Chronicle and nearly 1,100 other newspapers in 32 countries. It is not only hilarious, but also a dead-on sendup of corporate life in America. Everybody gets skewered: office politics, short-sighted bosses, team-building exercises, overzealous marketing departments and, of course, dweeby engineers like Dilbert. And, like all good satire, it is rooted to some degree in reality. Nearly all the strip's ideas come from readers, who e-mail him with anecdotes from their workplaces.

As with other popular cartoon strips, there are already seven ``Dilbert'' compilations. Earlier this year Mr. Adams published his first hardcover book. ``The Dilbert Principle'' hit bookstores April 16 and immediately began shooting up the best-seller lists. Combine it with the compilations, and Mr. Adams has close to 2 million books in print. His Internet Web site, ``The Dilbert Zone,'' is one of cyberspace's most popular lily pads, luring 55,000 visitors a day. He is growing rich as Dilbert merchandising appears on everything from T-shirts to screensavers, and he is in constant demand for speaking engagements.

He is on top of the world, and even he admits he has no right to gripe about being ``loved to death.''

Not bad for a guy who never took a college English course. Or whose memory is so bad he cannot remember the home phone number of his girlfriend, Pam Okasaki. Or who just last year had a day job as a middle manager at Pacific Bell in San Ramon, until he was asked to leave.

Even to some of his closest friends, Mr. Adams remains a mystery. Former Pacific Bell colleague Anita Freeman, the inspiration for the strip's ``Alice'' character, has known him for five years and is one of his closest friends. But she has never met his girlfriend or visited Mr. Adams' house. Still, they talk at least twice a week on the phone. ``He is just so bright,'' she says.

Dilbert ©1996 Scott Adams - United Feature Syndicate

Playmates were scarce

To get to know what goes on in Mr. Adams' head, you need to go back to his childhood in Windham, N.Y., a tiny town in the Catskill Mountains. The closest house was ``three stones' throws away.''

Windham is a resort town with a for-members-only ski slope in the middle. The Kennedys have a house there. Mr. Adams' family members were the locals. His father was a postal worker and for a time, his mom worked in factory ``twisting that little coil that goes in speakers.''

He describes them as ``upstate New York people. They've got that Germanic and British background. So we're not talking expressive people here.'' It was not unusual to eat meals together in near silence.

``It's funny,'' Mr. Adams says and laughs. ``As I flash back, God knows how many hundreds of times we all sat there and there weren't any conversation other than `Pass the bread' and `What did you do today?'''

Playmates were scarce. He shared few interests with his peers, most of whom he says ``became garbagemen or joined the service.'' He spent a lot of time by himself and began to draw. He applied to the Famous Artist School for Talented Young People when he was 11, but was rejected because he was too young. (The very funny application is reprinted on his Web site.)

Schoolwork came easy. He was valedictorian of his high school class, which he quickly points out was no great accomplishment, as there were only 40 kids. It is false modesty. He was a National Merit semifinalist and was offered college scholarships.

Mr. Adams' parents have not changed much, despite their son's success. When he called to tell them about the front page article the Wall Street Journal did on him a few years back, his mother said, ``Oh, we don't read that.''

``And that just put it all in perspective,'' Mr. Adams says. ``She asked me if I had a chance to be in People magazine - that was her barometer of success.''

People did interview him in December. ``And this is just like making me crazy. This is not the thing that will thrill me, but it's her marker.''

Dilbert's mom has appeared a few times in the strip. Mr. Adams says she was not meant to be a replica of his own mother but concedes she may have influenced the character. Dilbert's mom thinks he is an engineer on the railroad, not at a big corporation. Or that he fixes typewriters. When he tells her in graphic techno-detail what he does, she says, ``You mean, all you do is slap a BRI analyzer on a circuit and look for bad packets?'' Dilbert shrinks in his chair, one-upped again.

Mr. Adams admits that he has inherited his parents' placid nature. Much like them and Dilbert Mr. Adams, he has trouble getting a real high out of anything. Making the New York Times best-seller list recently was great, a lifelong goal. But the high faded quickly.

``But if I can gripe, and I've already said I can't,'' Adams says, ``it is that in everything that's happened, as good as it is, there's never been a moment like a win-the-lottery moment. There's all these little incremental steps, but it's never gotten to the point where you say to yourself, `They can't take it away from me now.' You're always on the edge. Which keeps you hungry, which is a good thing.''

