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In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work-for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders. While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process-a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway. As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.
List of contents
Prologue: The Almost End of the World Phase I: Taking Inventory Chapter 1: Millennial Transitions Chapter 2: Quality Assurance Chapter 3: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" Chapter 4: Write What You Know Chapter 5: Teamwork Phase II: Media and Mediations Chapter 6: My Putative Promotion Chapter 7: A Total Bitch and an Absolute Fraud Chapter 8: A Tepid Marxist and a Bubble Popped Chapter 9: My Joke of a Promotion Phase III: Contingency Planning Chapter 10: Continental Comportment Chapter 11: Frequent Fliers Chapter 12: Floods and Fires Chapter 13: The End of the End Afterward: Weeks and Decades Acknowledgements
About the author
Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of
Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art and
Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. Her writing has appeared in
Texte zur Kunst,
n+1, and
The Los Angeles Review of Books.
