August 23, 2002
It's always risky for me to talk about my day-job here, because there are folks at work who read the strip. One of them sits in the office nextdoor to mine, and likes the strip enough to have bought a T-shirt, for which I'm grateful. The guy in the other office on the other side of mine does NOT read Schlock Mercenary, and was just promoted to Vice President of the largest engineering organization within the company.Thus, within a statistical sample of the two people physically closest to me at work, not reading Schlock Mercenary is an indicator of success.
It gets worse. The wild-and-crazy product manager who inspired the "Reverend Theo Fobius" character confessed to me that he has not read Schlock Mercenary in six months. This means he has lots of catching up to do. Oh, and he was just promoted to Director of Product Management. Stop reading Schlock, succeed at Novell...
(You know what would be really funny? It would be really funny if there was another re-organization, and Howard the Product Manager ended up reporting directly to [I won't mention his name, so let's pretend it's Ted] this newly promoted director. I'd have to either kill off the Reverend, or promote him to Captain or something.)
Let's turn this around: once upon a time, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, was approached by his boss at his day job and was told "don't put a character in your strip that makes fun of me." Adams did so, and within a year had left his day job, and was working full-time as a cartoonist where he made more than my neighbor the VP, my neighbor the Schlock-shirt-fan, my friend not-Ted the Director, and me put together.
Here's hoping that kind of thing happens to me. Being filthy rich is nice, because when you're filthy poor you can't afford hot showers often. Besides, I think Dilbert is funny.