Hey.

Just spent a week on Kauai, Hawaii, a great vacation I'll write about it in the coming days.

But for now a book recommendation: Max Barry's “Company,” which I read during my first two days on Kauai. It's not only the novel for anyone who has suffered a dead-end, meaningless job with idiotic managers—which means 99% of us—it's also the novel most of us who suffered dead-end, meaningless jobs with idiotic managers wished we'd written. In the early nineties, I must have written five short stories/novellas on customer-service/bookstore work but they were all a little too bitter and not nearly clever enough. Barry's wit outweighs all. He pushes the bounds. He makes the absurdity funny. He also makes it both logical and, at the same time, more absurd.

Here's a sample. Sydney, an awful manager and a worse person, is in the act of firing her personal assistant, Megan:

“Second, you don't show any teamwork.”

“But I work alone! I'll work with people if you want! I'd love to work with people! I'm stuck by myself!”

Sydney folds her hands on her desk. “Well, there's no point in complaining now.”

“Then ... why are you telling me these things?”

“It's part of the feedback process. I'm showing you what you need to work on to improve.”

“So if I improve--”

“Not here. You can't improve here. You're being fired, Megan. This is just the process we go through. It's really for your benefit. A little gratitude wouldn't be out of place.”

Megan's mouth works. What finally comes out is: “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Sydney says. “Anyway, those two categories hurt your score. But the clincher was your failure to achieve any goals.”

“What goals?”

“Well, you didn't have any.” Sydney picks up a silver pen and waggles it. Little daggers of reflected sunlight flash into Megan's eyes. “During your last evaluation, we were meant to agree on goals for you, but we never did. So where it says, 'Goals Accomplished,' I had to tick 'None.'”

“I would have accomplished goals if you'd set some!”

“Well, you might have. It's hard to say.”

“How can you sack me for not accomplishing goals I never had?”

“You don't want me to say you accomplished goals when you didn't, do you?”

Then there's this passage, spoken by the CEO of the company, Klausman, which surely resonates in this presidential year when Republicans are going on about “job creators”:

“You're probably too young to remember, Jones, but there was a time when a man filled your gas tank for you. A boy carried your groceries to your car. There was a time when you hardly ever stood in line, not outside of a government office. But labor is a source of cost, so companies externalized it. They, as you say, shat it out. And those costs landed exactly where they belonged: on their customers.”

“And on their remaining staff.”

“Quite so. Quite so. Hence: 'Doing more with less.'”

In a masterstroke, the novel is dedicated thus: “For Hewlett-Packard.”

All previous entries