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    JPod
    JPod
    JPod
    Ebook528 pages5 hours

    JPod

    By Douglas Coupland

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    JPod, Douglas Coupland's most acclaimed novel to date, is a lethal joyride into today's new breed of tech worker.

    Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames begin with "J" are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod's universe is amoral, shameless, and dizzyingly fast-paced like our own.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 10, 2008
    ISBN9781596917101
    JPod
    Author

    Douglas Coupland

    Douglas Coupland first came to prominence as the author of Generation X (1995). He followed that with a sequence of ever-more daring and inventive novels, including Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus! He lives in Vancouver.

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    Reviews for JPod

    3.5/5

    991 ratings42 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Coupland has more fun with book design within these pages than he has since his debut novel Generation X. While still not measuring up to the bar set early in the author's career, J Pod delivers a few giggles, one or two pseudo-deep thoughts, and enough pop culture references to strangle a modestly sized basement full of hipsters.
    • 4/5
      Here we have a kind of follow-up to one of his older books titled MICROSERFS, where a group of Generation-Xers worked in the Microsoft© offices. Here the location is a videogame company, but the content is largely the same. Ethan (our hero) muddles his way through a psychotic family, weird co-workers and a bizarre set of circumstances which has him burying bodies, saving his boss from a Chinese sweatshop, and at times obsessing about evil Ronald McDonald©. Coupland admits that he loved writing this book and it shows - there’s a sense of fun and freedom that was lacking in some of his more recent novels. And to top it off, he’s put himself in as a character – the omnipotent ‘Doug’ manipulating the Jpodders towards a better life.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this one also & it's likely my favorite Coupland. Donating this one as I'm clearing my bookshelves for a move.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as Microserfs, but worth reading. It'S really odd to find Coupland as a central character himself
    • 3/5
      There's something vaguely disturbing about being cynical about the very medium you are using - is that irony? Coupland totally overdoes it, and frankly while it was fresh and edgy in Generation X, 15 years later it becomes old. Add to this an outlandlish plot and the author as a character and it gets rather tiresome. At least the main character, Ethan is endearing in his willingness to please and in his naivete.
    • 3/5
      OK, but I liked Microserfs better.
    • 3/5
      Engaging read. I particularly appreciated the self-deprecating Coupland way of including himself in the book. Engaging, and yet not as emotionally-connecting, nor as deeply-themed as Hey Nostradamus. I haven't read Microserfs yet.
    • 4/5
      This book is what made me want to become a computer programmer. In real life it is nothing like that. But a very fun, experimental book.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed the pace and style of the book, and thought it conveyed some interesting food for thought about how we process things in the current age, as well as morals etc. It would have been slightly better if Coupland hadn't inserted so many obscenities and other blatantly, in your face, offensive bits into it, which seemed to serve no purpose, except, maybe, to add to the total randomness of the piece; I feel like the message could be equally conveyed without it.
      For that reason alone I shall not be recommending it to anyone; I shall, instead, find a better book in the same vain, or write one myself.
      Just watched Fight Club, which reminded me of this story because of the similar way it points to the meaninglessness of our consumer cubical driven lives.
    • 3/5
      I've resented Coupland for the whole Generation X thing for years and have always perceived him as a bit pretentious. Fair? Maybe not, but what are you going to do. A friend pushed this book on me and I have to say I enjoyed it. Coupland even appears as a character that plays off the image I had of him. Well played, Doug.
    • 3/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As I've detailed here before, I have for most of my adult life been an obsessive fan of "Generation X" phrase-coiner Douglas Coupland; but while I read literally everything from his first book up to Miss Wyoming when younger, mostly for personal reasons, and have read literally everything from The Gum Thief to now for professional reasons, there's a chunk from 2000 to 2007 that I completely missed altogether (comprising the books All Families are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby and jPod), mostly because this was when Coupland reached the low point of his transition between Postmodernism and 21st-century "Sincerism," right at a point when I myself was doing a lot more writing of books in my life than the reading of them. I mean, take 2006's jPod as a good example, which was ostensibly meant to be a "conceptual sequel" of sorts to the biggest hit of his career, 1995's Microserfs, with the two novels sharing a lot of the same premises and details; but while Microserfs was a revelatory celebration of a coming geek entrepreneurial class just starting to show itself, jPod is an unimaginative reaction to our Web 2.0 times, with Coupland seemingly out of ideas about what to do with his old pop-culture shtick and quirky Aspie characters besides to ramp things up to an unsatisfyingly cartoonish level, but not yet understanding what he needed to do to change his career path into its next higher level. Eventually, of course, he did end up realizing what to do, which in a nutshell was to make his stories a lot weirder and darker (see Generation A and Player One, for example); but here where he was still floundering with it all, jPod feels very much like a Coupland simply waiting with boredom for the high-profile MTV shorts offer that were guaranteed to come with any early-2000s project of his (and indeed, jPod itself got made into a 13-episode show for Canadian television, with a novel that feels very much like a quickly done afterthought to that show instead of the other way around). As big a fan as I am of his, it's admittedly hard to justify this particular stretch of his career, so best perhaps to turn either to the books older than these or newer to save yourself some wasted reading experiences.Out of 10: N/A
    • 2/5
      Unfortunately, this smacks for Microserfs for Generationals.
    • 4/5
      Excellent, funny, anarchic, and strangely accurate. I work as a software developer, and could identify several of the characters in the book as people I have worked with.
    • 3/5
      This is a pretty funny book about being a computer programmer with family problems. There are quite believable in my experience.
    • 3/5
      An entertaining read, though Coupland could do without all the repetition of number sequences/abbreviations within the book; save some paper, we get the point you're trying to make about the characters and their environment!
    • 2/5
      Microserfs is one of my favourites. I started out not liking JPod because it seemed a bit cold. I didn't find Ethan, the main character, very likable. It gradually won me over, after I accepted the fact that it's quite a different book than Microserfs was -- much more of a satire.

