Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke

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 that 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, she soon inexplicably 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.

Featuring an unforgettable carousel of characters and theoretical interjections from present-day Leigh Claire, Fake Work perfectly captures how a fake job, at a fake firm, in a fake industry dedicated to solving a fake crisis portended the domination of financialized capitalism and the soul-crushing culture of corporate life.