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For the past two years, the prestigious National Engineers Week Committee-made up of such big names as Martin Marietta
CEO Norman Augustine, Rockwell chairman Donald Beall and Tellabs president Michael Birck-has invited a mere applications engineer to join them in the annual celebration, which unfolds this week.
One is reminded of a fox being invited to a chicken coop. The engineer is Scott Adams, who makes a living taking potshots at management in his wildly popular "Dilbert" comic strip.
Perhaps this association of Adams with the top brass of American corporations has made him feel a tad guilty. Witness this latest jab:
Dilbert: I can't decide if I should stay with engineering or pursue a career in management. In my heart I'm an engineer, but I hear a voice calling me to the dark side.
Dogbert (peering behind Dilbert's couch at a devil-like character called "Phil from Heck," who carries a giant spoon instead of a trident): I found your problem.
Now seen in more than 400 newspapers around the country, the flat-topped, bespectacled, computer-chained, cubicle-confined Dilbert character has given engineers an exposure to the public that they've rarely enjoyed before.
Of course, there's good exposure. And there's naked-butt exposure.
Environmental inspector: I'm checking the building for environmental hazards. Have you been feeling tired, nervous and disoriented?
Dilbert: You've just described my entire career.
Adams concedes that "my portrayal of engineers is certainly not positive."
Bewildered, powerless, swaying before the winds of corporate whims and fancy, Dilbert is whipsawed by managers, human-resources people, lawyers and other forms of ink-ubated life, finding refuge only in front of his display tube.
Come to think of it, that describes the '90s Everyman. Adams's frequent targets see themselves as victims as well as perpetrators. Bosses have bosses. Marketers buy as well as sell. And everyone but everyone endures the winds of change blowing around their offices that amounts to nothing more than hot air. The universality of "Dilbert" accounts for the strip's tremendous success in just five years.
Adams estimates that 70 percent of his ideas come from readers' e-mail. The other 30 percent of...