Once corporate climber

Believe it or not, there was a time when Scott Adams was a hungry young, and yes, idealistic, corporate climber. A guy who believed that you could work your way up to be a captain of industry simply by being a ``hard-working straight-talking smart person,'' Mr. Adams says. He shakes his head at the memory. ``I was thoroughly wrong about that.''

After receiving an economics degree from Hartwick College in New York, he came West for an MBA at University of California at Berkeley and got a job as a teller at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco. He stood in line at a teller's window, and when they asked what he wanted, he answered, ``a job.''

It was there where he began to notice his dyslexia; his totals rarely balanced at the end of the day. He was on the verge of being fired when he wrote a note to a bank vice president suggesting ways the institution could improve. Much to Mr. Adams' surprise, the bank president called him in, not to discuss his suggestions, but because he thought the letter was hilarious. He put Mr. Adams in a management training program.

It is a perfect example of the Dilbert Principle, which is: The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage to management.

After eight years, he took at job at Pacific Bell and still had a shred of confidence in the system. That disappeared when he won an employee recognition award his second year there. The executive handing him the award had no idea what he did for a living. So, for the benefit of the other employees there, the executive invented an entirely bogus project and thanked Mr. Adams for his contribution to its success.

``It was a defining moment,'' Mr. Adams says. ``That was a whole year of work. And if you define yourself by your job, then my whole definition of myself came together in that moment when I realized that it didn't amount to very much.''

Worse, it did not change the world in any way.

``It didn't even change my boss' boss' boss. So,'' he pauses, and laughs at what he is about to say: ``I guess it just told me that corporate America wasn't where I was going to make my mark. Ironically.''

But soon he would make his mark. The doodles he was drawing to entertain himself and his colleagues in the trenches were drawing raves in the office. His friend, Mike Goodwin, won the ``Name the Nerd'' contest. ``It was a word to refer to somebody who was kind of nerdish,'' Mr. Goodwin says. ``Like, `what a dilbert.'°''

The strip was less of a hit outside the Pacific Bell cubicles. Every major syndicate, except United Media, turned him down. The strip debuted in syndication in 1989 to modest interest. It did not explode until 1993, when Mr. Adams became the first cartoonist to print his e-mail address on a strip. He had tapped into something of a rage against the corporate machine. And Dilbert became the hero to the beleaguered white-collar crowd.

Thus began his double life. He'd draw the strip at 6 a.m., then work 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day at Pacific Bell. Then in June he was downsized. The truth was, Mr. Adams says, he made a standing offer to his boss that when his costs outweighed his benefits, he would leave. For the previous two years, his workload had lightened so that he was only doing a few projects with Ms. Freeman and their old lab mates. Most of the time he did public speaking, which was good publicity for himself and the company. It was a comfortable existence.

When a new boss arrived, the time had come. Before he left, Mr. Adams says, his new boss, who wore a beard, asked if there would be a bearded man in the strip. Sure enough, a character appeared earlier this year who was too dumb to grow hair on his chin, so it came out on his forehead. Dilbert's boss immediately recognized the new guy's management potential and paired him with Alice and Wally. Soon, Alice killed him by driving a pen through his raisin-sized heart.

You could call that closure.

``People asked me if I'd go soft after I left,'' Mr. Adams says, and laughs. ``I just wanted to make a point.''

It was not bitterness. Mr. Adams has not been bitter since the strip became successful.

Someday, he wants the chance to run his own company. He is already the CEO of the ``Dilbert'' empire, but he's thinking bigger. Already, he's envisioning a Dilbertworld techno-amusement part, sort of a ``Chuck E. Cheese for adults.''

But he is also thinking of something else, a blending of the entertainment and technology worlds. Deeper in his brain are plans for a futuristic city, a garbageless place where every product is recyclable. You would grow food in hydroponic gardens, which pleases Mr. Adams, a vegetarian. He envisions it in the desert, preferably as a community for seniors.

He has another dream, one eminently more feasible: the Pulitzer Prize. ``Why not?'' he asks. He concedes that it would be rare for a cartoonist to win one, but maybe, somewhere in a parallel universe that only Mr. Adams can see, he has already won it.

And he will not even have to leave the house to pick it up.