21 Dog Years : Doing Time @ Amazon.com

A Michael Moore for the Dot.com generation, '21 Dog Years' is Mike Daisey's wickedly funny story of life in the New Economy trenches. In 1998, when Amazon.com went to temp agencies to recruit people, they gave them a simple directive: send us your freaks. Thus began Mike Daisey's love affair with the world's biggest bookstore. Mike Daisey worked at Amazon.com for nearly three years during the dot-com frenzy of the late nineties. Now that his nondisclosure agreement has expired, he can tell the real story of tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, venture capitalism that feed into the delusional cocktail exulted as the New Economy. His ascent from lowly temp to customer service representative to business development hustler is the stuff of dreams - and nightmares. No wonder Newsweek has dubbed Daisey the 'oracle of the bust.' With a hugely popular website mikedaisey.com and a hit one-man show that has received phenomenal coverage (with stories in Wired, Daily Mail, Salon, Guardian and elsewhere), Michael Daisey has been called the first dot.comic and the Michael Moore of the net generation.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member wfzimmerman

Amusing account of life stuck in the customer service cube farm at Amazon.com. Not inspiring reading for Ann Arborites who are interested in working for Google AdWords. Customer service at any big company is something of a dungeon, the best option is to use your "customer-facing" cred and get ouf

of the dungeon as fast as you can.

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LibraryThing member amf0001

Funny and disturbing, slackers view of early days of amazon. He sounds like the world's worst employee in the world's worst job.

LibraryThing member Jebbie74

Although read some time ago, I remember reading parts that were similar to my dealings with cubicles. Sent along through BookCrossing.

LibraryThing member sfisk

Having 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...

LibraryThing member JohnMunsch

This 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.

LibraryThing member Miro

If 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.

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LibraryThing member Jenners26

This 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.

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LibraryThing member Count_Zero

This 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.

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