Aside: WTF is with whinging? It’s whining, innit? I’m seeing that G more and more, and it bugs me! And I’m not going to whing about it, I’m going to f’ing whine, geddit???
Whinge is actually the British English version.
What the shit is that? I thought it was whining or something.
Bly me! That’s fooked!
Yeah. If you do a forum search, you’ll notice that it’s only used by people from the UK or Australia, or by Tom Chick.
EDIT: Grammatical anomaly.
I wasn’t aware that it was even possible to be from Tom Chick. Is that a Zeus/Athena kind of thing?
… thus Tom Chick smote the mighty Kraken with his beret, and the Quarter to Three community erupted from its innards.
Mark Asher was playing Nintendo or something.
Nobody finds it funny that the IT firm is named Nutzwerk? :(
We had one of those horrid printers in our office. That line made me a huge fan of this movie instantly because I’d uttered a variation of it so many fucking times in the mid-90s.
And, like the movie, we participated in one serious-ass trashing of that piece of shit once we upgraded to a printer that actually displays understandable error messages. Man, that was cathartic.
That may be the greatest legacy of the movie. I’m sure there are white collar professionals around the world just salivating at the idea of printer obsolence so they can go unleash their pent up rage. There’s nothing quite so satisfying to an impotent desk jockey as taking a baseball bat to the most malevolent of PC peripherals.
The truly ironic thing is I now have the trusty ancient HP LaserJet whatever, with its crappy deteriorated paper detection system intact, with the apparently random PCLoadPlainLetter error messages, at home.
And now, I often think of bringing it back into work, because the crap we replaced it with is much worse. Those old printers are like Russian tanks: they never work that well, but they can be fixed with duct tape and a screwdriver. And the ink and drum come in one package for something like $25 a throw.
Modern shit basically has to be thrown in the trash or sent away. We have some commodity Brother printer stamped out in one go, and it is obscene. It feels like it’s made of the same material they make blister packs with, the toner costs $70 a shot, and the “drum” is sold separately, has to be replaced every 25,000 pages, and turns out to include about two thirds of the printer’s entire mechanical assembly.
One a not completely unrelated tangent, I spent a semester working the bar in a student pub. The cash register at the place was named Omron. It was older than me, broke twice a night on average, the control receipts had to be rolled up by hand, and printing receipts at all took so long I could probably do a better job by hand. Eventually it got to the point where the workers there had a collection for a new cash register just so we could get rid of it. By the end of the semester a new register was bought and Omron found a new job as a foot rest for our economist. Not quite as satisfying as taking a bat to it, but it had a certain sense of poetic justice. Fight the machines!
I don’t believe it took me so long to watch this filem. Utter genius. My fiance thought something was wrong because she walking in five minutes after I’d watched it and my eves were still watering from laughing that hard.
I don’t think I’ve ever related to a work of art as much as this.
Dilbert - 1988
And just to fill out the timeline…
The Drew Carey Show - 1995
Twelve years ago we had an Office Space thread. Twenty years after the movie’s release, we have this excellent interview with a huge number of the people involved and you should definitely read it.
Klopper: “Bob Slydell.” Just the character names give you an idea of what they should look like.
McGinley: I wanted my shirt to be a size too small because those guys always wear a wardrobe that’s a size too small. Like, maybe they were athletes and now they’re fat fucks and they’re still wearing the fucking ties from high school. I wanted that. I wanted those braided, leather suspenders, which just makes me sick. And I wanted those glasses. I gave [Mindy] that input the week before and I go down to the fitting Monday night to work Tuesday morning and everything she did, she just crushed it. You don’t have to open your mouth and illustrate and demonstrate as much when the wardrobe and the props speak for you.
Bader: We decided on the mullet and then I really wanted the mustache. When I was a kid I really worshipped the album Brothers and Sisters by the Allman Brothers, and when you open it up and just look at the old vinyl, there was a picture on the inside with the whole band, and I just really wanted to be in that picture. So that’s how we decided on the look. It was hard to laugh in that mustache because it was really glued on tightly to my face. Lawrence doesn’t smile a lot because the mustache would have popped off.
Root: The tie on [Milton], it’s just filled with horrendous stains and it smelled. You knew that he never changed, he was not a cleanly person, so you just went by that stuff.
Cole: I had exactly those glasses, not even that long before we did it. I had those big fucking aviators. Early ’90s.
Tears in my eyes laughing…
I read that article this morning. Such a delight.
I saw it posted elsewhere here earlier but haven’t been able to finish. Great article halfway through though!
Could it be?
HOLY SHIT WHAT