SLA: Scott Adams, Dilbert Creator
Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, gave the closing keynote at the SLA Annual Conference. He’s pretty funny in real life. His work reminds me a bit of blogging because he uses his corporate jobs for inspiration and has gotten in trouble for drawing cartoons related to specific work things.
In one comic, he quoted one line from a memo written by a vice president at his company. At the time, Dilbert was not running in the local paper. Someone else at the company read the comic, thought it was funny, photocopied it, and distributed it around the company. The vice president was not happy. He schemed with another executive about what to do about Adams. They couldn’t legally just fire him, so they decided to make his job miserable in the hopes that he’d quit. This change, of course, led to more comics and actually helped his comic career.
He shared a lot of reader complaints and the related cartoons with us. As you might imagine, some complaints result in more comics. One is comic with a square dance caller who ran out of calls and faked some, like hit your partner, write bad checks, etc. He got a letter from Callerlab about that. I wanted to see who signed the letter, but Adams didn’t display the signature. I showed the colleague I was sitting next to my Tech Squares badge, since I’m using my dance bag for the conference. I didn’t hear a big enough reaction from the audience to know how many other square dancers might be present.
He said librarians are hot.++
One librarian mentioned after an audit, the large corporation where she works demanded that everyone take down the Dilbert cartoons because they believe they are damaging to the company. She wondered if Adams knew about other similar situations of censorship.
“The day you realize your efforts and your rewards are not related, it really frees up your schedule.”–Scott Adams
