Rating: 
Summary: Life in the Stupidly Fast Lane
Review: Mike Daisey has a gift for taking perfectly ridiculous situations that he found himself in the middle of and making them not just humorous but side-splittingly funny. I've seen the play on which this book was based, and the book isn't a transcription. In fact, it's an entirely new level: it's a love story. Well, two love stories. One of the love stories is about him and his now-wife, and her sensible, grounded, occasionally wild-party animal advice and behavior. The other love story is about a crush on a company and its founder (well, this company that you're reading the review on).The book waxes and wanes both love stories, though you know he's going to wind up with the girl, not the stock options and the guy. I worked at Amazon.com before Mike's tenure, and I recognize many of the portraits in the book. I left before I lost my soul to overwork; the corporate culture was a thing of beauty when I was there. I still work for a living, and Mike works incredibly hard to turn the grist he got during the height of dotcom insanity into a beautiful set of life lessons that, hopefully, we'll all take to heart. I know I did and still do.
Rating: 
Summary: Amusing, but not Deep or Revelatory
Review: After deciding he needs dental insurance, Daisey takes a job at the first place that offers him a job. That just happens to be Amazon.com. There are many anecdotes in the first half of the book about some of the oddballs in CS that made me laugh out loud. However, the criticisms Daisey has for Amazon.com have little merit and aren't terribly well thought-out. His complaints are more about working for a corporation instead of working for Amazon.com. There is not enough insightful material about *Amazon.com* that makes this book about Amazon.com. In fact, this book veers between Daisey's 'I'm not worthy, but I'm clever' persona and Amazon.com so much, it's unclear what the main subject of the book is. If this book is supposed to be about Amazon.com, it could have been a much more compelling story if there were more details about the sheer rollercoaster-ness of working at Amazon.com in the early days. And frankly, working at Amazon.com in the first five years was not a cakewalk. I know because I worked there during that time. You were either able to match the pace, or you couldn't. Daisey admits that he couldn't. Daisey is not a company man, and by the end of the book, you don't think he even realizes that and that working for a corporation was never a step in the right direction for him. He expresses shock when "Mullet" is promoted. However, this book shows little initiative on Daisey's part to move up in the company and he admits he was a poor worker. He also writes that he had to figure out ways to 'cheat' to improve his contact numbers (e.g. hang up on the customer and it looks like you resolved that call mighty quick!). The secret to his move to Business Development: a clever and intricate smokescreen of BS. While I'm sure his one-man show is hilarious, the details just don't exist to make this book more than a semi-whiny 'I was there back in the day' memoir. Amazon.com is at turns an exhilarating and sometimes surreal place to work. Unfortunately, this book does little to capture this, and is instead more of a 'the Big Bad Evil Corporation' story. This book has a high consumability, much cotton candy -- sweet and exhilarating during consumption, but ultimately unsatisfying or memorable in the end. Daisey doesn't have a unique angle on the Amazon.com experience, and this memoir is not unique -- only the first.
Rating:
Summary: E-Commerce Gone Hilariously Awry
Review: If Amazon didn't carry _21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com_ (Free Press) by Mike Daisey, that would be a news story in itself, and would get the book more publicity, and so they are carrying it. Or Amazon is happy to take constructive criticism. You can decide on the best explanation, but Daisey has seen the commercial Internet revolution firsthand, and he doesn't like what he saw. He worked for a couple of years as a wage slave at Amazon.com, and since everyone there had the habit of changing the period they worked into what is supposed to be the equivalent time in a dog's life, he has titled his memoir. It is a very funny and rather touching account of his life within "Earth's Biggest Selection." Motivated mostly by fear of dental decay, he telephoned an answer to the _Seattle Weekly_ ad which started: "CUSTOMER SERVICE TIER 1: LAME TITLE - COOL JOB." Perhaps he should have been worried when they called back five minutes later, but he had a peculiar hankering in this time of his life for a Real Job. Maybe he should have wondered when all the desks were made out of used doors. It turns out he was in love. He fell in love with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Everyone was in love with Bezos, who was supposed to personify the Internet revolution, but especially in the eyes of the Amazon staffers, the resiliently cheerful CEO who dressed like a regular guy, had a receding hairline, and had an unforgettable and frequent laugh, was "...a god, the still point around which the Amazonian world revolved. Religions have their popes and prophets, and we had Jeff." The