Playboy Interview: Scott Adams

"I live by these. They are the office supply of the gods." Scott Adams is surrounded by a sea of Post-it notes--Post-its attached to Post-its attached to Post-its stuck onto his desk, computer monitor and the lamp above his work space in his home office, a white-walled room equipped with computers, audio equipment, weights and a pool table. As he does almost every day, Adams sits in front of his monitor, wading through upwards of 350 e-mail messages from readers of "Dilbert," his hugely popular comic strip. Besides the usual kudos and good-natured jabs, "Dilbert" fans often send Adams offbeat but true stories about their workdays. Particularly good anecdotes, potential comic-strip fodder, are scribbled onto Post-it notes.

Adams, 40, is gleefully waving one such yellow square in the air. "Look at this," he says. "You know the law that requires companies to put up warning signs if there are carcinogens in a work area? At this guy's workplace the warning is on the Exit sign."

He slaps the Post-it onto the wall. "You couldn't make this stuff up," he says.

Workplace absurdities have made "Dilbert" one of the few comic strips to become both a sensation and a cottage industry. Since its debut a decade ago, the strip has ventured where no comic has gone before--into the land of cubicles and copiers. It has hilariously skewered management trends, office politics and white-collar drudgery. Cruel and incompetent bosses, plus the pervasive stupidity of people Adams calls "in-duh-viduals"--with emphasis on the "duh"--are favorite targets in the strip, which appears in 1700 newspapers, on the Internet, in best-selling books and on refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, desk calendars, neckties and even underwear.

Before the success of "Dilbert," Adams worked in the kinds of offices he now satirizes. Back then, he drew cartoons for fun, often sketching a nerdy engineer who was a compilation of his co-workers, christened Dilbert by a colleague. In Adams' words, Dilbert was "a poster boy for the corporately disenfranchised."

Adams sent sample "Dilbert" strips to cartoon syndicators, and one, United Media, signed him up. As the strip began to take off, Adams kept his day job--at the telephone company, with the technology group responsible for ISDN (fast-speed data lines). In 1993 he created a home for Dilbert, called the Dilbert Zone, on the Web and published his America Online e-mail address in his strip. The Net helped popularize "Dilbert," and e-mail from readers helped Adams create the world in which Dilbert lives. The cartoon seemed to strike a chord with corporate sufferers. "There were about 35 million office workers in the U.S. all having this shared experience, but not knowing that it was shared," Adams once told "Time," "who were going home and not talking about it because they assumed it could not be this bad anywhere else."

More newspapers signed up, particularly when Bill Watterson retired his long-running strip, "Calvin and Hobbes," and space opened on the comics pages. But it wasn't until 1995 that Adams left his day job to become a full-time cartoonist and run the growing "Dilbert" empire.

Adams had finally fulfilled the dream that was formed in the small town of Windham, New York, where his father was a postal worker. His mother, a homemaker, encouraged him "to be anything I wanted," he says. "She said I could be president. I wanted to be Charles Schulz."

His cartooning career was derailed early when he was rejected by the Famous Artists School, to which he applied by mail, at 11; he was too young. Being practical, Adams gave up on his plans to become a cartoonist and majored in economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.

After graduating, he entered the workforce as a bank teller and manager at Crocker National Bank, got his MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and went to work as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell, doodling all the while. He submitted several cartoons to magazines such as Playboy and "The New Yorker." Both replied with rejection slips (the strips and slips can be viewed on his Web site). Years later he tried again, but this time he was given a chance. In 1989 United Media syndicated "Dilbert" in about 50 papers. The strip--with its soon-familiar list of main characters, including Dilbert, with his unruly necktie; Dogbert, the power-mad, football-shaped dog; Wally, a sharp-tongued co-worker; gung-ho Alice; and the unnamed, comically incompetent, pointy-haired boss-- became a staple of office bulletin boards.

As the strip's popularity grew, Adams published six books, including "The Dilbert Principle," which became a number one best-seller in 1996. His latest book is "The Dilbert Future," in which Adams predicts that scientists eventually will give up on solar power and harness the one truly unlimited source of energy: stupidity. The 258-page book's introduction calls it an "exhaustive analysis of the future, in the sense that if you held the book above your head for several hours, you would become exhausted."

One day, as Playboy's top management team disappeared to Florida for a weeklong retreat complete with bonding exercises, mutual-trust workshops and, of course, several days of golf, we sent Contributing Editor David Sheff to meet Adams in his home office in a suburb of San Francisco. Here's Sheff's report:

"Adams' office is a technophile's heaven, with a video-conferencing system for virtual book tours, studio-quality audio equipment for radio interviews, high-tech drawing boards and the expected computers, both Macs and PCs. 'I've always had both machines, though I used to be a Macintosh devotee,'Adams explained. 'Unfortunately I don't have faith that Apple will be around for long, so I'm trying to wean myself. It's kind of like when you know somebody is going to die, so you try to get yourself ready.'

"The tour continued through the rest of the house, where there is hardly any furniture. When I asked if he had just moved in, Adams sighed. 'I've never lived anyplace where people didn't ask if I had just moved in,' he said as he guided me to the backyard, with its impressive swimming pool and a hammock. 'The hammock is where I do most of my work,' he said, with no hint that he was kidding.

"Adams, who wore glasses, a shirt, Levi's and sneakers, explained that his daily schedule rarely changes. He gets up at six and works at his desk. Coffee--in a Dilbert mug, of course--is nearby. He draws the day's strip freehand and then answers the e-mail messages that require immediate attention. Next he works on a new book until early evening, when his live-in girlfriend of eight years, Pam Okasaki, returns home from her job--she's still with Pacific Bell. They normally go out for a late dinner at a local restaurant (they are both vegetarians) before Scott returns to his office to ink, color and send off (via the Net) his strips. After that, he answers more e-mail while watching TV.

