FILM · 1999 · USA
Office Space
27 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (27)
- #001
The iconic red stapler that Milton covets was created for the film by the props department. They needed a color bright enough to be visible on screen and chose red. After the film's release, Swingline began receiving requests from customers for a red stapler. The company, which had stopped offering red a few years earlier, decided to start offering the color again.
- #002
Milton was actually based on a former co-worker Mike Judge had worked with during his engineering days. One day Judge went up to his co-worker and asked how he was doing. The co-worker began explaining how he was going to quit his job because he had to move his desk too many times.
- #003
A scene was cut from the film showing Lumbergh reacting angrily to his Porsche being towed. Gary Cole said he was glad the scene was cut, because he felt the character of Lumbergh should always remain in the same emotional state.
- #004
In real life, TGI Fridays stopped requiring its waiters to wear "flair" because of this film.
- #005
At the time, all the cast members were relatively unknown, and 20th Century Fox agreed to produce the film only if Mike Judge cast at least one famous name. Jennifer Aniston was cast as Joanna, which allowed Judge to cast each of the other, lesser-known actors.
- #006
After its poor box office performance, the film gained cult status on video. Mike Judge said that more people have talked to him about this film than about any other project he has worked on. Judge was offered the chance to make a sequel, "Office Space 2: Still Renting." Judge said he did not want to go through that experience again because he had suffered enough the first time.
- #007
As of October 2018, the term "ass-clown" was officially entered into Webster's Dictionary, with a citation to writer Mike Judge, who first used the term in "Office Space."
- #008
Ajay Naidu improvised the moment in which his character break-dances at Peter's house, because he was break-dancing with his friends in his spare time while shooting the film. Paul Wilson improvised the "Naga, Naga, not gonna work here anymore" line.
- #009
Mike Judge hated the film's marketing campaign, especially its poster, and believes it was one of the reasons the film failed to succeed at the box office. For the film's home video release, he was able to persuade the studio to add the character Milton, peeking out from behind the man covered in Post-It notes, to the poster.
- #010
Gary Cole and other Office Space cast members reunited in November 2022 for a new Black Friday commercial for Walmart.
- #011
Stan is Joanna's boss at Chotchkie's. He is listed in the credits as "William King."
- #012
The film is generally based on Mike Judge's animated short films titled "Milton," which aired in the early 1990s on Saturday Night Live (1975) and MTV's Liquid Television (1991).
- #013
The script initially described Michael Bolton as a "no-singing asshole," but the line was changed because he claimed he did not sing his own music. David Herman came up with "no-talent ass clown" instead.
- #014
Mike Judge said the idea of destroying the printer came to him during the frustration he experienced while writing the script for Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).
- #015
The studio wanted Matt Damon for the role of Peter, but Mike Judge felt the role required "star energy." While he thought Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson should not audition for the role of Lawrence, Kate Hudson was considered to play Joanna.
- #016
When Lumbergh holds a meeting with the Bobs to discuss the layoffs, they pull out his personnel file. In the photo stapled to the file, he is wearing the same shirt, tie and suspenders he wore while sitting at the table with them.
- #017
According to Richard Riehle, his first day on set in the role of Tom Smykowski was in the character's full-body cast. Riehle said the production did not have a Special Effects Coordinator on set, which meant the emergency room had to help Riehle create his full-body cast. Riehle said it took two hours to put on and one hour to take off.
- #018
All the cars have fictional generic US license plates that avoid naming a specific state. However, they imitate the Texas license plate, Mike Judge's home state.
- #019
Both Bobs wear medical identification bracelets on their right wrists.
- #020
Jennifer Aniston shot her scenes in two weeks.
- #021
At Tom's (Richard Riehle) party, Drew (Greg Pitts) tells Peter (Ron Livingston) about all the men who have slept with Peter's girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston). Among the people he mentions is the film's editor, David Rennie.
- #022
During the famous printer-destruction scene, Peter never actually strikes the machine.
- #023
The directory where the bank software virus is stored is "C:/LR427/Virus_CDEF". CDEF is a virus dating back to 1990 that affected Macintosh computers. It infected desktop files and could cause system crashes, abnormal behavior and printing problems. It is now obsolete and mostly harmless. It should be noted that "C:\" relates to MS-DOS and MS-Windows.
- #024
Although it is not stated directly, Lumbergh's demotion following his meeting with the Bobs is implied by the change on the parking space sign.
- #025
The notorious "P. C. Load Letter" error that confuses Michael Bolton is a message indicating that the printer does not recognize that letter-sized (8.5x11 inch) paper has run out or been reloaded. "P. C." stands for "Paper Cartridge." Older HP Laserjet printers commonly display this error. The error also appears when trying to print a non-letter-sized project onto letter-sized paper.
- #026
Peter states that he (and possibly the other programmers) are trying to fix the "year 2000 problem" in Initech's banking software. Commonly known as "Y2K" or the "millennium bug," the problem was a real issue addressed by many companies in the late 1990s. Peter correctly explains that the problem stems from a space-saving shortcut used by programmers (mostly in the 1960s and '70s) in which the year portion of date-related data was stored as two digits (for example, "75" instead of "1975"). The expectation was that software written this way would likely fail catastrophically when the year changed from 1999 ("99") to 2000 ("00"). However, largely thanks to the massive efforts of the software and finance industries, most of the problems were resolved before the deadline, and the turn of the millennium passed with few issues.
- #027
In 2006, an advertisement for the computer game World of Warcraft was released using an altered scene from Office Space. When Bill comes to talk to Peter, Peter is playing World of Warcraft instead of Tetris. The game's box and installation CDs are also arranged on his desk.
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