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"This is about taking the crazy cat person's enthusiastic aesthetic...you should do something very cool and totally overwhelming with your cube space. Make it the biggest something--whatever it s that you're into: stars, Bollywood, Charles Bukowski, UFOs, Sophia Loren, Dr. Seuss, surfing, Andy Warhol, knitting, Nikola Tesla, fancy hats, expensive boots, clowns."

That's Jeffrey Yamaguchi describing the most obsessive, anti-social ways to decorate your cubicle in his new book, Working For The Man. This week he released a series of office-related videos for the handbook, including this cringe-inducing feature :

Yamaguchi's book teaches creative types around the corporate world how escape the mind-numbing monotony of a dayjob. This week he's our special guest on my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
I'm sure this kind of book requires a special kind of revision. I'm sure your first draft had a much lower joke and comic ratio than the final product How did you revise your first draft into the hilarious final product? How did you add the layers of jokes and cartoons on top of your original draft?

Jeffrey Yamaguchi:
The humor, I don’t know – there were not painstaking revisions to the jokes. I think maybe because this book was written in pieces over many years, that probably helped. Continue reading...

The Rules in the book, for example, were written up over many years. I didn’t just bang those out in a few weeks. So perhaps that helped me avoid having to keep going back and trying to make things more biting or humorous.
 
And in terms of the drawings, those were done by Danny Jock. I pitched him my concepts over coffee and via email, and then he worked his magic.

I really dig his sensibility and style, and just kept telling him, do your Danny Jockian thing. Danny had written some really funny pieces for the workingfortheman.com website a few years back, so it just made perfect sense to ask him to contribute drawings to the book. He’s a fantastic artist.