July 10th, 2011 - Personal Days

Personal Days by Ed Park takes all those "how - the - hell - are - we -still - in-business moments of an office and somehow turns it into a 'how to survive at work" bible AND a random mystery novel at once.

AND a nice characterization of your typical coworkers. The person who cares to much about their work, the person who doesn't care at all but does it well anyway, the five people with the same name, the one who doesn't get any work done yet is the bosses favorite, the boss who doesn't know what's going on who is always under pressure from the "higher ups" that no one ever meets. They're all in there.

And you've got your weird office happenings: accidental reply-alls, tech support screwing with your computer and updating it so that it's even slower, that line break that WILL NOT go away no matter what you do that ruins your whole presentation, the cat e-mails going back and forth, random desk moves. It's all in there.

Park also does switches up the format in  each part in really interesting ways. The last part is a 30 page e-mail that was written by someone who was in a completely dark elevator and whose period "." was no longer working on his keyboard. He made it work.


If you work in an office environment you'll enjoy it and laugh, and simultaneously want to bang your head against the desk because life shouldn't be like this but is.

And  I wasn't kidding about the random mystery novel part. It really does turn into one.