Microserfs

Microserfs: a hilarious, fanatically detailed, and oddly moving book about a handful of misfit Microsoft employees who realize they don't have lives and subsequently become determined to get lives inside the lightning-paced world of high-tech 1990s American geek culture. Amid a Seattle backdrop of software corporate cultishness ("B-B-B-B-Bill!") and the financial terror of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech startups, the members of Coupland's quirky ensemble "stick a piece of dynamite inside themselves, like a cartoon cat, in the hopes that when they reassemble their exploded pieces they will be somebody different". Coupland gives readers an intimate, deadly accurate, and very funny view of a way of life that is quickly becoming the dominant way of life: friends, families, and lovers falling through the trapdoors of the new electronic order and becoming involved in an engaging, awkward scramble toward love and success in a brave new world.