THE DOG WAS TELLING DILBERT WHAT TO DO, DUDE

In headier days, I used to indulge myself in private pity-fests for some of my co-workers. These were the folks who had managed to get themselves into highly specialized, and even more highly paid, jobs or even professions that took up almost all their waking days. Something seemed missing from their lives. I could tell just by looking at the expressions on their faces. My heart would bleed for them, and sometimes my visible suffering almost cost me my job.

For example, I once worked in a position in which I had both the freedom and the permission to actually read a book on the job–as I waited for $400-an-hour lawyers or their diligent paralegals to get Fed-X packages to me to process and ship. Eyebrows would raise whenever I was caught reading something along the lines of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man or C. Wright Mills’ White Collar.

I’d get comments, too: "What are you wasting your time on junk like that?" they’d ask.

Sometimes, I’d come off with a sanctimonious and sarcastic quip like, "An idle mind is the devil’s workshop." It would get a laugh. But nothing would really change.

Of course, the only ideas raised by these perplexing exchanges seemed to be my own. Why, for example, are these people paid so much more than I am, I’d ask myself, when it’s obvious the only things they seem to know have something to do with making money or accomplishing the tasks related to their employment? Shouldn’t it be the ones who actually have lives of their own who get paid more? Why should people be paid small fortunes if they don’t have lives to spend them on?

Some of these people sported huge mansions in Lakewood or on Swiss Avenue. But they didn’t spend any time in them except when they were asleep. I wondered: Why are these folks spending millions on what amount to "crash pads" when they could spend about $500 a month on a cheap motel room on Harry Hines and then donate the rest to a worthwhile charity like the SPCA–where the big money could actually do some good in giving dogs the homes they deserve?

I’m not kidding. I actually thought these things. I was young and innocent. Slowly, however, I realized that, at least from the outside looking in, big corporations seem to hold employees who have undeveloped personal lives at a premium. It took me awhile to find out why.

For the answers, let’s flash forward about five years. After the short tribulation of a stint of unemployment in the mid-1990s, I’d landed a temporary job as a courier for the executive offices of one of America’s largest and most prestigious accounting firms. All I had to do, really, was walk around–delivering faxes and documents, and copying important papers. But remember? I’d been reading all sorts of wild-eyed books, and my eyes were open, the scales had fallen off them, and I couldn’t help but look at what I was seeing with eyes that were all my own. In a bush-league way, I was a little like the Biblical Joseph wandering the Pharaoh’s home offices.

This extremely indulgently decorated space housed this accounting firm’s international consultancy training center. Hundreds of entry-level accounting consultants from around the world had been gathered to be trained in the ways and means of financial advice-giving. Yet I noticed something odd about these youngish employees. Paid high salaries nevertheless, and dressed like clothes horses, these people didn’t seem to know who they were.

I remember a telling incident when I happened upon a consultant-trainee who was smiling at the Dilbert cartoon on his daily calendar.

"Must be funny," I said.

With a perplexed expression, he turned and stared into my eyes. "I don’t get this stuff," he said. "I mean, I got this calendar as a gift, but most of the time, these cartoons kind of escape me. Like, why’s this guy talking to a dog? What’s that supposed to mean?"

To be honest, this guy was being honest. He didn’t have a clue. Neither did I. How on earth, in other words, could a simple cartoon about working in the white collar world be so hard for this guy to fathom? After all, he was being paid $80,000 a year and was hence better than me. Regardless, he was pretending to be amused!

Really freaked out, I held my breath for at least a week before I asked my immediate supervisor, one of the chief executive’s managerial assistants, about this. "Oh, you see a lot of that around here," she said. "Our human resources department actually looks for prospective consultants who haven’t fully matured as people. A lot of these people are exceptionally easy to mold into the corporate mind-set. They’re a lot easier to train. A lot of corporate molding has to do with teaching people what to think."

Oh. So that was it. One short conversation explained a lot of things. It explained, for one, why so many of these consultancy trainees based their status as individuals on the quality of their clothing or the cut of their hair or the images they projected. It explained, too, why London’s Economist magazine had labeled this firm’s staff "androids." They seemed cut from the same cloth, die-stamped, brainwashed, under the thumb of The Man.

These aren’t comforting recollections for a man who values his ability to think for himself, but recently The Dallas Morning News featured opinions posited by a Baylor University dean, Thomas S. Hibbs, that bemoaned the dearth of "humanizing education" in our nation’s institutions of higher learning. I couldn’t have agreed more with the man’s arguments, but I also couldn’t have helped but remember my experiences in the white collar world.

When it comes down to the bottom dollar, an education that liberates the mind could also endanger the hierarchy of rules and values that drives Big Business in America. If too many people start to think about what they’re participating in, Big Business could suffer. Politics as we know it could suffer. The status quo could suffer. It’s much better in the long run for Big Business to continue to hire people who have learned in college how to do a job but have not learned to think about what that job means in the real world. Thank God we’re safe. Thank God we've got Big Business to take care of us.