"Adams takes regular work breaks at the pool table. 'I love it,' he said. 'And you can't fit one of these in a cubicle."'

[Q] Playboy: What's so bad about cubicles?

[A] Adams: If you have a job that requires you to think and concentrate, there is no way you can do it in a cubicle. If you don't have to think or concentrate, you're fine.

[Q] Playboy: Is the problem that cubicles are too noisy?

[A] Adams: Yes. You've got the sounds of the world around you all the time. When I worked in one, I would have a sore neck at the end of the day. I couldn't help but yank my head around whenever I heard anyone walk by. It was an unconscious reaction. And I feared someone would sneak up behind me when I was playing solitaire on my computer.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think lack of privacy is the worst part?

[A] Adams: That, and it's hard to sleep in a cubicle. It was a big problem for me.

Where do you put your head? I learned to prop myself up and sleep. The key is to put your back toward the "door" and face the computer. Make sure your screen saver doesn't activate; it if does, it's a dead giveaway that you're not doing anything. You close your eyes and take micronaps, which are excellent. It's still a problem when your head falls over and you get keyboard face. It's proof that you haven't been working too hard.

[Q] Playboy: How do people deal with the lack of privacy?

[A] Adams: Oddly, people adapt very quickly. They fool themselves into thinking one of two things: either that what they're saying isn't so private after all, or that other people can't really hear them, when they know damn well that anybody with normal hearing can. There is also some unspoken bond among the cubicles: I hear yours, you hear mine. It's how you make it possible to live in a cubicle. Instead of hearing people say, "I wanted to say something private but couldn't," I hear, "I've heard every detail about the life of the guy in the next cubicle and I want to kill him." A huge problem is people who check their voice mail with their speakerphones on. It can be extremely annoying. If that's happening, my advice is that you go to a phone that's untraceable and call whoever is playing their messages out loud. Call at night and leave suggestive messages that the recipient wouldn't want anyone else to hear: "Hi, Bob. Bring the leopard outfit again next week. The midgets and the pony will be here." Do that every day until the person no longer plays his messages out loud.

[Q] Playboy: Do companies intentionally use cubicles to disallow privacy?

[A] Adams: No. They're just really cheap.

[Q] Playboy: Have cubicles changed over the years?

[A] Adams: They have shrunk and will continue to shrink until they eventually become the size of your head. You'll wear the head cubicle like a helmet. It will have a little screen. Then companies will be able to line you up shoulder to shoulder in a dangerous part of town and save a lot of money on real estate.

[Q] Playboy: When you worked in a cubicle, did you decorate it?

[A] Adams: I had so little respect for my cubicle surroundings that I didn't want to dress it up. I didn't want to honor it. Many companies don't allow people to decorate their cubicles. I often hear about the cubicle police. They have these absurd reasons why you can't decorate your cubicle--the acoustics will be damaged, or it's a fire hazard, or it will break the visual plane. Companies have guidelines about how far window shades can be pulled down, so all the shades are at the same level. It's hard to imagine that people have nothing else to do but invent policies like that.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the Dilbert Principle at work?

[A] Adams: Exactly. The least-competent people get promoted into management because you don't want your good people doing unimportant things. I don't know how many people think it's tongue in cheek when I say that, but it really is a strange time when the people who do the work need to be smarter than those who are managing them. It's the ultimate absurdity to put incompetent people in management and think you've done a good thing, but it happens all the time. These managers have to do something for 40 hours a week, so they come up with window-shade and cubicle-decorating policies.

[Q] Playboy: At least they're good fodder for your comic strip.

[A] Adams: Good fodder is anything inherently absurd. These managers, because they have to do something, may start with ideas that were once good management theories, but then they bastardize them to where they are ludicrous.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't many of the policies designed to made the workplace better?

[A] Adams: The reason for many so-called innovations is that management has lost its carrots, its incentives. It used to be that you could tell workers that if they did a good job you'd give them job security and big raises. That has changed. Now, if you do a good job, you're as likely to get fired as someone who does a bad job. Everyone knows that. If you're a manager, what are you going to do to get people to work harder? You bring in the carrot juice, open a gym and do stupid teamwork exercises where you have everyone hanging from ropes in the forest. Then you hand out certificates of accomplishment or stuffed animals or almost anything except cash. It makes people nuts. If you're a manager and you don't have any tools, just leave me alone. Please leave me alone.

[Q] Playboy: Don't the perquisites inspire workers?

[A] Adams: I think people have the cause and effect backward in this. I remember when Apple was going great guns. There were stories about how the people at Apple could get back rubs at the office. They had health facilities and other things most companies don't have. The myth was that that's how Apple became great--by being so good to its employees. Well, as soon as things went bad there, the first perk that was discarded was the back rub. Even Apple didn't believe there was a relationship between back rubs and the company's success.

[Q] Playboy: But don't happier employees do better work?

[A] Adams: I see a tenuous connection. That's not to say that it's not inherently good to have happier employees. If you're a manager or owner and you can do things that make your employees happy and don't hurt you too much, do them for morale. But do happier employees make you richer? My observation is that companies do well because they have some inherent advantage that the employees can't screw up and management can't ruin. Sometimes it's luck. Most often it's luck, actually. Occasionally a few shockingly brilliant employees do something so spectacular--build the Macintosh computer, for instance--that no amount of bad management can ruin it for years. My theory is that what works is finding brilliant employees who are perfectly suited to the task, and not screwing it up by getting in their way. Plus luck.