      I can see why people might not like this novel, but I think there are enough interesting thoughts about technology and culture to make it worthwhile (even if some of the insights are a little shallow). And, unexpectedly, it was pretty funny.
    • 3/5
      July 2007. Entertaining read. Assumes readers' intelligence. Especially liked the lists. My favorite list was the language list, which included Catalan (lisping) and Catalan (non-lisping). The self-referencial aspect was a bit tiresome and overdone. This was my book club's choice for this month's review. [We are 5 women, 4 men, only two of whom comprise a couple. We've been a book club since 1993, and have 3 original members, and 2 more members whose membership is almost as long.] One member said the book reminded him of PG Wodehouse, comparing Copeland's use of pop culture to Wodehouse's "period" color and motifs. My club rates on 1-5, but any decimal point between the cardinal numbers is accepted (even pi, but only 2 digits). I think the average was 3.6. My rating was 3.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved this book. It was so clever and so much fun to read. On numerous occasions I laughed out loud while I was reading this (which was slightly embarrassing when I was sitting on the bus). Douglas Coupland even makes an appearance in his own novel. Very clever!!
    • 3/5
      This is the first Douglas Coupland book I've read. Maybe it wasn't the best one to start with, because it came across as self-indulgent in a way that probably wouldn't have bothered me if I'd read lots of his other books. The pages of numbers were tedious to flick through and took the book to the level of 'nerdy in the extreme'. I liked the protrayal of the JPod characters which struck me as very realistic, having worked with techy people for a few years. Much of the rest of the book was wildly and deliberately unrealistic, but no less fun for all that.
    • 5/5
      I love this book. It was quirky, interesting, and insanely funny. I think Douglas Coupland is a genius. He is my favorite Canadian.
    • 5/5
      Read the entire thing on Sept 20, 2007. Great book, though not as tight and coherent as other Coupland books.
    • 4/5
      Lived this life before. Doug brings it to life. It would've been great, but Doug decided to pull a Hitchcock and put himself in his own work of art...self-agrandizing propaganda brought this down a notch...but still worth a read.
    • 2/5
      While I have a collection called 'Have Read'. I don't have a subset labelled 'But Didn't Finish'. According to page numbering, I am exactly half way through, and decided that I've given it enough time / patience / hope / optimism. The meaningless of life in IT office pods is, no doubt, the DNA of the non-plot here. But for all the observation and occasional humour, I've reach the conclusion that my attention that a reader's attention is better placed where the writer has invested creativity and discipline to build some architecture. More of a joke book and sketch show, less of a novel.
    • 4/5
      A bit like Microserfs meets the golden arches. Entertaining, but ultimately insubstantial. If you haven’t already, read Microserfs first. If you have you’ll probably still enjoy this but will need to read something else soon after.
    • 5/5
      Hilarious. My one critique is Doug wrote himself into the text.
    • 4/5
      I guess most people will find this pretty disappointing after Eleanor Rigby, although I enjoyed it enough in a throwaway sort of way. Coupland had been maturing as an author, and this kind of rebels against that, with lots of Simpsons references etc. One for fans only.
    • 3/5
      Fun read. Knowing the geography, it's almost believable. It is missing the richness of themes present in Hey Nostradamus. At the same time, jPod creatively written as the author blends himself into the plot, making for some unpredictable results.
    • 3/5
      The back-blurbs don't lie: JPod is a compulsively fast read that engages you and draws you along. However, while it engaged and amused me, I can't say I liked it all that much.