love did not seem to translate into efficient service. "The weirdest thing about the entire structure was how totally unnecessary it was. We never spoke to anyone on our team with regard to our work. You were surrounded by coworkers but you never needed to have meetings or 'interface' with anybody. The only people you spoke with were four to six hundred customers a shift." There was a constant monitoring of performance, like how long it took a representative to handle a call. When their "call resolution time" needed buffing, they just started hanging up on people for the quickest of resolutions. When they transferred a complaining customer to higher management, it wasn't to higher management at all, but to the next cubicle over. There really wasn't time to find love or a life outside the company, and in the New Economy we were learning that enlightened folks slept where they worked - why shouldn't they take all their other pleasures there, too?" As a result, "...those who weren't previously attached spent every waking moment sleeping with one another." (Can it be that those good folks who take care of editing and posting these reviews are putting up with the same environment?) Eventually, dismayed with bureaucratic silliness and a firm that was meaninglessly expanding without making money, and whose stock during those times was fudged to look far better than it was, Daisey had to had to ask himself, "... titles aside, pride aside, what was I actually _doing_? Nothing." Deciding that being a directionless artist had been no better than being a directionless office drone, and worried to think he had succumbed to dot-com greed, he said goodbye to Jeff and his empire. Hilariously, he was such a red hot commodity after leaving Amazon that headhunters started calling him all day to sign him on as an e-commerce veteran. He turned this irony and all the others into a one-man show (which opened the day after his Non-Disclosure Agreement with Amazon lapsed), and this book that grew from it. It is written in a breezy, joking style that shows the raconteurship which would power a stage performance, but there is plenty serious here about what is wrong with commerce, e-commerce, and the service sector. And for those of us who like Amazon, and write reviews to help others use Amazon well, we can only hope someone in the organization is taking the serious parts seriously.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor and contrived
Review: This book promises a lot but fails to deliver. The basic plot is as follows - inexperienced, untrained slacker gets job in Amazon - gets treated pretty well and complains more than Eddier Vedder with a headache. "Boo Hoo - they are sucking my soul away because they don't have good stationary" - give me a break. I normally love this type of book and although I snickered a few times I just couldn't understand what his major issue with Amazon was...- come on there must be someone out there with some genuinely interesting stories about working for Amazon. I'm afraid this attempt by a second rate customer service representative just doesn't cut it.
Rating:
Summary: Seduced, betrayed, and abandoned
Review: As a former technology help desk representative, I found this book hit the mark too many times. This book was hilariously funny.
I found myself remembering the utter futility of working while the system was down. This book shows us the constant four alarm fire that is customer service and the average guy's desperation on escape without poverty. It is a love story between a man and a corporation. A seduction of corporate success without money and the promises made then broken.
Daisey recounts the absurd yet true time he spent as a CS rep at Amazon only to reach a higher level of absurdity.
A great read.
Rating:
Summary: Good News and Bad News
Review: There's good news and bad news about this book. The good news is that Daisey will make you laugh out loud reading his anecdotes and descriptions about his life as a customer service rep, low on the totem pole, at amazon. Amazon told the employment agencies to "send us your freaks" with almost predictable mayhem to follow. You'll probably enjoy his descriptions of cubicle life more than his bragging how drunk he gets, but he tells a great story nevertheless. The bad news is his sophomoric, leftist rant on amazon and capitalism in general. His lengthy letter to CEO Jeff Bezos is particularly mean-spirited and lacks any depth of analysis. He actually laments not joining the WTO protests in Seattle because he chose to work. His most amazing claim is that the "Boomers control everything." Now THAT'S funny, though he didn't mean it to be. Daisey managed to sell his stock and get out while amazon was riding high, after which he immediately criticizes the dot.com bust, almost as if he's laughing at those who held on. He is just so SMART to be a self-proclaimed slacker! He also has something bad to say about nearly everyone, coworkers and managers alike, including their physical attributes. Daisey is a very funny guy, but he needs to grow up. ...
Rating:
Summary: Ever dealt with Amazon's bureaucracy?
Review: Then you'll find this book to be hilarious! I love Amazon, don't get me wrong. But this book is great! Pokes gentle fun at our favorite company.
