And Then We Came to The End: Petty Never Seemed So Perfect

And Then We Came to the End is the book I wish I’d written. Like Joshua Farris’ highly-believable characters, I worked for a small start-up company at the height of the dot bomb bust. In the process, I watched my office turn from a convivial den of idle gossip into a toxic snake pit of wild accusations, paranoia and desperation as people fought to keep their jobs amid waves upon waves of layoffs.

Work does strange things to people, and Farris totally gets it. It can be our social network with office happy hours and group lunches. It can provide validation and a sense of importance. But it can also be a source of tremendous anxiety when the money runs out and the layoffs have to start. When this starts happening, the social network of the office breaks down, and people….well….they lose it.

And Farris’s characters lose it with aplomb! The best such incident involves the desk chair caper, whereby people start swapping their desk chairs with better ones left behind by laid off co-workers. The machinating over these chairs is hilarious for about 20 pages, and then turns obsessive as employees sneak around late at night trying to steal the best, highest status chairs. But the plot thickens when it occurs to one co-worker that the desk chairs are bar coded – Gasp! – and HR can easily discover who’s sitting in what chair. This, of course, prompts a mad scramble as employees try to replace what they’ve taken. In the end, no one had the chair they thought they did, and no one in management ever cared.

Another involves a gossip firestorm after one woman in the office gets a haircut and overnight becomes “hot”.

Is it petty? Very. But in an office where people are struggling every day to prove their value and retain their status in the office pecking order, it rings true, too.

And it’s not all petty. One of the characters in management is trying to gracefully juggle a diagnosis of breast cancer while her small company slowly implodes around her. In many ways, she’s the heart and moral conscience of the novel, and I appreciated the fact that she was also the head of the company – And Then We Came to the End is far too multi-layered to be just a screed about working for “the man” or just about how work sucks. It is about that, but it’s also about how work is also like a family, filled with pranks, oddballs, good conversation and interesting people with interesting lives.