"A mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm finds his consciousness uploaded into the company's internal Slack channel"-- Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company's internal Slack channels. At least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it is just an elaborate ploy to exploit their lax work-from-home policy. Disembodied and alarmed by the looming abyss of an eternity on-line, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to find out what happened to his body and help him escape. Slackbot, Slack's AI assistant, helps Gerald navigate his new digital reality. Why is Slackbot so interested in Gerald? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean? -- adapted from jacket
"I’m not normally a fan of comic novels , but I make an exception for Calvin Kasulke’s surreal office comedy, told entirely through the medium of Slack. In it, an underperforming public relations executive finds his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the servers of the instant messaging system, while his body remains unharmed, comatose in his apartment. His increasingly frantic requests for help are assumed by his superiors to be merely an irritating improvisational ‘bit’—and one they are willing to overlook, now that he is always online and apparently never more committed to his work. This is a compulsively readable novel that genuinely made me laugh out loud. I think it will appeal to anyone who has spent the pandemic working from home—read: almost everyone. Reminiscent of And Then We Came to the End , Joshua Ferris’s workplace novel told in the third person plural, it perfectly captures the choppy, polyphonic Greek chorus of a company’s #general channel. As one worker asks, rhetorically: “what is a workplace but a cult where everyone gets paid?” Is it a gimmick? Sure, but it’s one that I really enjoyed and I think you will too."