Rating:
Summary: Fast read, lots of laughs and a wonderful diversion
Review: Synopsis: Topical, hilarious and short. If you work in a cube farm or for a start-up in any industry you'll recognize the situations and players because they are not just at Amazon or in the Pacific Northwest, but are an amalgamation of corporate America and the wage slaves that exemplify the contemporary workplace. This is a fast, easy read. On one level it's an amusing story filled with trivia and told in an irreverent, politically incorrect 'rap'. Each page contains something that will make you chuckle or laugh out loud. View it as a loosely connected series of vignettes that deliver absurdities, improbable situations that have basis in fact and a broad characterization of life in the fast lane - where fast lane is defined by wild growth presided over by people whose brilliant ideas are only exceeded by their eccentricities. One example that sticks in my mind is about Jeff Bezo's love of dogs and his policy of allowing employees to bring their dogs to work at the corporate headquarters. What happened was the dogs formed packs and roamed the halls, which paints a vivid picture of the absurd while showing the surreal nature of working for as company led by personalities that were a bit left of the centerline. I also loved the way Daisey captures the essence of personality types - his description of Employee #5, a brilliant but quirky Unix guru is the archetype for every system programmer and Unix guru in the universe: extremely intelligent and utterly lacking in social skills and a sense of the real world around them. In fact, Daisey's keen powers of observation and ability to paint pictures in prose that reminds me of Tom Wolf's "Electric Kool-aid Acid Test" makes him the spokesman for a generation of dockers-clad, 30-somethings that baffle their older coworkers. He also has a touch of Hunter Thompson, especially in his e-mails, which are remarkably similar in style and spirit to Thompson's pre-gonzo letters, such as "The Proud Highway". In fact, this book comes close to Thompson's "The Great Shark Hunt" for style and a humorous look at the absurd. However, the bottom line is this book is plain fun and will be meaningful to anyone trapped in a cube farm or who is working 70+ hours a week with no idea why. It'll add a little sanity and more than a few laughs to that insane thing you call life.
Rating: 
Summary: Hot Air, by fermed
Review: I wish I could have laughed when reading this book, but I did not, for the simple reason that it is not a funny book. It is a sad book. Daisey wants to be humorous and witty and he certainly tries very hard. Trouble is people who try to be funny usually are not, and this no exception Even the title of the book reeks of inflation: three years become twenty one by making them "dog" years. Inflation is everywhere, though, because somehow the scant substance in this tract must be stretched into a book length, whether it deserves it or not; and so we hear, over and over, how the author has a useless degree in esthetics, and how the author is a lazy slacker, and after about the twelfth time of this silly self-deprecation we can no longer even smile, just frown. The book lacks a clear point of view or even a purpose. It is a rambling description of a few years of having worked at Amazon's customer service department. It lacks a deep enough understanding of the Amazon operation to be able to present a good criticism of it, or even to laugh at it as an insider (which the author never was) and thus the book is reduced to describing the bumbling efforts of a highly narcissistic incompetent. Nothing is learned from the author's experience, and that is one of the reasons why the book is so unsatisfactory. Apparently some of the material of this book forms the basis for a sort of one-man show that the author, Mr. Daisey, performed in tiny venues in the Seattle area. Surely a live verbal attack on Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, and the Dot Com fading culture must have been capable of gathering small audiences of disaffected adults willing to fork over some cash for the privilege of listening. At first I thought the book's failure must have derived from attempting to transpose such monologue material into a readable book, which is a difficult task. And then I though about David Sedaris and his work ("Me Talk Pretty One Day," for example) in which he managed brilliantly to produce both a one man show and a hilarious book Perhaps it is an odious comparison to make, but a most valid one: in this book Daisey lacks the wit, humor, timing and grace that Sedaris has in overabundance in his work. ...
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and (mostly) true!
Review: ...book is terrific -- both very funny and extremely well-written. I can vouch for most of the second half of the book -- ...-- he really did find stock option information for the entire BizDev department in the bathroom, and his boss really wouldn't speak to him for months after Mike caught him playing Rogue. It sounds like these stories are made up, but they are not. (Which, I guess, makes them even more horrifyingly funny). I have to admit that I disagree with Mike's main conclusion -- that we were just spinning our wheels at Amazon, scurrying around but not getting anywhere. The truth is, we have built a great company here, and I am glad to be a part of it. Some of the reviewers who provide blurbs for the the book seem intent on using it to buttress their pre-concieved (and ill-informed) notions about "the New Economy hangover" or "the pointless toil inside an industrial madhouse". Don't believe the hype. Everyone's experience at Amazon is different, and all I can say is that I wouldn't trade mine for anything. ...
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