[Q] Playboy: In general, do you hear that people are less discontented at work than they were a few years ago?

[A] Adams: The booming economy helps a lot because it provides more options. And some people are more contented because they have made the leap and are working for themselves. You hear people say, "Gosh, I wish I were as brave as you. You left the company and you're working for yourself and seem to be doing pretty well." Then they're saying, "I wish I were as brave as you and you and you," and at some point they realize there are as many people doing the other thing, and the number who have failed is zero. Nobody starves. Nobody dies.

[Q] Playboy: What about the people left behind at the office? Are they more or less content?

[A] Adams: Less. At least that's what I hear.

[Q] Playboy: Were you just putting a nice face on it in The Dilbert Future, or is it true that people who were downsized get their revenge by being hired back as consultants for ten times more money?

[A] Adams: I hear about it constantly. It has actually become difficult to hire an employee. And nobody's dumb enough to be an employee these days.

[Q] Playboy: Because?

[A] Adams: Because people have figured out that you want boss diversification. That means you don't want to work for one boss at one company. Employees have to go to the weekly staff meeting, whether it's any good for them or not. They have to go to the diversity training, whether they need it or not. They have to go to chair-safety training, donate blood, show up for the hours required, whether they are tired or not. That's how employers take away 80 percent of your productivity. On the other hand, if you become your own employee, you can shop yourself to five different places and do only work, no unproductive stuff. You can charge each company far more than a regular employee receives. The companies get better work from you, and you get five times more money.

[Q] Playboy: The trade-offs are job security and benefits.

[A] Adams: Job security? Who do you know with job security?

[Q] Playboy: How about benefits?

[A] Adams: You can buy lots of benefits when you make five times more money. The benefits companies offer are shrinking anyway.

[Q] Playboy: But everyone can't become a consultant or a freelance.

[A] Adams: All I know is that more and more white-collar workers who are laid off are discovering that it was a great thing for them. They figure out that their lives aren't over--in many cases, they're just beginning. I'm not certain how this applies to blue-collar workers, but I know they're really underpaid. I hope the fellow who does my gardening doesn't read Playboy, but if he should double his fee tomorrow, I would pay it without blinking. I just don't want to garden. It's not how I want to use my time.

[Q] Playboy: What are your favorite management trends?

[A] Adams: Teamwork exercises tend to be the nuttiest. Ropes courses are really nutty. I would like to see the proof that people are happier or that profits increase because somebody has done a teamwork exercise.

[Q] Playboy: The theory is that workers come back from an experience such as that feeling committed to one another and to the company.

[A] Adams: I'm willing to look at the scientific evidence. With all the e-mail I get, I've never heard a story that suggests that these exercises work. Let's say I've gotten 50,000 e-mail messages. Many of them were about teamwork exercises. Nobody has ever reported: "It sure seems like things are working better here." I've not even heard an anecdotal report. I just hear that the exercise itself was stupid or degrading.

[Q] Playboy: What exercise was particularly ridiculous?

[A] Adams: For me, the trust exercise. I had to fall back and have a co-worker catch me. She decided in advance that I was probably too heavy. She outweighed me, by the way. I fell square on my ass.

[Q] Playboy: That was your lesson in trust?

[A] Adams: Yes. Then there are the ones where you work as a team to solve a little artificial puzzle. I remember getting really annoyed that the people who had the loudest mouths dominated those groups. I would come away thinking, Man, a lot of people really suck. That's all I got out of it. I doubt if the assholes who ruined the exercises thought to themselves afterward, Hey, I ruined this whole exercise. I think I'll change.

[Q] Playboy: What's the newest thing in management gimmicks, according to your readers?

[A] Adams: People hate the microtrend of employers trying to keep people working in their cubicles. I hear about people who put little signs on their cubicles: The Door is Closed. There is no door, of course, but they're trying to tell people to leave them alone. There are also a growing number of companies that do not allow employees to use e-mail within certain hours.

[Q] Playboy: Why? Is there too much socializing by e-mail?

[A] Adams: The theory is that e-mail diverts you from higher-priority stuff because it's an easy and seductive thing to use. I certainly agree that people overuse e-mail, but not that restricting it to certain hours solves the problem.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of companies that restrict their employees' access to the Internet?

[A] Adams: Anybody who tries to manage having fun at work has missed the biggest change of the Nineties, which is that work and home and leisure have melded into one thing. Trying to force people to separate them will backfire. When I had day jobs, I always did my best work during my shower before I went to work. That's when I did all my planning. There's no way that that isn't work, though it doesn't show up on the time sheet. When you say the time your employees are at work belongs to work, and the time they're home belongs to work too, you're being absurd. You've lost sight of how people operate, and you take away their flexibility to manage their time in the way that works best for them. Some people stay up late working. The phones aren't ringing and they get an enormous amount done. Some people are preparing in the morning when they're in the shower. So if they get to work and surf the Web for fun for an hour, is that wrong? There's just no way that's bad. It's a Big Brother thing. Management will filter certain Web sites so you can't get to them. The Dilbert Zone is filtered by a number of companies. So is Playboy.

[Q] Playboy: So companies try to block humor and sex? Are they successful?

[A] Adams: Are you kidding? You cannot stop sex.

[Q] Playboy: In cubicles?

[A] Adams: It's certainly harder to do it in a cubicle, but it's not unheard of. It makes the existence of locked conference rooms all the more important.

[Q] Playboy: So one finds alternatives to the cubicle.

[A] Adams: The telephone closet turns out to be an excellent place.

[Q] Playboy: Which you know from firsthand experience?

