I’m not a gigantic fan of Dilbert. I enjoy the strip, I almost never miss it, and I think it actually provides some valuable lessons for my son Eric, who’s a fan of it. But for me it’s a bit impersonal. Which is, I know, the way things are supposed to be in the workplace. But still, like Beetle Bailey, I don’t feel a personal connection to Dilbert the way I do to Calvin and Hobbes, or Peanuts or, until a few years ago, Doonesbury.
It’s been a while since I checked Scott Adams’ blog, so a tip of the toupee to friend “Tom Tastewar” for pointing out this item.
As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis. It happens to people in my age bracket.
Frankly, at first I thought it was a put-on. It seemed too strange and ironic, because Adams draws Dilbert without a mouth.
Immediately I thought of idiot former disk jockey Rush Limbaugh’s deafness, which turned out to be induced by prescription drug abuse. But Adams seems to be sincere, so I’ll take him at his word. I guess I feel a bit embarrassed that I didn’t already know about this!
Thanks for doing the follow-up for me, Bill! And thanks too, for using HTML for that link! The first place I ever saw what is today HTML was at The Westfield Evening News, way back in 1979.
The raw news feeds from AP and UPI had the tags embedded, and everything we wrote had the tags added by the computer — a computer than ran on dual 8-inch floppy diskettes! The markup tags were used by the Compugraphic typesetting machine to format the output, which appeared in the form of wet strips of photographic paper.
Here’s the Yahoo news story on Scott Adams…!
I read Adams’ blog fairly regularly, and can at the least back up that he mentioned this once before quite some time ago. I remember in fact I printed out the post for Laurie and she hadn’t heard about it either. In the months between then and now it hasn’t been mentioned so it certainly does’t sound like any big set-up.
I’ve never heard of this disorder before. I sincerely hope they did all the usual CT and MRI scans of his brain, as some tumors can affect your speech! Adams admits there is a strong psychological component to the disorder. The number one fear (when polled) of most people is public speaking. I myself don’t mind it; I had to take several classes in it when I trained to be a teacher. My school, Framingham State College, had an excellent teacher training program and their number one priority was making sure the teachers they turned out appeared poised and confident in front of the classroom.
I certainly hope Scott Adams gets better! And yes, it IS weird that Dilbert has no mouth; one can’t HELP but make a connection between the two!