      The amorality of the characters was offputting and made them less interesting; the PoMo conceit of putting the author in the book seemed stale and, in this case, contrived. Unlike Microserfs, wherein moments of transcendence and meaning rose out of the rich white noise of geek life, here the white noise seems to serve itself first, foremost and forever.

      Maybe that's supposed to be a comment on modern mores. But as a Gen-Xer and a geek...I think he's selling us short.
    • 4/5
      Can there be any doubt that Douglas Coupland is now firmly entrenched as a leading influence in Canadian society? After all, in his new novel jPod, “I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel,” are the first words a character utters. It would appear Coupland couldn’t ignore his own cultural impact.

      Coupland made a name for both himself and his peer group when he penned the exceedingly popular novel Generation X. Since that time, his output of approximately one novel a year has earned him a unique berth as one of Canada’s premier pop culture commentators.

      In jPod, Coupland revisits the motif of arguably his finest novel Microserfs, a work that encapsulated the zeitgeist of the late 1980s computer work force. Not so much a literal sequel to Microserfs as it is a thematic one, jPod is vintage Coupland, and whether or not that is a good thing may depend on the mindset of the reader.

      jPod is the nickname for six determinedly quirky game designers, all of whose names begin with the letter j. Described as mildly autistic – “poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured” – the team is unhappily working on a skateboarding simulation, the hero of which has been unexpectedly re-imagined as a wisecracking turtle.

      As the characters follow their daily routines, avoiding work and throwing out Simpsons references as naturally as breathing, one designer, Ethan Jarlewski, suffers a crisis of faith. “I was pleased to be able to earn a living within an industry that’s increasingly more corporate and bland and soul-killing, but…then I got to wondering if I even possessed the ability to fall in love with another human being and…I began to feel like such a module.”

      Happily, Coupland’s knack for capturing the mood of a particular time is still intact. He has also not lost his partiality for unorthodox plot twists; illegal refugees, grow-ops, ballroom dancing, and appearances by Coupland himself are only a few of the plot-twists Ethan manoeuvres as he seeks to unearth his own measure of happiness.

      Like Microserfs, jPod indulges Coupland’s appetite for abstract wordplay, visual puns, and numerical coding. Many of jPod’s pages consist of nothing but numbers as the designers divert themselves with challenges such as hunting for a displaced number in the first hundred thousand digits of pi.

      Yet as enormously diverting as jPod is, it suffers from familiarity. After the emotional heft of the striking Hey Nostradamus! and the gentle humour of the amusing if slight Eleanor Rigby, jPod’s turf is too similar to his early efforts. The setting is new, but jPod all too often seems like Microserfs Redux to its detriment.

      jPod, then, is coasting Coupland, engaging yet unsurprising. There is enough of the new to satisfy ardent fans, but those who admired Coupland’s steady progression from unknown quantity to established Canadian talent may view jPod as an inauspicious regression.
    • 3/5
      Some would say that this is Coupland's attempt to revisit his previous success with Microserfs, like revising a program to conform to 2.0 standards and they'd be correct. The problem here lies in the fact that sometimes like a program being ported to 2.0 status, what comes out is less impressive than the original.

