Unlike my puzzlement over today’s Get Fuzzy, today’s Dilbert is brilliant! bravo!
Plus, how did Scott Adams sneak that past the censors?!
I get Dilbert in two papers. The Murky News printed another one, my local paper (where the editors are a few serifs short of a character set), did. I had the same reaction as you.
Is it a normal North American practice for employees to have individual heaters? Aren’t the office buildings already heated?
It wouldn’t be the first time. Wasn’t there a strip several years ago where Dogbert, having been hired as a consultant, changed the company’s name to “Uranus-Hertz?”
Yes the buildings are heated, but different area can be cold. My second to last job, I shared a room on an outside wall that was added after the buiding was first built. Outside it in the shop it was toasty but our little room was artic like.
We needed an electric space heater to keep from freezing in the dead of winter.
They have been rampant among cubicle-dwellers in many offices in which I have worked. If the building isn’t sufficiently warm enough, they bring in their own heaters. This is frowned upon, since the heaters tend to trip the circuit breakers and thus cause the neighboring computers to shut off.
It is hard to heat a building to suit everyone. So it is often too hot or too cold for people. Often people will put a small space heater under their desks or in the cubicle.
And some people plug them into their computer’s surge protector. Not only is that not good for the computer, but it creates a fire hazard (surge protectors aren’t designed to work with an appliance like a space heater that draws a lot of current).
…“Uranus” jokes… Not funny.
Only someone from Uranus would say that…
Hmm… my “Dilbert” today featured Alice gluing the PHB’s head to a stapler. I guess my paper wimped out on the Uranus joke.
“In order to get rid of those stupid ‘Your anus’ jokes once and for all, we changed the planet’s name . . . to Urectum” - Futurama ( from memory )
Yep - he used a random-word generator that used words from astronomy and electronics. There was an alternate strip provided in case newspapers felt skittish publishing it.
Also, Scott used a variation of the gag in “Dogbert’s Top-Secret Management Handbook” in discussing company mergers and postulated if Hertz Rent-a-Car merged with A.B. Dick Office Supplies they’d be come Hertz Dick circumcisions 
Bwahaha. My company’s building manager the other day sent around yet another email reminding us that personal space heaters and refrigerators were forbidden. I’ve got to pass this one around.
Seems rather silly to censor a joke that is the same premise for the one joke all 8 year olds are guaranteed to know.
How is toilet paper like Star Trek?
They both circle around uranus looking for clingons! 
Another one who hates Uranus jokes. Well… not so much hates, as baffled by. I could name the planets of the solar system before I turned six, but I probably never neard the word “anus” spoken out loud until I was in my 20s (in all likelihood, it was in the context of a Uranus joke, which then had to be explained to me). I don’t see the humor here - the commonly used word for a major planet is vaguely similar to an obscure synonym for asshole? That’s like saying that “California” sounds sorta like the Urdu word for fellatio. Interesting, sure, but not all that funny.
I don’t find Uranus jokes funny either, but you’re severely understating the similarity. The name of a major planet sounds exactly like the word “your” and the clinically correct word for asshole. Vaguely similar? Obscure synonym?
I’m just talking about myself, here. To me the word “anus” is obscure - it never really comes up in conversation, does it? - while the word “Uranus” isn’t. Diffirent associative world, I guess.
The fact is, the joke is usually told by people with too little knowlege of astronomy and too much knowlege of a very specific portion of anatomy.
English-speaking astronomers generally say YUR-uh-niss or yu-RA-niss.