21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
3/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
In 1998, when Amazon.com began to recruit employees, they gave temp agencies a simple directive: send us your freaks. Mike Daisey -- slacker, onetime aesthetics major -- fit the bill. His subsequent ascension, over the course of twenty-one dog years, from lowly temp to customer service representative to business development hustler is the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. Here, with lunatic precision, Daisey describes lightless cube farms in which book orders were scrawled on Post-its while technicians struggled to bring computers back online, as well as fourteen-hour days fueled by caffeine, fanaticism, and illicit day-trading from office desks made out of doors.
You'll meet Warren, the cowboy of customer service, capable of verbally hog-tying even the most abusive customer; Amazon employee #5, a computer gamer who spends at least six hours a day locked in his office killing goblins but is worth a cool $300 million; and Jean-Michele, Daisey's girlfriend and sparring partner, who tries to keep him grounded, even as dot-com mania seduces them both.
Read by the author and punctuated by Daisey's hysterically honest fictional missives to CEO Jeff Bezos, 21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak -- a wickedly funny anthem to an era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity.
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Reviews for 21 Dog Years
65 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is a sarcastic, funny and caustic account of the author's stint as a customer service representative at Amazon.com. He worked there in 1998 so I'm assuming a lot has changed in that time. However, it is a pretty biting view of what it was like inside Amazon during the beginning years. I read it quite a while ago but remember enjoying it and feeling like the author was probably violating some kind of workplace confidentiality agreement. Perhaps his former employee agrees because, although you can buy this book on Amazon, you'll find that the subtitle is changed to "A Cube Dweller's Tale." Kind of funny.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If Mike Daisey had worked in customer service at some other dotcom I'm not sure that his account would have been published. Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos have a giant fascination for the public and the J.B. shadow falls over the whole book. Employees are presented as part of a cult and the author even addresses imaginary emails to J.B. to explore their imaginary relationship..From a commercial point of view Amazon has been a big success and the author doesn't at all suggest why this is, so I would be much more interested in an autobiography by J.B. himself should one ever arrive.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is amusing, certainly, but I wouldn't exactly call it a great work of computer history. It's basically the story of a humorist working for a corporation, sitting in the cogs. It's inoffensive and worth checking out from the library, but I wouldn't call this a must-have book about the history of the computer industry.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was great. I really heartily encourage you to get the audiobook version of this as it is read by the author himself who normally performs this and his other writings in a manner similar to Spaulding Gray. Audible has it for download and I'm not sure who else might have it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having lived it (not at Amazon, but an equally big site) I wasn't that impressed.Maybe to a dot com world outsider it would be more gripping...
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Funny and disturbing, slackers view of early days of amazon. He sounds like the world's worst employee in the world's worst job.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although read some time ago, I remember reading parts that were similar to my dealings with cubicles. Sent along through BookCrossing.