      This book chronicles the lives of a group of people who code, except that this time around the topic is about video games, not basic building blocks of code that can be formed into more complex programs like Lego.

      I think Coupland was not as successful this time around, as the novel felt staid and lacking a certain heart that I've come to associate with the Microserfs team.

      Borrow it for the video game references.

    Book preview

    JPod - Douglas Coupland

    JPod

    a novel by

    Douglas Coupland

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Part One

    Part Two

    Part Three

    A note on the author

    By the same author

    Imprint

    Winners Don’t Do Drugs

    William S. Sessions, Director, FBI

    FINAL

    FINAL. FINAL

    final. FOR REAL

    FINAL.version 2

    absolutely.FINAL

    FINAL.2

    FINAL.3

    FINAL.3.01

    FINAL.3.02

    FINAL.working

    1ne

    2wo

    3hree
    4our

    5ive

    6ix

    7even

    8ight

    9ine...

    ...Best!

    ...Dream!

    ... Ever!

    Play as Gene Simmons

    Play as Iron Man

    watch_me_xplode

    332 of 438                comments

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    Fatality gap

    Do the Boneless

    Want to take your business to the next level? Use new strategies to improve your income, and locate parks and truck stops where purchased orgasms are a snap. Make your elevator banter funny but not witty. Get free publicity even though you’re promoting nothing. Business network with scary people you don’t respect and whose haircuts obviously cost way more than your own. Establish credibility for tasks you hate performing. Clarify values but remember, a million times nothing is still nothing. Read business magazine articles written by children and adults who’ve never owned businesses. Get more referrals by grooming better and by shooting out more pheromones; basically,don’t wash your perineum, that little strip of skin between the genitals and anus. This goes for both sexes. Sex is everywhere in even the drabbest office environment. But then, so is death. Find the middle ground. Overcome objections by pretending you have a non-existent education. Nobody will ever check your credentials unless you run for public office or become head of a school; the secret message is don’t aim for the top—aim for someplace two notches below the top. Having said this, you will still become bitter for not having made it to the top. Even when life is good, it isn’t really good. Get commitments, then let people down. Increase sales and get nothing for it. Sell more with your Internet marketing and your website, but don’t show too many teeth in your press photo. Make spelling mistakes in your resume and then wonder why nobody calls you. Play Free cell and contribute nothing to the world but have fun doing it. Yes! You can improve your marketing strategy and your sales, but people will find you kind of boring while you’re doing it, and if it works out, people will still think you’re not that nice person who showed promise in high school. Also remember that high school is a North American obsession. Europeans think this obsession is juvenile, and the moment you use a high school metaphor, their minds will wander. They’re just jealous. There is a much better way to market your products and services, but it’s maybe too fresh, and maybe you’re not ready for that new freshness. If you want to grow your business with less wasted effort, then you’re living in dreamland. Whether you’re just starting out or you made a million from your business last year, it’s all kind of scary and futile, isn’t it? There are simply too many people on earth. Oil is going to run out in your lifetime. What’s your follow-up strategy to increase sales and profits? Honestly, if you haven’t joined a local Kiwanis-type organization, then do it right now. Most of the business decisions in your city are made by older guys who eat mediocre chicken dinners in hotel ballrooms and then go off and have naked whipped cream go-kart rides. It doesn’t matter how savvy your proposal is, if the guys in the fezzes have chosen Murray to take over the lease to that office space you were eyeing, then you’re totally fucked and Murray will get the lease. One person’s testimonial: Requests for my services went up by 300% as a result of working with Ken, because he’s way better-looking than the earnest blank before him, Ron. We fired Ron under the pretext of catching him swiping Post-it notes and bond paper from the storeroom, but really it was because he was boring, didn’t like golf, and Tracy at the front desk thought he was, quote, ’Kind of pervy.’ If you’re trying to stay more focused on what you do, then simply do what most genuinely successful people do, which is take Ritalin. Most people think Ritalin is a kiddy drug, but what it actually does is allow you to stay focused and stop your mind from wandering. Hi, I’m Denise from HR. This morning I crumpled up a piece of paper and then I held it in the palm of my right hand and I looked at it and I thought, Denise, this is your life. This is as good as it gets. Hi, I’m Jeremy. I’m that high-energy new guy they stole from Remtech across the Parkway. I’m young, smart, good-looking and I’m using ever-escalating amounts of crystal meth to make me seem more alive than you. I’ll either end up winning everything or be found holding up a cardboard sign and talking to myself at the Exit 23 off-ramp. Hi, I’m Rick and I hate everything in the world because I lost everything I owned in the tech bubble in the late 1990s. I really thought I’d be on a beach right now. Instead, I