[A] Adams: I'm told it is. Also, company cars in the parking lot. Cubicles are for the adventurous. There is a cubicle club, just like the mile-high club. Let's just say I'm aware of people who've had sex in cubicles. I've been assured that some of these stories are true.

[Q] Playboy: Was there a lot of sex going on in the offices where you worked?

[A] Adams: Yeah. You hear about it by accident sometimes. Once, a woman was telling a friend in the office, who she used to date, about her new boyfriend. The two had remained close, so she was giving an update to the old boyfriend in vivid detail, even comparing the old boyfriend, in specific ways, to the current one, who worked in the same office. She relayed this all by e-mail and by mistake hit the "reply to all" button. "All" in this case included the guy she was talking about and just about everyone else. It also went to the co-worker's mother, because she was on the list of recipients of the original message. I thought that was pretty good: telling a mother by e-mail about the sex you had with her son.

[Q] Playboy: Do certain companies have more sex going on than others?

[A] Adams: Definitely. You can break it down by industry. You don't hear so much about the aerospace companies; I don't know why. Banks are wild places. Everybody in the financial industry has a lot of hormones. In software companies, too.

[Q] Playboy: Why software companies?

[A] Adams: Much of it is age related. Those companies tend to have a younger worker base. The companies with the young women are where the action is. People always wonder why employees at companies like Microsoft work ungodly hours. It's not why you think. If you've got a good mix of the sexes at the office, you have about the same odds or better of scoring at work as you would if you were to go home. That counts for people who say they have to work all night. If people of the opposite sex who have the same interests as you are going to be there all night too, your chances aren't bad. If I go to the office cafeteria at two A.M., I'm going to run into some eligible person I have a lot in common with. I won't if I go home. You don't have to say, "What's your sign?" You can say, "How's your project going?" It's far more conducive to getting lucky.

[Q] Playboy: We thought it was Microsoft's workers' passionate commitment to Windows 98 and Bill Gates that kept them working all night.

[A] Adams: All I know is that if you put a bunch of young people in the same place, you don't need to add a lot. Similar-minded people of mating age are consciously being brought together in a large community. The odds of procreation are high. What effect will that have down the line? If you work for Microsoft in Redmond, your odds of marrying another Microsoft person seem pretty good. Does it mean there will be a bunch of supersmart babies in Redmond over the next few hundred years?

[Q] Playboy: Beyond Microsoft, how important is sex to the world of work?

[A] Adams: It sure makes it fun. And you can be assured it's going on because sometimes you can see it. At night, it's easier to see into the buildings across from you. Their windows have gone from opaque to transparent because of the change in sunlight. People have been caught. A building I worked in in San Francisco has mirrored windows; from the outside, it's not entirely obvious that you can see out from the inside. The building overlooks a parking garage. One day, on the roof of this garage, two people decided to have vigorous sex. All the phones started ringing throughout our building, with everybody saying, "Go to the east window." Within minutes, the entire building was watching. They were going at it like crazy. The funniest moment was when a security guard arrived. You see him slowly walking over. The couple scrambles to get on their clothes. You can't hear anything, but you see him talking to them. Then you see him gesturing toward our building. He's clearly saying that at least a thousand people were watching them have sex. You see these two people look at the building. They realize they were entertainment for a thousand people. It was a wonderful moment.

I love those stories because I love to think that people are having more fun than I am. Doing it in a cubicle has to be the ultimate fun, because not only are you having sex, you're also getting paid for it. It doesn't get any better than that, and more and more people are going to be able to do it.

[Q] Playboy: Be paid to have sex?

[A] Adams: Yeah. Telecommuting is where sex in the workplace is going. It's an advantage of working at home, maybe the biggest advantage. People who work at home are often able to work it out so their sex partners are at home at the same time.

[Q] Playboy: What happens then?

[A] Adams: They have sex. Let me try to explain--

[Q] Playboy: But what about the work that is supposed to get done?

[A] Adams: The work gets done. But in the meantime, you're being paid to have sex. It's my version of heaven.

[Q] Playboy: How concerned are people about sexual harassment these days?

[A] Adams: Women are very concerned. They often write and mention that it's a huge problem. I hear it all the time. Occasionally, a woman will write and say, "I can't take this to the authorities--I need my job. But please do something about this so that I can at least get some satisfaction in your comic strip."

[Q] Playboy: Do people often write you for that type of help?

[A] Adams: They do. Sometimes I'm the court of last resort.

[Q] Playboy: What do men say about sexual harassment?

[A] Adams: I get the impression that if a guy wants to hit on someone, he's at least aware that it would be a bad thing if the person works for him. They may be doing it, but they know it's wrong. Another result of sexual harassment complaints is that employees must take training seminars. People generally find them completely absurd. Usually there is some role playing and some hokey movie. It's usually done by human resources people, who are not known for their ability to do much of anything.

[Q] Playboy: One character in your strip, Catbert, is a particularly evil head of human resources. Does that sum up your view of that job?

[A] Adams: Human resources departments are happy to make your job as difficult as possible. I hear from a lot of human resources people who love Catbert. The reason, they say, is that they actually feel evil and like it. I would never have believed the number of people who say, "I am entirely evil. I intentionally do mean things to employees and I like it." I can only offer my pop psychology explanation. I think they feel like second-class citizens because they're disconnected from the thing that produces value for the company. They have complexes. There is a little bit of an "I can prove I exist by hurting you" thing here.

[Q] Playboy: Has Catbert hurt people in your strip in ways that are based on real experiences?

[A] Adams: The classic is that a company is desperately in need of hiring people. Everyone is overworked. They go to human resources to find out how the search is going and they're told, "We didn't know you wanted anybody." Somehow the human resources people always forget that they should be hiring people. It can't be an accident; it must be intentional. Or they'll have requirements for jobs that make it impossible to find anyone. They'll be looking for someone who has ten years' experience programming in Java. Java has been around for only three years. That can't be a mistake. It seems too boneheaded to be a mistake.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever hear stories about nice human resources people?

[A] Adams: I knew one human resources director who had a wry sense of humor. I liked him very much. He told me about someone he had been counseling who was having trouble with his life and work. He counseled the guy in the morning and afterward was sitting in his office, gazing out the window. He saw the guy fly by--he committed suicide. My friend said, "I sat there thinking to myself that I hadn't done a very good job that day."

[Q] Playboy: Has that story gone into Dilbert?

[A] Adams: Some things are so bizarre that people wouldn't believe them. They'd say, "He's completely lost touch."

[Q] Playboy: What other real stories have been too far-out to use?

[A] Adams: They come in all the time. Yesterday I heard one that was too amusing to use. Somebody was trying to work and his boss was hovering over his desk, pacing, before a big meeting. The employee said, "Will you stop pacing? You're driving me crazy." The boss replied seriously, "It's my prerogative if I want to pay you to go crazy."

[Q] Playboy: On the other hand, what real stories have made it into the strip?

[A] Adams: Many of the strips are based on real stories. I recently did one in which somebody has to share a cubicle with a photocopier. That is real What could be more disruptive than having a photocopier in your cubicle, with people coming in and making copies all day? And this one is real: You know those little stress balls that people squeeze? Somebody was squeezing the stress ball and it broke on his keyboard and ruined it and ruined his whole day, which caused more stress than he could ever have imagined.

[Q] Playboy: When you worked in an office, did you keep a journal of the type of outrageous stories that now make it into the strip?

[A] Adams: I wasn't keeping a journal, mental or otherwise. I was just working. I actually started out working more exuberantly than most people. I started as a bank teller, but I was pretty sure I was going to rise through the ranks of management and run a multinational corporation in no time flat.

[Q] Playboy: You eventually became a manager at the bank. Were you a good one?

[A] Adams: One cannot see one's own management errors. So I don't know.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like being a manager?

[A] Adams: I loved it. It was the best part of my career. I got a really big cubicle, and then, for a while, I actually had an office.

[Q] Playboy: How much of a difference did that make?

[A] Adams: Enormous difference. I loved it. I could close the door and make personal phone calls. I could play around. There wasn't a day when I didn't walk into work in my bad little suit, walk into that office and think, I could do this for 30 years. At the same time, I can't say my experience is common, because I've never heard from anybody so fixated on the actual walls and door as I was. To me, it was the difference between enjoying and not enjoying my work. All the other stuff was far less important. Then I lost my office and went back to a cubicle. It sucked big time. It was softened by the fact that I got a big cubicle, but then I left the bank and went to Pacific Bell and got an even smaller cubicle. It was downhill after my halcyon office days.

[Q] Playboy: After Dilbert took off, you kept your phone-company job. Why?

[A] Adams: A funny thing happens when you don't have to work, when you have enough money that you can leave any time you want: All the bad things about the job disappear. As soon as you know you don't have to be there, the things that are bad no longer bother you. You go from being a person who is going to have a heart attack because you have no control over your life to one who is very contented. It's just like the janitor who wins the lottery and still goes to work every day. I love working with technology. There was a structure. It was pay, and the pay was pretty good. There weren't a lot of reasons to leave.

[Q] Playboy: Were your co-workers resentful of your success?

[A] Adams: Instead of being resentful, people were living vicariously through me. I was the cubicle dweller who'd found a way to escape. Though I hadn't escaped yet, I could. People were genuinely thrilled that someone like them could find a way out. It gave them hope. I was just one of the people doing things on the outside too. The office was like a Middle Eastern bazaar because everyone was selling stuffed animals or Amway or Avon products. It was a regular free market. There were a lot of professional musicians. My theory is that creativity is kind of like a tube of toothpaste. It has to get out. So if they can't use it in their work, people transfer their creativity to other areas.

[Q] Playboy: Had you not become successful as a cartoonist, would you still have created cartoons to express your creativity?

[A] Adams: There was a point before Dilbert got syndicated when I promised myself that I would draw a cartoon every day until I got something published. You have to know this about me: If I said it, I would have done it. I would have been 95 and drawing a cartoon on the day I died.

[Q] Playboy: And what would that cartoon have been?

[A] Adams: I'm sure it would have been about me converting to Christianity, just in case.

[Q] Playboy: Did the power shift when you were making more money than your bosses?

[A] Adams: In a sense, I'm very much like my Dogbert character. Dogbert gets all his power from his attitude. His attitude is that he has power. I have always genuinely felt that people have only as much power over me as I am willing to give them.

[Q] Playboy: But bosses do have power over their workers.

[A] Adams: Not really. Ultimately you can kill anybody you want.

[Q] Playboy: Rather than do an unpleasant task?

[A] Adams: Definitely. My manager can order me to do something, but for me not to kill that person at that moment is clearly a choice I make. It's always a choice--a choice to do the assignment, quit and become a circus performer or kill all the people around me. I never felt that I was under the control of any other person. Maybe that was part of the problem with me.

[Q] Playboy: Did your co-workers start to treat you differently when Dilbert became successful?

[A] Adams: I would go to meetings and people would say things and then look at me to see if I was going to write them down. If I didn't, they'd say, "Aren't you going to write that down?" Also, people started returning phone calls. That had been unheard of in my career. I had less than a 30 percent returned phone call rate for the first 15 years. I would call somebody and just assume they would never call me back because there wasn't anything in it for them. Suddenly everybody would call me back. They'd say, "So, how's that Dogbert doing?" In the last year or two, I had this totally artificial existence that warped everything.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as if people liked the idea of being immortalized in the strip. Did you ever hear from people who were offended?

