21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.Com

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.

"[A]n interesting look from an insider's perspective at the preeminent dot-com....Coming from the mind of a confessed bad employee, filtered through hindsight, the account is humorous and highly entertaining as well." Gavin Quinn, Booklist

"What saves the book from being an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel is Daisey's sharp eye: he renders even banal corporate moments with energy and wit." Publishers Weekly

"Imagine a memoir by a grunt worker at the Ford Motor Company circa 1910, or from Monsanto circa 1950. Then imagine that memoirist as neurotic and very funny. Mike Daisey has done us a service by revealing the dorky, scary truth about Amazon.com before it's too late." Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature

"[A]n exhilarating ride through life on Internet time....21 Dog Years is so funny, fast-paced and well-crafted that it could easily zip by without your realizing that its underlying message is dark, serious and even subversive." Joshua Tanzer, OffOffOff.com

"A brilliant, honest, and side-splitting account of the strangest company the world has ever seen. Mike Daisey is the tech world's answer to Tom Green, Michael Moore, Spalding Gray, Jean Shepherd, and Mark Twain." Bill Lessard, coauthor of NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web

"For those still nursing a New Economy hangover, Mike Daisey's funny and evocative memoir serves up the hair of the dog that bit them." Andy Borowitz, New Yorker and New York Times humorist and author of The Trillionaire Next Door

"21 Dog Years is more than just one man's adventures in Webland. It's a farce, a confessional, and a love story; laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly poignant." Robert Spector, author of Amazon.com: Get Big Fast

Mike Daisey's one-man shows include 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, roofer, cow innard remover, law firm receptionist, cold caller, rape counselor, DJ, night janitor in a home for the violently mentally ill, and dot-com wage slave. He lives in Brooklyn.

Visit the author's website at mikedaisey.com

1: Dilettante
2: Freak Parade
3: Doors For Desks
4: Geek Messiah
Subject: introductions
5: Our Physics
6: College Years
Subject: transformers, dreams
7: Gorillas vs. Bears
8: 1-Click? Christmas
Subject: oompa-loompa
9: Mission Statements
10: Interviews
Subject: to tell you
11: Supervillain Lair
12: Pornsniffing
Subject: accident
13: Fiscal Wonderland
14: Exit Interview
Subject: au revoir
15: Museum of Ham
Subject: laugh with me
16: Field Trip
Acknowledgments