Some time ago I wrote about a short-lived fad to hack Garfield cartoons by removing all of the cat’s speech bubbles – thereby rendering him ordinary. The result is a subtle yet subversive twist on Jim Davis’s bloopy take on the relationship between humans and the cats they live with. I’m really not into Garfield anymore but these hacked cartoons have something wonderfully existential[1] about them. Now I’ve found another source of existential cartooning – the fridge at work.

It appears that the Dilbert merchandising behemoth produced Dilbert fridge magnet kits – like the fridge poetry magnets that we all know but in the form of individual panels of Dilbert cartoons that can be shuffled around. As with fridge poetry the magnets invariably end up being clumped together and ignored while people hunt for milk and Tuesday’s lunch. But while waiting for the shiny espresso machine in the kitchen to expertly steam my half-cap-single-americano[2] I’ve started reading the cartoons as individual panels. It turns out that they’re funny in an entirely different way to a complete cartoon strip.

In an interview some time ago[3] Scot Adams was prompted into some comments on the existential nature of Dilbert.

Reason: Dilbert has emerged as the new workplace Everyman. This is a change from the traditional workplace Everyman, who was often an assembly line worker and whose greatest obstacles were the pace of the machinery and grinding repetition. Dilbert’s biggest problem is basically bosses who keep him from getting his work done.

Adams: It’s about futility and absurdity. But he’s got a different problem, too. If you’re on the assembly line, at least you’ve made something. Whereas Dilbert is like I was in my career: work 17 years and never do anything for anybody. Nothing tangible came out of anything I ever did. There’s a lot of people in that boat. They’re working on something which, if it were ever actually completed, it would be tangible. But nine times out of 10, things get canceled or delayed. You change jobs before it’s finished. You never really get the feeling that you’ve done anything useful. You feel like you’re bluffing all the time. It’s the big difference.

Reason: That’s the existential angst of the knowledge worker?

Adams: Yeah. You have no traction with the real world and you lose any correlation between your efforts, your paycheck, and what you are doing in the world. Those three things are thoroughly unconnected.

While I’m not a regular Dilbert reader I relate to this in a big way. The closest thing that the knowledge working team that I work in produces are internet banking sites hosted on far-away servers and marketing glossies printed on far away presses. These individual panels reflect my working days more closely than the cartoon strip; there are no punchlines in my day, just a series of mundane or absurd panels that blend together into a fridgeful of passing time. Reading Dilbert panels individually more closely reflects the disconnected nature of an average office work day[4] where no build up or payoff is guaranteed.