[A] Adams: Never. No one ever saw themselves in the strip. I changed their gender. No man ever thinks a female character could be him, even if I use an exact quote.

[Q] Playboy: In general, do you worry about offending people with the strip?

[A] Adams: I have no problem offending people intentionally. If it's accidental, I worry.

[Q] Playboy: When have you accidentally offended people?

[A] Adams: In a recent Dilbert series, the boss was on a plane trip and the plane went down. The boss survived with only minor hair injuries, and he explained why: The plane was full of nuns. Wally said, "You mean prayer saved you?" and the boss said, "No, padding. Those nuns don't do a lot of aerobics in the nunnery." It shouldn't have surprised me, but you wouldn't believe the number of complaints I got.

[Q] Playboy: From nuns?

[A] Adams: From everyone. Nuns were very upset. Guess why? They said God needs their bodies to be fit to do his work, so most nuns are in extremely good physical shape. Makes sense, but who knew? The most serious complaints were from people who fly a lot. They took it the worst. They said it's wrong to joke about airplane crashes. I also got complaints about my killing nuns from religious people, and complaints about my killing bosses.

[Q] Playboy: Who complained that you were killing bosses?

[A] Adams: Bosses.

[Q] Playboy: Are you often surprised by your readers' reactions?

[A] Adams: Often. Wally recently got a mailorder bride from the tiny, impoverished nation of Elbonia. The Elbonians sent him a pig in a wig. Who would complain about that? Let's see: People complained that I was making fun of the country Elbonia, because they thought it was whatever country they came from. Albanians complained that I was making fun of Albania. In fact, every republic that broke away from the Soviet Union is pretty sure it's their country. So are many Middle Eastern countries. Elbonia was intentionally based on nothing so I wouldn't have this problem. I also got complaints from mail-order-bride companies. I'm not sure they call themselves that, but they arrange marriages with women from other countries. They said I was insinuating that their brides are pigs. I wasn't. The whole point was that Wally got an actual pig--that he got ripped off and was sent a real pig. Of course I also got complaints from women who said I was saying that women are pigs. I won't even dignify that with a comment. Most recently, a woman decided that Elbonia is a play on "eubonics," and that I was insinuating something about the facial characteristics of African Americans by using a pig. Who could have anticipated that sort of criticism? You're probably thinking, Oh, these are bizarre, incredible examples. No. There's not a day that goes by when somebody doesn't make you wonder if the whole Darwinian thing has gone wrong.

[Q] Playboy: On the other hand, are your readers ever right when they see things you didn't intend?

[A] Adams: All the time. One time I did a cartoon about the United Nations in which I drew people from foreign countries. Someone wrote in about one character in a turban and said, "That character is a penis." I swear I wasn't thinking that when I drew it, but the guy was right. It looks like a gigantic cock. What can I say?

[Q] Playboy: How do you respond when people write that a cartoon isn't funny?

[A] Adams: Sometimes I'll do a cartoon that isn't funny but that I believe people will like because they relate to it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you try out cartoons on your friends?

[A] Adams: Other people's opinions don't help. If their opinions on cartoons were that good, they would be cartoonists.

[Q] Playboy: Do critics' opinions affect you?

[A] Adams: There aren't really any cartoon critics. I get critical comments from readers. One of the pluses of getting 350 e-mail messages a day is that at least 100 of them are going to be about my being the god of cartooning. Then if three people say, "Don't quit your day job," it doesn't have nearly the impact. The truth is, I'm not terribly affected by negative stuff. The opinions of people who don't like my work are irrelevant. The people who like it matter completely.

[Q] Playboy: Did you learn that lesson the hard way?

[A] Adams: Rejection always kind of bounces off me. I don't know if it's a philosophy or just the way chemicals work in my brain. I'm just not terribly affected by it, which is good. I never was, even as a child.

[Q] Playboy: Did you draw when you were a child?

[A] Adams: I don't remember a time when I wasn't doodling. My mother was a reflex doodler. If you put a pen in her hand she would draw pictures. It's my earliest imprint.

[Q] Playboy: Your father, meanwhile, was in management at the post office. Was he disgruntled?

[A] Adams: He was the most disgruntled. I had to keep the firearms away from him. He's retired now.

[Q] Playboy: How old were you when you decided you wanted to be a cartoonist?

[A] Adams: From the time I was conscious of the world, at four or five years old, I was sure I would be a cartoonist when I grew up. I had one of those mothers who say, "You can be anything you want when you grow up." I believed it. I was a little kid. What did I know? She seemed to know more than I did.

[Q] Playboy: Did real life ever clash with that?

[A] Adams: Yes, when I was 12 and went through this hideous rational period of my life. I started understanding statistical import. I looked around and said, "Wait a minute. There are 4 billion people in the world. There is only one Charles Schulz. I bet I'm not the only one who wants that job. What's wrong here?" Then I thought, Maybe I ought to become a lawyer.

[Q] Playboy: A lawyer?

[A] Adams: I lived in a very small town. We had 2000 people, a quarter of the number at the Pacific Bell headquarters where I later worked. There were two good jobs that I knew about. One was doctor and one was lawyer. I didn't like gucky stuff, so I chose lawyer. I majored in economics because that seemed as good as anything and I liked money. Still, there was never a time when I wasn't drawing. If I was in class I was drawing obscene pictures of my teachers doing obscene things with all manner of obscene objects. That got me through the day.

[Q] Playboy: What cartoons did you read while growing up?

