I've gotten about 15,000 messages from readers since I started including my e-mail address in the strip. Many people ask the same questions. So as a public service (sprinkled with self-serving promotional bits) I thought I'd answer them this way.
I always wished that series had made it through the editorial net. But Dilbert gets another shot at it this summer when he meets a woman named Liz. Liz will either take Dilbert's innocence or be killed by a meteor. I haven't penned the ending yet. I'm going to monitor my e-mail and see how the sentiment flows after Liz gets introduced. There will be a two month lag while I decide her fate.
Any opinions?
(If Dilbert gets lucky, I'll draw the strip one day this summer with his necktie hanging flat. That's how you'll know.)
There are persistent rumors that I work (or worked) at HP, DEC, IBM, AT&T, Boeing, Honeywell and a dozen other companies.
At IBM, one employee searched the company directory looking for me and turned up three Scott Adamss. (My guess is that the careers of those other Scott Adamss are not going too well.)
An employee of Mass Mutual was so sure that I worked at her company under an assumed name, or had a spy there, that she researched all of my past comics looking for clues. She noticed a dinosaur named Dawn in a 1990 strip and a restaurant sign named "Scaparotti's" in the background of another strip. Then she found a Dawn Scaparotti in the Mass Mutual employee directory and wrote a memo to her asking if she was the spy. She isn't, but Dawn is my good friend, and both the dinosaur and the restaurant were in fact named in her honor.
The truth: I work at Pacific Bell in San Ramon, California. Before that, I spent 7 years at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco.
I work in a laboratory that develops ISDN applications. (ISDN is a technical standard for sending lots of data over phone lines digitally.) So I spend my time figuring out what hardware and software the customers need to take advantage of Pacific Bell's ISDN lines. And I run Pacific Bell's BBS and manage the data on our Gopher server on the Internet.
But my background is a B.A. in economics and an MBA (mostly finance) from Berkeley. My technical training is all on-the-job, and frankly I usually don't know what I'm doing. But I get to use a battery powered screwdriver and I can surf the Internet as a legitimate part of my job.
In previous jobs I've also pretended to be a software programmer. Back in my Crocker Bank days, I lied and said I could program in order to get a higher-paying job that required it. Then I quickly signed up for a programming class at night. Nerd that I am, I fell in love with it and programmed on my own time for years, developing a string of amazingly bad and commercially unsuccessful software products. But damn, it was fun.
This leads me to the next question:
Actually, I don't know why the necktie turns up like that. Dilbert started as a doodle -- a composite of my co-workers -- and the tie evolved. I don't remember thinking anything about it except that it looks right that way. Maybe it's a metaphor for his lack of control over even the simple things in his environment. Maybe he's just glad to see you. You decide.
My advice to all aspiring cartoonists who would compete with me is to get the blow to the head during childhood (which is also traumatic) then use hypnosis to uncover the memories of your alien abduction. It's that easy.
If you want to flame me personally, my address is still
scottadams@aol.com and I read all the messages. But I may not be able to respond to all of them.The frequency of the Dilbert Newsletter is approximately "whenever I feel like it", which should be about two or three times a year.
Scott Adams scottadams@aol.com