piss in the men’s room urinal and have to listen to Jim in the stall beside me flip through the sports pages. It’s all he does. I don’t know how he gets away with it. He’s there for two hours a day. Please turn off all cellphones and personal computer systems. Engineers aren’t funny or cute or nerdy. They’re damaged. I might be damaged, but they’re way more damaged than in any other division of the company. I resent the fact that nerds are somehow cool. They’re just losers. Would you like another transaction? People say that everyone can be a success, but you look at the numbers and no, the world is way more about failure and compromised standards than it is about winning. The older the culture is, the less cutesy it is about saying, Well, you’re a winner because you tried your best. Can you imagine a Chinese person saying that? They’d just think you’re a lose rand buy all of your goods at fire sale prices during your bankruptcy yard sale. You’re always hearing about following your dream, but what if your dream is boring? Most people’s dreams are boring. What if you had a dream to sell roadside corn—if you went and sold it, would that mean you were living your dream? Would people perceive you as a failure anyway? And how long would you be happy doing it? Probably not long, but by then it’s too late to start something else. You’re fucked. Communists are smart in some ways. They actively discourage hoping or dreaming. At least that way, when you finally get a shitty little AM radio after being on the waiting list since 1988, you’ll feel both cheered and kindly towards the regime in power. Okay, I’m kidding. The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps. Greed kind of helps, but it looks ugly, and at parties people avoid greed heads, so there goes your social life. Life is a contest between you and everyone else. Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list? Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream? Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people. TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public. There are too many old people coming down the chute in the next few decades. Heaven help you if you can’t hold your job act together Put a smile on it, or it’s cat food for dinner tonight. A decade of cat food is 3,652 cans. Incorrect password, please try again. People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. Invitation to All staff members: Thursday bowling, pizza and drinks, sponsored by the company. Black light sand music galore. Dancing and bowling shoes provided. Bowling Skills Not Required!!!People who use the phrase, In these changing times, when the only thing that’s certain is change itself are idiots. Think about it and read the following sentence: In these static days, when the only guarantee is stasis itself … You see what I mean. Sometime when you’re all alone in a room, ask yourself if what you do for a living can be done by someone in India. If there’s even a flicker of doubt, then you have to admit that you’re doomed. Which is more humiliating: losing your job to a robot, or losing your job to someone who lives in a country whose standards of living you consider inferior? You can’t fake creativity, competence or sexual arousal. If you have none of these three attributes, then pack it in right now. Go sell roadside corn in India. Your call is important to us. As you know, Jessica is away for two more days—could you please be sure all of your dirty dishes are put into the dishwasher (not the sink) before the end of the day so that when Katie or Kirsten comes down to turn it on, it is ready to go. Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resume. Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it’s been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries. Using the keypad, spell the last name of the person you wish to speak with. Women can discern shitty clothes at thirty paces. Even seasoned recruiters base their first impression on the basis of fuckability. The second thing they look at is whether you’re competent, and the third thing they see is whether you’re creative in disguising your lack of competence and/or fuckability. A big Thank You to everyone who participated in Jeans Day this year. We did really well and were able to raise $230.00 for the kids. My friend Josie used to apply for jobs she had no interest in getting, and she liked to mess with people’s minds. She’d talk about cramps and abusive boyfriends and her daydream about one day breastfeeding her baby and she always got offered the job. Most people are at their most robotic when interviewing, which is obviously ironic because you’re trying to put forth the most concentrated essence of yourself that you can. Most resumes are as boring as yours, and nobody ever reads the second page. There are people out there who will hate you for the way you use your knife and fork. Put the word imple­mentin your resume and you won’t get phoned back. College will guarantee you a higher lifelong income, and friends made in college last longer than those made in real life. Men turn bitter around forty. The easiest way to get a job is to fill in for women on maternity leave. They almost never come back. Watch out for post-grad students. They wreck more marriages than drugs and alcohol combined. Needy people never last more than two years at any job. I used to get straight As my whole life, and then in college I started getting D’s and it was like morphine. It was great. If someone’s bothering you at work, ask him or her to make a donation to a charity. Keep a can and donation envelopes in your desk. They’ll never bug you again. It works.

