More than mere Office Space

Company
By Max Barry
Publishing date: January 17, 2006

We have “The Office” on NBC. We have the new special edition DVD of Office Space. Many of us have the reality of working in an office, complete with cubicles and failing laser printers and confounding work procedures. So why do we need a new novel to point out the banality and ridiculousness of life at the office?

Stephen Jones, the new hire at Zephyr Holdings, finds himself promoted over other, seemingly more deserving candidates. Confused, he sets out on a mission to find out what Zephyr Holdings really does. He knows that his department, Training Sales, sells training packages. But their customers are all other Zephyr departments. When he discovers the truth, it’s all a little hard to believe.

At the outset, Company merely seems to use hyperbolic situations to say that office work is boring and meaningless. Yet as the reader digs into the book, we, like Jones, find much more going on. Author Max Barry captures the essence of office work, but then ups the ante for an incredible amount of absurdity. He lampoons the office furniture, the office employees, the decrees issued from Senior Management and edicts from Human Resources. These departments, and even some individuals in the departments, are always given Capital Letters, which helps remove their humanity.

At one point, a departmental assistant receives her annual review. Last year she was told it was no big deal, just routine, so she did not worry about it. Once in the review, however, she finds she is fired for, among other things, failing to achieve her goals. “What goals?” she asks her supervisor. “Well, you didn’t have any…During your last evaluation, we were meant to agree on goals for you, but we never did.” When the assistant responds that she would have met any goals had they been set, her supervisor responds, “Well you might have. It’s hard to say.”

Barry does move well beyond simple satire, however. His novel becomes a wicked version of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a novel about working at Microsoft, meets Peter Weir’s "The Truman Show". His look at office inefficiencies moves out of simple observation and exaggeration toward a voyeuristic, somewhat sadistic view of the corporate world.

Barry utilizes an economical style of writing that suits the story. The novel is absent of any long-winded descriptions, and the characters mostly speak only what is necessary. The language is as stark as the cubicle farms that the employees work in. But I was confused as to why Barry continually refers to employees of a Seattle company being “sacked” (and sick employees are told to get a “doctor’s certificate”), until I realized that he is Australian. Other than that, Barry nailed working for a nameless, faceless American corporation.

Some of Barry’s examples of corporate bureaucracy are brilliant. In one of my favorites, an employee recounts, “Last month we had to sit through a presentation on redundancy, and it was a bunch of Powerpoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies.” Except, in my world, the Powerpoint presentation freezes up mid-meeting.