[A] Adams:Peanuts. It is the reason that I'm a cartoonist.

[Q] Playboy: Charles Schulz has been creating Peanuts for 50 years. Will you go on that long?

[A] Adams: I don't know. I plan to live to 140. If you ask me if I'll do this cartoon for another 100 years, the answer is no.

[Q] Playboy: What is it that causes cartoonists to burn out?

[A] Adams: My promise is that I will never describe myself as burnt out. Deep down, I know that what I do is easier than almost anybody's job. I do exactly as much of it as I want. I guess I'll never relate to the words burnt out.

[Q] Playboy: Three enormously popular cartoonists, Gary Larson, Berke Breathed and Bill Watterson, recently retired. Did they burn out?

[A] Adams: I suspect that once you've got $25 million in the bank, the amount of work that causes you to burn out is different. I think Gary Larson has sold 33 million books to date.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a Far Side fan?

[A] Adams: Oh God, yes. Larson may in fact be, for the single panel, the best ever.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a favorite Far Side?

[A] Adams: Everybody does. An alien comes to Earth and a farmer is greeting him. The alien is shaped like a forearm with a hand on top. The farmer grabs the alien and is shaking it as though it were a big hand. The punch line is something like "Farmer Roy, in an attempt to be friendly, grasps the alien by the head and, (continued on page 150) Scott Adams (Continue form page 60) shaking vigorously, dooms the entire planet to annihilation."

[Q] Playboy: Do you like Matt Groening's cartoon work?

[A] Adams:Life in Hell is great. I'm a huge Simpsons fan, though that's more of a group effort. Cartoonists like Matt Groening proved that you don't need great drawing skills to be a cartoonist. Thank God for that. I believe it was Garry Trudeau who said that he helped make the world safe for bad artists.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Trudeau's Doonesbury?

[A] Adams: I love it. He's probably done the best job of changing a strip to keep it fresh over time. He's a model of how to stay in the business a long time and still be relevant.

[Q] Playboy: On television, do you like Mike Judge's cartoons King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-head?

[A] Adams: Yes, though I can't do big doses of Beavis and Butt-head. I don't think it's safe for anybody to do that. More than 20 minutes would not be good for your mental health.

[Q] Playboy: As a child, did you know you were funny?

[A] Adams: I was always screamingly funny to a very small percentage of the general population.

[Q] Playboy: When did Dilbert come to life?

[A] Adams: When I worked at the bank. Originally, he was a composite of my co-workers. Dilbert is some part of my own personality and some combination of people who had better jobs than I did, the technical people, the engineers. There is one person who doesn't know that he was actually the body model for Dilbert, which I think is funny.

[Q] Playboy: Why don't you tell him?

[A] Adams: Well, he probably wouldn't be flattered.

[Q] Playboy: How does a doodle become the one you continue to develop?

[A] Adams: That's a question that makes you wonder if there is such a thing as fate. I don't know the answer. Dilbert emerged over time. The most fateful moment was when I was drawing him as a doodle and realized he needed a name. I was at Pacific Bell at that point. I drew him on my whiteboard in my cubicle and had a name-the-nerd contest. One of my bosses came by and wrote "Dilbert." It was one of those moments of total clarity. I was completely certain not that I was naming him but that Dilbert was in fact his name.

[Q] Playboy: How much of Dilbert's personality and history are actually yours?

[A] Adams: If you include my entire past--my dating and work histories--he is maybe 65 percent me and the rest other people.

[Q] Playboy: What are the qualities you and he share?

[A] Adams: He has a good attitude but circumstances have put him in a bad place. He's an optimistic guy despite the fact that everything around him is really not that good. He is this little spot of normalcy among the absurdities. I have the same love of technology for the sake of technology that he has. I share very much his lack of understanding about how female creatures operate.

[Q] Playboy: Have you done better than Dilbert in that area?

[A] Adams: I've had a long-term-girlfriend relationship for eight years. That's way better than Dilbert, whose best was 20 minutes.

[Q] Playboy: Do Dilbert's romantic misadventures come from your history?

[A] Adams: Yes, from the period between 16 and 32. It wasn't always smooth and easy.

[Q] Playboy: And how about Dilbert's work ethic?

[A] Adams: I work hard. I'm pretty much a workaholic.

[Q] Playboy: How good are you at balancing your work and home lives?

[A] Adams: I don't have kids, so everything is easier to balance. My girlfriend, Pam, is as much a workaholic as I am. We both work late and have dinner around nine o'clock. We will go to any place that's still open. We have amazingly compatible lifestyles in terms of how we spend our time.

[Q] Playboy: Do your readers complain that their work seems to have infiltrated the rest of their lives?

[A] Adams: I'm hearing that a lot, particularly from people with electronic leashes--pagers and cell phones. When people are hired these days, sometimes they are told that it's a 24-hour-a-day job. They will be paged at four A.M. to go fix the computer system or even for much less important things.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have those leashes? A pager?

[A] Adams: My pager goes off only if somebody hits the Urgent button on my voice mail, and even then I routinely ignore it. Experience has shown that it's never urgent.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a different code for a genuine emergency?

[A] Adams: For real urgent? No. I don't have a special blood type--even if someone is in a really bad accident, they are going to be just as alive or dead by the time I get there.

Nonstop work can suck your reasons for being alive right out of you. Things like having a personal life and being with your family and raising kids and having sex go out the door. People are dying inside.

[Q] Playboy: But not you?

[A] Adams: I love my work. I'm not working for someone else. I don't have a boss I hate.

[Q] Playboy: Is it any worse when bosses make crazy salaries while their companies are losing money and even laying off employees?