    Click here.

    Part One

    Never Mess with the Subway Diet

    Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.

    "That asshole."

    Who does he think he is?

    "Come on, guys, focus. We’ve got a major problem on our hands."

    The six of us were silent, but for our footsteps. The main corridor’s muted plasma TVs blipped out the news and sports, while coworkers in long-sleeved blue and black T-shirts oompah-loompahed in and out of laminate-access doors, elevated walkways, staircases and elevators, their missions inscrutable and squirrelly. It was a rare sunny day. Freakishly articulated sunbeams highlighted specks of mica in the hallway’s designer granite. They looked like randomized particle events.

    Mark said, I can’t even think about what just happened in there.

    John Doe said, I’d like to do whatever it is people statistically do when confronted by a jolt of large and bad news.

    I suggested he ingest five milligrams of Valium and three shots of hard liquor or four glasses of domestic wine.

    Really?

    Don’t ask me, John. Google it.

    And so I shall.

    Cowboy had a jones for cough syrup, while Bree fished through one of her many pink vinyl Japanese handbags for lip gloss—phase one of her well-established pattern of pursuing sexual conquest to silence her inner pain.

    The only quiet member of our group of six was Kaitlin, new to our work area as of the day before. She was walking with us mostly because she didn’t yet know how to get from the meeting room to our cubicles. We’re not sure if Kaitlin is boring or if she’s resistant to bonding, but then again none of us have really cranked up our charm.

    We passed Warren from the motion capture studio. "Yo! jPodsters! A turtle! All right!" He flashed a thumbs-up.

    Thank you, Warren. We can all feel the love in the room.

    Clearly, via the gift of text messaging, Warren and pretty much everyone in the company now knew of our plight, which is this: during today’s marketing meeting we learned we now have to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle. Yes, you read that correctly, a turtle character—in a skateboard game.

    The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone’s nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees. Then I wondered if Leonardo da Vinci had ever inhaled any of the oxygen molecules I was breathing, or if he ever had to sit through a marketing meeting. What would that have been like? "Leo, thanks for your input, but our studies indicate that when they see Lisa smile, they want a sexy, flirty smile, not that grim little slit she has now. Also, I don’t know what that closet case Michelangelo is thinking with that naked David guy, but Jesus, clamp a diaper onto him pronto. Next item on the agenda: Perspective—Passing Fad or Opportunity to Win? But first, Katie here is going to tell us about this Friday’s Jeans Day, to be followed by a ten-minute muffin break."

    But the word turtle pulled me out of my reverie, uttered by Fearless Leader—our new head of marketing, Steve. I put up my hand and quite reasonably asked, "Sorry, Steve, did you say a turtle?"

    Christine, a senior development director, said, No need to be sarcastic, Ethan. Steve here took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years.

    No, Steve protested. I appreciate an open dialogue. All I’m really saying is that, at home, my son, Carter, plays SimQuest4 and can’t get enough of its turtle character, and if my Carter likes turtle characters, then a turtle character is a winner, and thus, this skateboard game needs a turtle.

    John Doe BlackBerried me: I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS

    And so the order was issued to make our new turtle character accessible and fun and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: {101,100,103, 121}

    ORIENTAL

    NOODLE SOUP

    NISSIN

    70622 03503

    2 ¼ oz. x 6 CUPS

    Chicken Flavor

    Back in our cubicle pod, the six of us fizzled away from each other like ginger ale bubbles. I had eighteen new emails and one phone message, my mother: Dear, could you give me a call? I really need to speak with you—it’s an emergency.

    An emergency? I phoned her cell right away. Mom, what’s up? What’s wrong?

    Ethan, are you at work right now?

    Where else would I be?

    I’m at SuperValu. Let me call you back from a pay phone.

    The line went dead. I picked it up when it rang.

    Mom, you said this was an emergency.

    It is, dear. Ethan, honey, I need you to help me.

    I just got out of the Worst Meeting Ever. What’s going on?

    I suppose I’d better just tell you flat out.

    Tell me what?

    Ethan, I killed a biker.

    "You killed a biker?"

    "Well, I didn’t mean to."

    Mom, how the hell did you manage to kill a biker?

    Ethan, just come home right now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.

    Why doesn’t Dad help?

    He’s on a shoot today. He might get a speaking part. She hung up.

    On my way out of the office, I passed a world-building team, standing in a semicircle, staring at a large German-made knife on a desktop.

    What’s up? I asked.

    It’s the knife we’re using to cut Aidan’s birthday cake, a friend, Josh, replied.

    I looked more closely at the knife: it was clownishly big. "Okay, it’s hard-core Itchy & Scratchy—but so what?"

    We’re having a contest—we’re trying to see if there’s any way to hold a knife and walk across a room and not look psycho.

    And?

    It’s impossible.

    A few desks away, Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweatshops. She was bummed because she couldn’t get into North Korea: too much legal juju. It’s a real blotch to have on your passport. I just wanted to know what it’s like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors.

    Bree is right. For those of us who are too young to have visited Cold War East Germany or the USSR, North Korea remains as the sole boutique nation with a quack low-technology dictatorship. Owning a 56K floppy disk can land you two decades of hard labour.

    I suggested North Korea should change its name to something friendlier, more accessible.

    Like what, Ethan?

    How about Trish?

    As in Patricia?

    Yeah.

    I like that. It’s fresh.

    Thanks.

    Through a rare and cheerful accident of freeway planning, I can get from the campus to my parents’ place by making two left turns and two right turns, even though they live 17.4 miles away in the gloomy evergreen cocoon of the British Properties. I find this elegant and pleasing.

    When I pulled into the driveway, nothing seemed out of place. It could easily have been 1988, right down to the 1988 Reliant K-car wagon. Inside the front door, I heard Mom call from the kitchen, Ethan, would you like a sandwich? I have egg salad.

    I walked into the kitchen, unchanged since Ronald Reagan ruled Earth. My brother, Greg, and I once found a pile of cleaning products that predated bar-coding on a hallway shelf. No sandwich, thanks, Mom. Am I, or am I not, here about a dead biker?

    Mom cut her own sandwich in two. I know for a fact that your diet is appalling. Greg tells me that all you eat is Doritos and fruit leather.

    "Mom, the biker?"

    I was going to eat my sandwich, but okay, Mr. Impatient, follow me.

    We walked out of the kitchen and down the main hallway, past my old bedroom, over which my beer-bottles-of-the-world collection had once stood sentry—a room that now housed Mom’s sewing machine, her cigarette-making machine and the machine she uses to roll up old newspapers to convert them into fire logs. Where my bong once sat now rested a balsa wood mallard duck, sitting in a basket of silk freesia.

    Farther down the hall we descended a set of stairs into the back hallway, rife with the aroma of mildewed sporting equipment, and from there, down another set of stairs that led into the basement proper. Mom reached into a basket and handed me a pair of RayBans and put a pair on herself. She said, I’d lower the lights, but it confuses the chlorophyll cycles.

    Mom also keeps her grow-op at nearly a hundred percent humidity, and I hate humidity. Humidity feels like hundreds of strangers touching me.

    At the far end of the basement, where the air hockey table had sat dormant for decades, amid a cluster of astonishingly fertile female plants decked out in coloured ribbons (Mom’s genetic bookkeeping system), lay the beefiest, scariest death star of a biker I’d ever seen. "Holy crap, Mom, you’ve done some weird stuff in your life, but this tops it. What happened?"

    I electrocuted him.

    "You what?"

