Thursday, October 18, 2007

Too much horror business

I chanced upon Then We Came to the End at the library today and my resultant cackling must have disturbed the other riders. The novel is a hilarious (and also existential angst inducing) look at office life. I generally don't do snippets, but this one is too good not to do it. This may only appeal to office worker types, but give it a try:

Ordinarily jobs came in and we completed them in a timely and professional manner. Sometimes fuckups did occur. Printing errors, transposed numbers. Our business was advertising and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client's toll free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter the could go to the website, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day. Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.

No comments: