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21 Dog Years : A Cube Dweller's Tale
by Mike Daisey
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Free Press (2003-08-26)
ISBN: 074323815X
EAN: 9780743238151
Dewy Decimal #: 817
Paperback: 224 pages
SKU: 070405218
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: First Free Press edition 2003 in great condition. No creases, tears, highlights, markings. Tight spine. Clean text. Very light shelf wear. Worth having at an affordable price. (ref b. 52)
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In 1998, when Amazon.com began to recruit employees, they gave temp agencies a simple directive: send us your freaks. Mike Daisey -- slacker, onetime aesthetics major -- fit the bill. His subsequent ascension, over the course of twenty-one dog years, from lowly temp to customer service representative to business development hustler is the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. Here, with lunatic precision, Daisey describes lightless cube farms in which book orders were scrawled on Post-its while technicians struggled to bring computers back online, as well as fourteen-hour days fueled by caffeine, fanaticism, and illicit day-trading from office desks made out of doors. You'll meet Warren, the cowboy of customer service, capable of verbally hog-tying even the most abusive customer; Amazon employee #5, a computer gamer who spends at least six hours a day locked in his office killing goblins but is worth a cool $300 million; and Jean-Michele, Daisey's girlfriend and sparring partner, who tries to keep him grounded, even as dot-com mania seduces them both. Punctuated by Daisey's hysterically honest fictional missives to CEO Jeff Bezos, 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.
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Customer Reviews
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Funny and insightfull on today's corporate jobs and Amazon culture
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-07-21
I got this as audio book and it's few of the amazingly written and performed audio book. We listened to this in our commute and travel and kept us tightly intrigued and left us laughing and thinking at the same time. The author has degree in Asthetics and it shows. The story is pretty honest and simple but very well told. I think author manages to create pretty good humor out of everyday life, observations and his thoughts about himself as well as outside world. The voice for reading audio book has emotions, truth, passion and captivating rhythm. The story is simple: The author ends up as a temp after graduation but he has no willingness to succumb to serve as corporate drone or be "useful" in that context. But then Internet train arrives which is hard to resist but only to end up as customer rep. People who wants to know about how Amazon worked in its hey days will find pretty good meat here (author was about first of 300 employees). This might be probably the only book on inside look in Amazon corporate world unlike other companies like Microsoft and Google. While being funny, author doesn't escape to reflect on today's corporate servitude and how these entities strives to keep it alive by taking in as many bodies it can regardless of trivial passions and purpose that they offer.
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Easy read....interesting look at the .COM world (and all the promises it offered for a "different economy"
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-12-30
I guess my interest in this book was to take a look into the heart of a .COM business to see if the people inside actually beleived some of the crap they were trying to sell people outside. What I mean is that this was a "new economy", and that profits were not what it was about. (god knows how many stocks went over $100 without a single profit in sight!)
Well, the glimse into Amazon was from a single guy, who didn't fit in from the start...so it might be a bit slanted.....on the other hand, he admits to "drinking the cool-aid" a bit himself and getting into the culture.
Bottom line....it looks like the .COM people believed in their jive even more than the people who bought $100/share stock off them.....
As for the book, it was an easy read.....and to me gave me a fair bit of insight into that world. (I was working at a computer company who's stock also went through the sky....but we were also making good profits.)
The run-up of the .COM "bubble" was always a mystery to me...and this book does go some part of the way to help me understand it. (but don't look for technical analysis....just the ramblings of the days in this guy's life at Amazon.....his low's, highs, and lows again)
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WITLESS DRIVEL...
Rating  (1)
Date: 2005-10-09
12 out of 29 customers found this reveiw helpful
I bought this book, thinking that it would offer some insight into Amazon.com in terms of what it was like to work there during its halcyon days. Touted as a funny memoir, among other things, I was to discover that it was none of what was promised. In fact, the book was painfully difficult to read, as it was very poorly written, decidedly not funny, and offered little insight into what it really was like to work at Amazon. It was totally sophomoric in terms of what it did say.
The author should be thankful that he was not fired by Amazon, as that is what he richly deserved to have happen based upon his own account of what he was like as an employee. He was a total slacker who treated customers with the contempt that he felt that they deserved. He was totally wasteful of the company's resources. He proudly stole supplies in bulk from the company. When toys were given to him for review purposes, he not only did not bother to review them, he then refused to return the toys to Amazon. He may think that all this is hilarious. Unfortunately, I do not. Reading this drivel felt like it took twenty-one dog years.
Moreover, this book was so poorly written, I am surprised that a reputable publisher went ahead with the expense of actually publishing it. Don't waste your time with this drivel. If you want to read a well-written, interesting book about working at Amazon, read "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot. Com Juggernaut" by James Marcus.