    I rigged up this corner of the room so that if I ever got into trouble, I could electrocute anybody standing in that puddle. I looked down—the biker was lying in a puddle.

    You set up a death trap in your own house?

    This is a grow-op, dear. I’m not raising miniature ponies down here.

    So why did you electrocute him?

    His name is, or was, Tim.

    "What did young Tim do to you?"

    He was trying to extort me into giving him a share of the crop.

    How much?

    Fifty percent.

    What an asshole.

    It really was an accident, Ethan. I wasn’t sure if it was going to get ugly, so I arranged things so that he was standing in the puddle. And then his cellphone rang, and I had a panic reflex and flipped the switch.

    I wanted to know what sort of ring tone a biker would select for his cellphone, but that could wait until later. I stared down at Tim. He looked heavy. And his—for lack of a better word—deadness was hard to absorb.

    Mom said, If you could drag him through the door into the carport, together we can probably lift him into the wagon.

    What then?

    You tell me, Ethan. You’re the family genius.

    Why couldn’t you call Greg? My brother is a hot-shot real estate sales guy.

    Greg is in Hong Kong on business.

    Here’s the thing: How do you get rid of a body? Pretend that right now you have a corpse in your house. It’s like trying to get rid of a side of beef with nobody knowing. It’s hard. Mom, do you have a carpet you want to get rid of?

    Why a carpet?

    The Sikhs are always rolling up the dead bodies of unwilling brides from arranged marriages and tossing them into the Fraser River. Maybe we can do that.

    Mom looked disappointed.

    What? What’s wrong with that idea?

    "What’s wrong is that wherever we put the body it has to stay where we put it. I wouldn’t want Tim floating to the surface. I think we should bury him."

    "We could roll him up inside the carpet and bury him."

    Okay. Let’s get the carpet from your father’s den. I’ve always hated it. It reminds me of your grandmother.

    We went upstairs. Dad used to work for a marine engineering firm. When he was laid off, he got into acting, mostly TV, but lately he’d been copping a few brief non-speaking roles in U.S. theatrical releases. Okay, he gets tiny crappy non-speaking parts in TV commercials where he always seems to be left on the cutting-room floor, as well as gigs as an extra in crowd scenes.

    In his den, all of his old ship models and nautical maps had been dumped off the shelves and heaped in a corner in favour of framed headshots—colour and B+W, serious, lighthearted, The Lover, The Sad Clown, Good Cop Gone Bad— as well as pictures of Dad shaking hands with a galaxy of made-in-Vancouver actors carted up to Canada to max out tax credits: Ben Affleck, Mira Sorvino, Kirk Cameron, Lucy Lawless, Raffi and various Muppets way down the Muppet food chain, like Cookie Monster. There was a new one of him with Uma Thurman. What was she like to work with? I asked Mom.

    Apparently a dream. She signed his cast and crew jacket.

    Some of Dad’s ballroom dancing outfits were draped over an armchair, awaiting dry cleaning.

    What your father sees in that horrid dancing I’ll never under­stand. Mom pointed to a braided rug beneath Dad’s desk. That was a wedding present. It’s given me the heebie-jeebies for decades. Is it big enough to hold Tim?

    I think so.

    She bent down. Lift up the desk, and I’ll pull it out from under the legs.

    I lifted the desk, and in so doing, toppled a five-hundred-thick pile of headshots of Dad as a Nazi. Mom puffed. Got it.

    We rolled up the rug and lugged it downstairs, where we made a biker-wrap sandwich out of Tim. I dragged him out into the carport—man, was he heavy—and I got oil stains on the carpet.

    Mom was holding open the wagon’s rear door. Come on, Ethan, show a little respect.

    You electrocute the guy where my air hockey table used to stand, and you ask me to show some respect?

    You and your brother never played air hockey after the first Christmas weekend.

    Well, it kind of sucked.

    "Well, I kind of drove all over town trying to find a place that wasn’t sold out of them."

    With one big huff, I lifted Tim into the back, but he fell out with an unnerving thump. Ethan, get him in the car.

    I did that, and we backed out of the carport and driveway.

    Okay, Mom said, "let’s find a nice big

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