Mike DaiseyCritiques

Started out with promise, but wandered away from the theme of bad faith. Not really funny, too much shouting, and largely incoherent. Luckily, it was short.

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.

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.

It was worth the read. Sadly I understood alot of what he was describing...sarcastically or not. The world of being a CS ... and realizing the point that the job is really not for you, was right on the button.

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.

Very uneven, switching rather frustratingly between segments of actual description of life within the depths of Amazon and attempts at philosophical musing on the dot-com culture. Choosing one approach or the other might have worked better, but giving equal page space to the two has resulted in a bit of a muddle.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

wage slave at dot.com gives insider scoop on cultish fascination and distress

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