Then We Came to the End
BY JOSHUA FERRIS
This darkly hilarious debut novel is a cautionary tale for the demoralizing effects of the Type X workplace. At an unnamed ad agency in Chicago, people spend more time scarfing free doughnuts and scamming office chairs than doing actual work—all while fretting about walking Spanish down the hall office lingo for being fired.
Type I Insight: They had taken away our flowers, our summer days, and our bonuses, we were on a wage freeze and a hiring freeze and people were flying out the door like so many dismantled dummies. We had one thing still going for us the prospect of a promotion. Anew title true, it came with no money, the power was almost always illusory, the bestowal a cheap shrewd device concocted by management to keep us from mutiny, but when word circulated that one of us had jumped up an acronym, that person was just a little quieter that day, took a longer lunch than usual, came back with shopping bags, spent the afternoon speaking softly into the telephone, and left whenever they wanted that night, while the rest of us sent emails flying back and forth on the lofty topics of Injustice and Uncertainty.”
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