Casual Day Has Gone Too Far

Rating:
Summary: Another Dilbert classic!
Review: Another great book in the Dilbert lineup. Although I had already seen all of the cartoons, either in my calendar or the paper, they make me laugh everytime I read them! I think Scott Adams is a spy at my company and everyone else's!!

Rating:
Summary: Dilbert rules!
Review: Do you like Dilbert? If the answer is yes, then buy this book! If the answer is no, then wait till you get a windfall, and buy this book! It's funny, but of course, Dilbert can be an acquired taste.

Rating:
Summary: A good collection of Dilbert comic strips
Review: How would Dogbert review "Casual Day Has Gone Too Far", the ninth Dilbert collection? By making up a bunch of stuff and attributing it to other people. Dilbert fans (like you) will want to own a copy to complete their collections. Dilbert haters - like Norman Solomon (look him up in the Amazon search engine) - should buy several copies of this book just to burn them. And Scott Adams should pay *me* for writing this review.

"Casual Day Has Gone Too Far" starts out with Dogbert's explanation of Leadership (immunity to logic and coffee). His handy reference guide to types of bosses follows a few pages later. This book also introduces a new character - Tina the brittle technical writer. It includes one of my personal favorites - the public apology for selling a keyboard missing the letter 'Q'. Finally, while the last comic in the book may not seem obvious, you'll get it in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Dilbert
Review: If you like Dilbert, you'll like the book. Beyond that, I don't know what else to say...

Rating:
Summary: Marvelous Catbert Intro
Review: In this book, Catbert makes his first appearance as HR director of Dilbert's company. His casual day policy is insane, and so, casual day will always be a strange day. Dilbert knows the feeling of going to work on a casual day, and wondering "Has it gone too far?" Besides the histerical Catbert jokes, there's jokes on company takeovers, futile projects, team building excersises, and much more! So join corporate America's truly relatable office crew in these insane misadventures of white collar workplace life.

Rating:
Summary: Classic office humor
Review: Scott Adam's hilarious Dilbert series captures the essence of the cubicle office lifestyle of the 90's. This book is jammed packed with reprints of his Dilbert comic strip, and is sure to make you laugh at the antics of his co-workers and sidekick Dogbert.

Rating:
Summary: Witty commentary on the corporate rat race.
Review: This collection of hundreds of Dilbert reprints provides anybody with a cubicle view or anyone who'd like to know the ins and outs of the buisness world with a collection of insightful comics. These comics follow the odd world of Dilbert, his dog, Dogbert, and a host of colorful characters including Ratbert and Wally help show just how zany corporate life can be. Also, it shows that although buisness is professional stuff, it sure doesn't look like it from any realistic perspective.

Rating:
Summary: A classic Dilbert book!
Review: This is a classic Dilbert book - it is hilarious and very funny.

It will always be on my bookshelf to grab whenever I need it - this is a definite 'must-have' for anyone who works in a cubicle-type of job, or who does work in general for that matter. I am a student and Dilbert has always appealed to me - and this book is no exception!

Rating:
Summary: Twice as true and half as funny...
Review: When I worked at my old college, our dean decided one day that the modern corporate culture idea of having a casual Friday would be a good innovation. A few months later, he looked about in consternation, and remarked that he thought casual day had gone too far (I have my own opinions on this, considering most people had not in fact become very casual at all, and charity requires me to refrain from commenting upon what I think was really at issue). Shortly after this exchange, one of my book clubs offered 'Casual Day Has Gone Too Far', a collection of Dilbert cartoons, which had become the object of break-room bulletin boards and interoffice memo attachments around the country.

The book has a brief introduction (Scott Adams recounts in it that he felt cheated once upon buying a buying guide which had no introduction, hence, he felt required to include one), which includes email instructions for subscribing to the online Dilbert newsletter, which is published 'whenever I feel like it', according to Adams.

Then, of course, we jump immediately into 'the good stuff', the columns.

The sociology, psychology, and even the sex appeal of Dilbert -- all of these have been variously explained and lauded or decried in other places, so I shall not go into detail here, save to say that there is something very true about the representations found in this small column that resonates with anyone in any way familiar with corporate America. Of one political satire in Britain, a columnist once commented that with regard to its reflection of reality, that 'reality is twice as true but half as funny' -- this dictum can likewise be applied to Dilbert.

The first column starts out with Dogbert explaining leadership.

(Fair warning -- how does one adequately describe a cartoon column in words, without pictures? Forgive me if this analysis becomes something less than the actual columns.)

Dogbert explains that leaders start their careers as morons, drawn to meetings like moths to porchlights, with a high bladder-to-brain ratio (which makes enduring meetings easier on both counts), and they succeed because, being untempted by logic or coffee, they continue along the path of promotion until the reach their true skill level (often, that of recognising others, underlings all, with true ability) -- and Dogbert's conclusion is that leadership is the way of removing morons from the productive flow.

Adams' wit is scathing, unmerciful, and has no 'sacred cows'. He parodies all levels of the production chain, from the lowest to the highest, often showing the inverse relation of skill to responsibility, authority to intelligence, productivity to reward. He demonstrates the imperviousness of all levels of the corporation to logic. He likes to invent corporate-based 'lingo' which, if it appeared in an actual memo (and some of this actually does appear in the real world) it would most likely be taken seriously.

With regard to casual days, this has been seen as the evil plot of HR Director Catbert. Alice determines that 'it's just another sadistic human resources plot to make people quit.' Others decided that they loved casual Friday, because 'it combines unattractive with unprofessional while diminishing neither.'

Finally, Dilbert shows the golden road to visibility in the large anonymous corporate structure.

Dilbert: I significantly increased my visibility at work today, Dogbert. Yesterday I was invisible to my management. But today I am known by all.
Dogbert: You screwed up, huh?
Dilbert: Ooh yeah. Big time.

And so it goes. Perhaps it is not only casual day that has gone too far.