The Joy of Work: Dilbert's Guide to Finding Happiness at the Expense of Your Co-Workers ANNOTATION
This humorous corporate survival guide details the joys of work, reverse telecommuting, boss managing strategies and office pranks. It also discusses meeting survival, co-worker management and criticism handling. Complete with Dilbert cartoons, examples and anecdotes, this guide is a surefire way to brighten up a dreary day.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A message from Scott Adams:
I think the next wave of office design will focus on eliminating the only remaining obstacle to office productivity: your happiness. Happiness isn't a physical thing, like walls and doors. But it's closely related. Managers know that if they can eliminate all traces of happiness, the employees won't be so picky about their physical surroundings. Once you're hopelessly unhappy, you won't bother to complain if your boss rolls you up in a tight ball and crams you into a cardboard box.
As soon as I noticed this disturbing threat to workplace happiness, I did some investigative work and discovered it wasn't confined to the issue of office design. Companies were making a direct frontal assault on employee happiness in every possible way! I knew there was only one thing that could stop the horror.
It was time for another Dilbert book
It might sound corny, but I felt an oblitgation to society. People told me it was time for me to "give something back to the community." This scared me, until I realized that no one knows I furnished my house with street signs and park benches. So I interpreted the"give something back to the community" message as a plea for me to write this book and then charge the community to read it.
In the first part of this book I will tell you how to find happiness at the expense of you co-workers, managers, customers, and -- best of all -- those lazy stockholders. The second part of the book teaches you my top-secret methods for mining humor out of ordinary situations, thus making it easier to mock the people around you. The third part of the book is made entirely of invisible pages. If the book seems heavier than it looks. that's why.
SYNOPSIS
Cartoonist Scott Adams returns with a comical treatise on dealing with corporate America's egomaniacal bosses, stupid coworkers, life-sucking drudgery, and the growing scourge of cubicle flatulence. Learn to use your creativity to succeed in the workplace—Dilbert style.
FROM THE CRITICS
Green - Business Week
It's cute and clever.
Daneet Steffens - Entertainment Weekly
Adams is no slouch, but his repetitive groove. . .is starting to wear a little thin.
Publishers Weekly
Dilbert devotees should enjoy Adams's compendium of advice on office life, subterfuge and pranks. Take his grid that identifies boss types along the axes of capable/incompetent and harmless/evil: with a boss who is both capable and harmless, be sure to delegate upward. Other handy tips: don't return phone calls (if you do, you'll seem accessible and underworked); present overly complicated diagrams with made-up letters (explain when asked: "Some ideas are too big for the alphabet"). Loyal readers have contributed some Adams's suggested office pranks, as well as choice bits like the coinage of the term "multishirking," or doing two nonwork activities at once. Sure, some bits are too silly to be funny (start a phone-sex biz from your cubicle?), and others could use some Dave Barry-style zing. But this book shines with Adams's real advice on creating humor and his hilarious tale of appearing as an expert consultant (aka Mebert) who convinced his clients to put their mission statement to music. As usual, this fourth Dilbert book--timed to arrive with the UPN animated series this fall--is punctuated throughout by hilarious and apropos Dilbert strips. Author tour. (Oct.)
Green - Business Week
It's cute and clever.
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