The classic black comedy Office Space debuted in theaters February 19, 1999. It was Mike Judge’s first live-action film. Judge is better known for his animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, but I’ll argue Office Space shows Judge’s versatility, and for me, Office Space will always be his masterpiece.
Inspiration for the movie Office Space
Judge worked two temp jobs in the 1980s in Silicon Valley that inspired the movie, where he worked in a soulless office park with an adjoining soulless chain restaurant, surrounded by soulless yuppies, making just barely enough to afford rent, living next door to a blue collar worker who had much better work-life balance and seemed much happier.
20th Century Fox wanted to make the movie more glamorous, but Judge got it perfect. My friend Steve introduced me to this film in the early 2000s. We were in our 20s, comparable age to the main characters in the film, working for incompetent management that was running our respective employers into the ground, and knowing being laid off was our inevitable fate. We just didn’t know when it would happen.
Mike Judge got us. He understood our plight and our existence. And we took solace in Office Space as we paid our dues and hoped for better days to come. So did millions of other people working in the IT or software industries.
How Office Space was accidentally timeless
Even in being hopelessly dated, the movie is timeless. The main characters are working on the Y2K problem. But even that’s perfect. They gave years of their lives to solving this problem, only to get complaints about how they handled the paperwork, or to get laid off. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at middle managers complaining about how your Jira tickets are formatted, the only thing that’s changed is the paperwork is digital now.
The thing that hasn’t changed is a no-talent ass-clown like Bill Lumbergh micromanaging his workers, taking all the credit for their work, and pocketing a nice bonus for laying them off and holding their positions vacant until after the quarterly results get reported, then filling one or more of the positions after the backlog of work piles up too much.
If you’ve seen the movie and you’ve worked in IT, you’ve called a manager a Lumbergh. Maybe not to their face, but you’ve done it. We’ve all worked for at least one manifestation of Bill Lumbergh. Over the course of a career, you’ll probably work for several.
And even if you haven’t worked in IT, at least some elements of the movie are relatable. White-collar life in general can easily degenerate into that same soulless existence. And we’ve all at least visited a chain restaurant that tried way too hard to be cool but fell far short because it wasn’t natural. And many of us worked in one before eventually moving into office jobs that may not have proved much of an upgrade.
The Characters
The characters in Office Space are what made the film. It was not a star-studded cast but it didn’t need to be, because the characters were so relatable. And most of them were brilliantly portrayed too.
Peter Gibbons
Peter Gibbons is an unhappy software engineer played by Ron Livingston. He’s unhappy with his job, his work-life balance, his relationships, pretty much everything. He’s also an example of failing upward, which is something we’ve all seen in office environments.
Michael Bolton
Michael Bolton is another software engineer, played by MAD TV alumnus David Herman. Bolton is a capable but unappreciated software engineer who resembles Bill Gates with a better haircut and deals with his frustrations by listening to gangsta rap. Sharing a name with a pop singer provides a bit of a subplot.
Samir Nagheenanajar
Samir Nagheenanajar, portrayed by Ajay Naidu, is a software engineer born in Jordan. He craves job security and hates that Americans can’t (or won’t) pronounce his name right. I can relate.
Milton Waddams
Milton Waddams, portrayed by Stephen Root, is an introverted and meek office worker with the thankless job of sorting papers. He mumbles a lot, mostly to himself, and has unusually strong opinions about staplers. The other workers alternate between ignoring and mistreating him. Milton’s mistreatment provides another subplot.
I would say most typical IT workers can find elements of themselves in Peter, Michael, Samir, or Milton, if not all four of them. They are all caricatures exaggerated to a degree for comedic effect, but relatable.
Tom Smykowski
Portrayed by Richard Riehle, Tom Smykowski is a cynical middle-aged product manager living in constant fear of losing his job. He’s deliberately an unremarkable character but delivers one of the best lines of the movie. He also sets up more than one subplot.
Bill Lumbergh
Portrayed by Gary Cole, Bill Lumbergh is the soulless vice president of the software company most of the characters work for. Somehow Cole manages to embody all of the worst elements of all of the incompetent bosses with poor intentions we’ve all had.
Bob and Bob
Portrayed by John C. McGinley and Paul Willson, Bob and Bob are two middle-aged, out-of-touch consultants Lumbergh brought in to help the company downsize and reorganize. I started out my career like Peter, Michael and Samir. I now fear I’m too much like Bob and Bob. But at least I didn’t turn into Lumbergh.
Lawrence
Brilliantly portrayed by Diedrich Bader, Lawrence is Peter’s next door neighbor. He works in construction and is crude and unkempt. But his life provides the perfect foil to Peter. On the surface his life situation appears no better than Peter’s, yet he is much happier.
Joanna
Portrayed by Jennifer Aniston to give the move star power, Joanna provides a love interest and accountability for Peter. Joanna is the one who points out that what Peter is doing is wrong. But even though she was the biggest star in the film, the career character actors surrounding her stole the show.
Legacy
Office Space wasn’t a hit, because Fox had no idea how to promote it and gave up on it way too soon. But it became a cult classic once it was released to cable movie channels and to home video. Critics generally gave it middling or slightly positive reviews. But audiences who could relate to it really loved it.
Last year, I joined a Zoom call at work where someone had a picture of Bob and Bob from Office Space as his Zoom background. I came off mute and said, “So what would you say…. you do here?” and I could immediately tell who’d seen the movie and who hadn’t. More than half the people on the call laughed. A few people on the call had horrified looks on their faces that subsided once they figured out I was quoting a movie.
Also, the chain restaurant in the movie, Chotchkie’s, bore more than a passing resemblance to the real-life chain TGI Friday’s. After Office Space came out, TGI Friday’s employees got tired of hearing jokes about the buttons on their uniforms and the chain stopped requiring employees to wear buttons as part of its dress code.
The red stapler did not exist as a product at the time of the movie. But intense demand caused Swingline to add a red stapler to its product line. I saw one at Office Max last week and couldn’t help but mumble “my stapler!” to myself as I walked past.
So that wraps up this retrospective on Office Space, the classic movie released Feb. 19, 1999. Make sure you say hi to Lumbergh for me! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to work on my big idea. This product that adds more flair to Jira tickets is my ticket to making a million dollars.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I bought that red stapler. It’s okay. Solid but jams up sometimes.