The Office Is a Beautiful Place When Everyone Else Works from Home (2021)

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The Office Is a Beautiful Place When Everyone Else Works from Home is the 49th Dilbert collection of daily and Sunday comics, each fully colorized, dated, and ready for your enjoyment however you choose to consume them. Spanning January 1st, 2020 through November 29th, 2020, this tidy set gives fans of Scott Adams’ 30+ year-old comic roughly 140 pages of new office hi-jinks and the depressing realization that even working from home can’t shield you from the worst pandemic of them all: the pandemic of stupidity.

The world has changed significantly since last year’s Dilbert collection, Eagerly Awaiting Your Irrational Response, and nowhere is this more evident than the latest accoutrements to the cast – masks. That’s right: the Covid-19 pandemic has come to comics, even influencing the name of this very collection. Much like the mundane office dreariness and insipidness the comic mocks, you can’t escape it.

Those looking to escape the inescapable Covid should take solace that, while the nasty virus does make its presence felt in these funnies, it’s mostly through visual cues, though we do get the expected assortment of now-familiar terms like quarantining, social-distancing, contract tracing, and everything else that’s helped inconvenience and frustrate much of the world over the past two years.

While most of the world would consider a global pandemic a total disaster, it’s a disaster of epic proportions tailor made for the likes of Wally. Adams does his best to squeeze comedy from a subject we’d all rather forget about, but laughter is better than crying.

Apart from that, however, it’s mostly business as usual for the office crew. Which, of course, means endless brain-draining meetings, managerial nonsense, marketing madness, toxic coworkers, and just about everything else that makes the daily grind a literal thing. Once again, Adams has tapped into the never-ending supply of the world’s most reliable resource – stupidity.

So what can Dilbert fans expect? Plenty. Can watching Ted Talks actually make you smarter? Is “social media poisoning” a thing? Do we really need a “sciencesplainer” to help explain science (in a condescending way)? Is the pointy-haired boss a white supremacist? Does it matter when all it takes is an accusation to make allegations seem true? It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him. Almost. Adams even sneaks a little of his own philosophy about “staying in your lane” to quell the less ambitious.

The Office Is a Beautiful Place When Everyone Else Works from Home feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially during these trying times. And if there’s anything we need a lot more of these days, it’s a few chuckles and guffaws to help ease the ongoing pandemic pains (at the expense of others). If nothing else, this should slot nicely right beside your other 48 Dilbert collections. After all, misery loves company.