Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.
An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with "That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.
Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me A Confederacy of Dunces.
Right.
I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended. I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.
Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me. Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.
Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?
I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics, pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel, certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.
So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book, the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!
posted at 23:30 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link Technorati tagged as: review