[A] Adams: People have become almost immune to that sort of thing. People are far more prickly about stuff they live with day to day. I just did a strip about a company canceling its casual Friday because it had designated a different day that week Hawaiian-shirt day. Somebody actually took the trouble to cancel casual Friday. Lord knows what's going to happen to your stock if you have two casual days in one week. That's the kind of thing people obsess over. When it comes to the huge money bosses make, at some level people are saying to themselves, I wish I were getting all that money. The griping seems like sour grapes. I've never heard anyone say, "Man, if I were Michael Ovitz, I would have given that money back." That's not to say that I don't go after that particular theme a lot. In fact, I recently had Dogbert taking over the company, downsizing and taking massive stock options. I heard indirectly that [Sunbeam's chairman] Al Dunlap wasn't happy with that series. Dogbert got the nickname "Buzzsaw" Dogbert. Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap apparently experienced a day when many people were cutting out that cartoon and showing it to him. It didn't please him.

[Q] Playboy: Was the connection innocent?

[A] Adams: A chain saw and a buzz saw are entirely different tools.

[Q] Playboy: In general, the politics in Dilbert are subtle compared with those in Doonesbury. Do you ally yourself more with the Democratic or the Republican agenda?

[A] Adams: I find myself in a strange situation that doesn't really relate to anything. Unlike many people, I feel no need to sugarcoat my opinions. I'm in favor of the death penalty. I'm in favor of abortion. I'm in favor of euthanasia. I'm in favor of a strong military defense. What do all these things have in common? I'm basically in favor of killing.

[Q] Playboy: Have you thought of running for office on that platform?

[A] Adams: I know that it wouldn't get me very far. I could try to put a good spin on it and say I'm pro-choice and pro-strong defense. People should have dignity in death. We should have deterrents to crime. But it all kind of falls into one basket when you simplify it. No, you don't see anybody running on that sort of platform.

[Q] Playboy: Although Dilbert isn't overtly political, is it gratifying that you're not merely entertaining people? That you are providing something meaningful that reflects their lives?

[A] Adams: I would like to say that I set out to do a good thing and it worked out. But I really sat down just to draw cartoons and make a buck. It will never vary from that simple objective. But if it helps people, I like that.

[Q] Playboy: How important has the Internet been to the success of Dilbert?

[A] Adams: Probably the difference between being in 300 and 1700 newspapers. At first it allowed me to have a really small core audience. The people who lived and breathed the Internet saw that there's a character who lives in that world too. Secondly, it allowed me to put my e-mail address on the strip, which allowed people to write and tell me what they liked and didn't like. They wanted more business strips, but I didn't know that and was doing a lot of nonbusiness stuff. So I changed, and that change alone probably would have brought the strip to several hundred newspapers. Then, Watterson and Larson, two of the best cartoonists in the world, retired unexpectedly, which opened up a bunch of spaces in newspapers. The key space for me was the one that was left by Calvin and Hobbes, since it was rectangular. In the world of cartooning, that makes quite a big difference. The Far Side was a single panel. To fill those spaces most editors conducted polls. They offered three comics and asked readers which one they wanted. Since I was on the Internet, people all over the country had already seen me. They hadn't seen the other strips. I won 100 percent of those polls. Most people said the Internet would kill newspapers; the Internet is what put me in newspapers.

[Q] Playboy: Did you always hope to write books?

[A] Adams: No, I didn't. I just had hundreds of people writing to me and telling me that I should. Then The Wall Street Journal ran an article I wrote called "The Dilbert Principle," which later became a chapter in the book of the same name. I got a call from clever editors at Harper Collins. And I have to say that probably one of the two or three highest points of my life was when The Dilbert Principle hit number one on the New York Times list. It had been languishing at number two for a long time. I think Dennis Rodman's book was number one. If you're two for long enough you won't make it to number one. I had convinced myself that the difference between being number two and number one is really just one spot. Boy, was I wrong. I really had no idea how much impact it would have the day I received the phone call and they said, "It's number one." Everything was different.

[Q] Playboy: Internally or externally?

[A] Adams: It's only internal. I don't know that the world treats me any differently. It's something that happened that no one can ever take away.

[Q] Playboy: Was it a big thing for you when you no longer had to worry so much about money?

[A] Adams: No, and I was disappointed that it wasn't. I was never one who worried that I wouldn't be able to eat. Nor have I had high requirements for physical comfort, though I do love my pool table. But life really isn't much different with or without money. I have always had this low-level anxiety over what would happen if I were to lose all my money, and that hasn't changed. I can run the numbers and see that the odds of my being poor are vanishingly small, but that doesn't change the background worry. I still think I could be poor tomorrow.

[Q] Playboy: Besides your pool table, do you have other sorts of indulgences?

[A] Adams: The freedom to be stupid. That's the best way I can explain it. For example, I'm driving to the store and I need a lightbulb. But I forgot to check what kind of lightbulb I need. Before, I had to drive home and make another trip. Now I can be stupid and buy most of the lightbulbs in the store and throw away the ones that I don't need. There is no way you can define that as anything but stupid. Now I have the ability to buy a bit of stupidity and be totally immune to its impact.

[Q] Playboy: Do you take vacations?

[A] Adams: I don't. I could take a vacation if I wanted to, but. I just don't. I quickly get restless. I always feel like I'm battling mortality. I don't take vacations because I have too much to do. There are a certain number of things I have to finish, and there is something really big ahead.

[Q] Playboy: Bigger than Dilbert?

[A] Adams: Bigger. I feel like I've got to hurry or I won't get there. It's a useful feeling, because it keeps me waking up in the morning.

More and more white-collar workers who are laid off are discovering that their lives aren't over--in many cases, they're just beginning.