Framing the Dialogue

I don’t want to suggest that you need to work in a cube city office to enjoy this book.  I don’t want to suggest that you have to have endured a series of layoffs at your work to enjoy this book.  I don’t want to suggest that you have to work for an advertising agency to enjoy this book.  I do suggest that the more of these experiences you have the more you’ll enjoy Then We Came to the End and I consider myself somewhat an authority since I’ve experienced two of the three.

“Those lucky bastards knew no such thing as a conference room or a frosted-glass door.  We had to suffer such insults, but in recompense, we were given mismatching recreational furniture intended to inspire the creative impulse.”

Joshua Ferris creates some incredible characters and gives us a window into their work lives as the struggle through an employer that is desperate for work and is downsizing because they cannot get any.  Gossip, whining, speculation, drama rules most days for this group.  I found the story enjoyable at first, but the endless dialogues grew somewhat tiresome for me.  Condensing it to a hundred pages less would have made it better for me.  I did learn a great new phrase, “polishing the turd.”

“That was the process known as polishing the turd…people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds.  Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope.”

Here’s to all of us who polished a turd or two.