21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com

Mike Daisey

Jun 2002 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Boy meets dot-com, boy falls for dot-com, boy flees dot-com in horror. So goes one of the most perversely hilarious love stories you will ever read, one that blends tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, venture capitalism, and free bagels into a surreal cocktail of delusion.
In 1998, when Amazon.com went to temp agencies to recruit people, they gave them a simple directive: send us your freaks. Mike Daisey -- slacker, onetime aesthetics major, dilettante -- seemed perfect for the job. His ascension from lowly temp to customer service representative to business development hustler over the course of twenty-one dog years is the stuff of both dreams and nightmares.
With lunatic precision, Daisey describes the lightless cube farms in which book orders were scrawled on Post-its while technicians struggled to bring computers back online; the fourteen-hour days fueled by caffeine, fanaticism, and illicit day-trading from office desks made from doors; his strange compulsion to send free books to Norwegians; and the fevered insistence of BizDev higher-ups that the perfect business partner was Pets.com -- the now-extinct company that spent all its assets on a sock puppet.
In these pages, you'll meet Warren, the cowboy of customer service, capable of verbally hog-tying even the most abusive customer; Amazon employee #5, a reclusive computer gamer worth a cool $300 million, who spends at least six hours a day locked in his office killing goblins; and Jean-Michele, Mike's girlfriend and sparring partner, who tries to keep him grounded, even as dot-com mania seduces them both. At strategic intervals, the narrative is punctuated by hysterically honest letters to CEO Jeff Bezos -- missives that seem ripped from the collective unconscious of dot-com disciples the world over.
21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak, a wickedly funny anthem to an era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity.

Ratings and reviews

This semi-comical book tells the true story of Mike Daisey who worked at Amazon customer support and biz-dev. It's an easy and fast read, but not that informative, because it lacks a deeper analysis. I would have loved to know why Amazon didn't fail like so many other companies did. Notes: - Measurement dysfunction: If measurement results are somehow connected to the pay check, then workers will not work towards the actual goal, but find creative ways to improve their metrics, e.g. hang up on customers if short phone calls are measured and rewarded, lots of bugs and bug fixes if developer are rewarded for fixed bugs instead of code which works in the first place. - Customer Support: Who wants to be my manager? If you are transferred to a manager, you are not. Quite often you are just connected to someone who pretends to be a manager. - Recruitment: Require something other companies don't require to create an air of exclusivity, e.g. skill tests, certain scores, testimonials. Even if you take every applicant, they will feel like you really honor their skills. - Employment: Workers like the feeling that the company/project has momentum and drive, either in reality or just as a created illusion. - Amazon was very good in creating the constant feeling of change and momentum - Mike Daisey used a fake report to get a position in biz-dev and this fitted perfectly, because biz-dev at Amazon was not about reality but also about reports and good looking power point presentations.

About the author

Mike Daisey's one-man show includes 21 Dog Years, Wasting Your Breath, and I Miss the Cold War. They have been performed in unheated garages, hotel ballrooms, unused hallways, and Off Broadway. He has worked as a security officer, web pornsniffer, high school teacher, blood plasma seller, archivist, telemarketer, roofer, cow innard remover, law firm receptionist, cold caller, rape counselor, DJ, freelance writer, accountant, night janitor in a home for the violently mentally ill, and dot-com wage slave. He lives in Brooklyn, and may be found on the web at mikedaisey.com.