Office Space

While I was packing to leave for Chicago and ALA this evening, I was watching one of the funniest comedies of the last twenty years, Office Space. If you've never seen it, hie yourself down to the local library and borrow it or put it on your Netflix list or use it as one of your 12 initial free selections when you join your DVD club. Mike Judge, the creator King of the Hill (motto: "We ain't the Simpsons but we're dang good in our own right"), directed this amazingly subversive look at life in a high tech company at the fin de siecle. If you have seen it, and you happen to be in management wherever you work, do you ever sometimes get the creepy feeling that you are behaving like Bill Lumbergh, Gary Cole's deliciously slimy character in this movie?

The movie reminded me again that the media take a dim view of bosses. Think of Mr. Dithers. Or Dilbert's pointy haired boss. Or Gale Gordon's "Mr. Mooney" on the old Lucy Show. Sometimes I hear myself saying things that would make a motivational poster blush. Other times, I'm absolutely thunderstruck by the brilliance of the people I work with, and wonder why they let a palooka like me sit in on their meetings. It make me think that sometimes the media are really over-generous to bosses (present company excluded, of course, Jay...)