To think that 20 years ago I was a Vice President for Indian Head Bank North, New Hampshire (now owned by Fleet Bank), sitting in a private office equipped with a private bathroom, a vault, and right outside my office sat my “secretary” (now referred to as an Administrative Assistant) with a typewriter (no computer). Dilbert, the syndicated cartoon by Scott Adams, was making its debut (April 1989). Most working people found this cartoon to be really very funny and perceptive, to the point that it was almost as if Scott Adams was secretly infiltrating corporate America to obtain material on which to base his cartoon.
In 1997 I returned to California and was hired as a Senior Business Analyst by the IT Department of Mercury Insurance Services. I soon found myself living in a cubicle in a room shared by 40 other IT gurus. I was now part of Dilbert’s world. We always read Dilbert, we regularly cut the strip from the newspaper and hung them on the inside and outside of our cubicles. Some Sunday strips were so apropos that I even framed them to hang on my cubicle “wall”. Here you can enjoy the Dilbert strip from my first day at Mercury and the one for the day I gave my notice.

I have now learned from visiting the Dilbert website that: “The Dilbert web site, dilbert.com, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995 and is the most widely read syndicated comic on the Internet.” And yes, Scott Adams has a blog on dilbert.com. Amazing! Why do I share this with you? For no other reason than it is Saturday and everyone deserves to take a break and laugh on Saturday. We spend a lot of time talking about Web 2.0 and now Scott Adams’ new book “Dilbert 2.0” will be available in October. Great holiday gift for the techies in your life.