'Hilarious … cynically examines the angst of modern office life' XFM 'Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny' City AM 'Happy to be back at work? If not, you may find solace here.' Daily Express 'Wry and observant' Director 'Witty and wry … funny without getting into ranting territory … some real gems' PQ magazine 'Anyone who has worked in an office will have a wry grin, a grimace and even occasionally laugh out loud at some of the inspired observations in this book … highly entertaining.' Personnel Today
Who, when they were six years old, ever said, 'Hey, I want to spend forty years of my life wondering what value-added knowledge capital is in a size-restricted cubicle surrounded by people who watch Bargain Hunt'?
Who indeed? But look around you. If you're reading this between the hours of 9.00 - 5.30 on a weekday, you'll recognize all too much of the picture Malcolm Burgess paints in his wry, darkling hilarious book.
I Hate the Office was originally a column in London's Metro newspaper. Malcolm Burgess' blackly funny pen-portraits of the realities of the modern workplace entertained millions of people every Monday for 2 years.
In September 2006, Icon Books first published the hardback edition of I Hate the Office - and it quickly became a bestseller. 'Office workers of the world unite!' became the slogan, heard quietly at first at water-coolers in the capital, and then spreading, stealthily, but with an unmistakable rhetoric power, across the length and breadth of the land. The masses are massing, the weapons are being sharpened - the Revolution is now but moments away! Well, almost.
So, what is it that makes the 9.00 to 5.30 sentence quite so gruesome? I Hate the Office is a painfully hilarious A to Z showing just why the office has become the modern byword for servitude.
From the agony of the away day via Hot Desking, office politics, romances and parties, to the sheer terror of work reunions or 'teleconferencing', Burgess vents spleen on the horrors of the working week.
Ending with the unique Corporate Bullshit Detector, I Hate the Office is the essential weapon in the war against the angst of modern office life.
As French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: 'Man was born free but everywhere he is in a sales conference just off the M25!'
I Hate the Office - read the book and break the chains!