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21 dig years
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-10-05
3 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mike Daisey's memoir is about his experience working for amazon.com. In the book, he tells about how he got the job, and how he ended up leaving the job. I chose to read this memoir because, it was kind of the only one I could find that seemed even semi-interesting. I probably should have chosen more carefully, because there were a lot of things in the book that I didn't understand very much. In his memoir Mike Daisey tells about his excitement to join amazon, to how it got to be to the point where he couldn't stand it, to moving to a new position, only to leave amazon .com for good.
The book starts with Mike Daisey introducing himself. He explains how he was lazy, and never really did anything with his life. This is relevant later on in the memoir, when he gets hired for amazon, and actually feels like he is working for a living. Anyway, he ends up moving to Seattle, and getting a job at a temping service. He doesn't like his job, so he starts to look for new jobs. While he is between jobs, he moves in with his girlfriend. His search for a job is ongoing until he finds amazon.com. He applies for the job, and after several interviews, he gets the job, and is entered into a four week training period. He is taught about the company, and how to do the job. He ends up coming out of the training period very enthusiastic about the job. At the end of the training period, he and several other are officially offered the job. He accepts, and starts working in the customer services for amazon.
At first the job is okay and he along with all the others turn into amazon believers. He refers to it as a religion, because they all believe that amazon is like the way of the future, and are pretty much obsessed with their jobs. The job soon becomes unbearable for the author, and he finds himself trying to get out. He tries to write reviews for items, but falls behind, and finds himself at square one. He then applies for a different division that is out of customer service, and finds the job to be very appealing. He is pleased with the job until he starts hearing rumors about lay-offs, and is noticing cuts that the company is making. He is using the bathroom when he sees a spreadsheet, and reads it. It had all of the salaries of all the upper level worker, and some of whom he had worked with. The were making millions of dollars, and were idiots who didn't do anything. He found this combination of things disappointing, and ended up leaving the company because of it.
The whole experience is important to the author, because it wasn't a natural experience working for this big company. From my perspective the author felt like the whole company was kind of weird. I think one of the main reasons that he wrote this book is to expose how odd the job experience was. Especially when he says that the amazon thing turns into like a sort of a religion for him, and his co-workers, and that the CEO of the company, named Jeff, is like a god to them. Also how the job kind of takes over their lives, and the spend all their time focusing on the job, and competing with the other employees.
What the author got for the whole experience is kind of like what I mentioned before. He really got exposed to how strange and unnatural the job situations at companies like that are. He saw first hand how easy it was to fall for this whole system that convinced workers to push themselves too much, because they truly believed that they were actually making a difference, and sort of staring a revolution. As far as the title goes, it is referring to how one of the rules or beliefs is in this time system where the amazon employees are working faster, and so they refer to their years like dog years. I interpreted this to mean that the amazonians, as the author called them were working so hard and quickly that they were getting several years' work done in one year. I thought the book was good, but it was over my reading level, and I found it some parts boring, since it was also over my maturity level, and I couldn't relate to some of the things that the author mentioned.
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Part Gonzo Journalism, Part Comedic Rant. Customer Service @Amazon.com.
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-09-22
7 out of 11 customers found this reveiw helpful
"21 Dog Years" is a satirical account of life as a Amazon.com employee by self-described slacker Mike Daisey, who was recruited though a staffing company in 1998 to work in Customer Service Tier 1 and left the company in a fit of angst in 2000 in spite of enjoying his position in Business Development. The book's audience might be those seeking workplace comedy or those in search of information about Amazon.com's culture. "21 Dog Years" originated as a one man show, so it aims to entertain. At the same time, the book is very much in the tradition of gonzo journalism: insightful but inherently subjective and self-interested. If it is information about Amazon.com you seek, it's a little difficult to know where the hyperbole begins and ends. Mike Daisey's perspicacity is obvious from Chapter 1, where he observes the predicament of Gen Xers in the Baby Boomer economy of the 1990s, and he never hesitates to dwell on his own faults -which are many. He was a bad Customer Service Rep. He loved his company, but hated his job. Daisey seemed more competent and content in his Business Development position, but most of the book is about his experiences in Customer Service, probably because discontent is more compelling than comfort.
As for whether the book is funny, I think it has more moments of insight than comedy. It is informative only if you are interested in how the company philosophy was felt by low-level employees. The book's most obvious fault is that Mike Daisey is a generally unsympathetic personality. Not so much because he is a liar and a crook, but because he is whiny and self-absorbed. Only his intellect makes "21 Dog Years" readable. "Amazonia", written by Amazon.com employee #55 James Marcus, who spent 5 years with the company, is a more informative, literate account. But Marcus seemed to be trying very hard not to offend anyone, leaving readers to glean his opinions between the lines. "21 Dog Years" suffers from the opposite style: It's all about mouthing off, sometimes to the point of sensationalism. People are either going to love this or hate it, but I'm giving "21 Dog Years" 3 1/2 stars because I found the book to be very readable and intermittently insightful.
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