It’s 2012, and the formerly dominant Internet 1.0 company Boing;) is in steep decline (think early 2000s Yahoo!). Unique users have fallen sharply, people are migrating from old-school portals to search engines and smartphones, and Boing;) simply isn’t cool anymore. In the midst of an ongoing attempt to revitalize the company called Project Resurrection, Senior Manager of Marketing Insights Glenn Cregg announces a new personal motto: “Being Objective Makes Me Effective.” The new motto gets Glenn some buzz, and soon he’s pitching a new music streaming service he believes could be a huge win for Boing;). But when Glenn finds his sole direct report, Jocelyn, lying on the floor of her cubicle with an opened bottle of pills, he adds a personal project to his agenda: Project Clarion Call, intended to help Jocelyn navigate whatever has caused her to apparently attempt suicide.

Glenn soon finds himself on the rise within the failing company—dealing with a bizarre collection of upper-management and C-Suite types, including a Senior VP of Product who can mesmerize people with his whiteboarding skills, a Senior VP of Consumer Marketing who declares everything is “delightful” while mangling the English language with oddball vocabulary choices, and a CEO who talks as if he’s on an MTV reality show, yo. When Glenn manipulates research data to push his streaming music service, however, he inadvertently violates his own new motto and begins learning just how difficult it is to keep a sinking ship like Boing;) afloat.

Author Brian W. Robinson writes PROJECT BOING;) from real-life experience, having spent most of his career in Silicon Valley working for a list of famous companies, and he nails the frequently absurd atmosphere of relentless hype and artificial casualness that exemplified their “campus”-style offices. The story, told by Glenn, takes a while to gather momentum, in part because of Glenn’s dry, analytical Voice (his habit of defining acronyms in real-time is both useful and subtly hilarious):

“According to the legend, many Boingers had gotten into the habit of spending their Fridays WFH = working from home, so the campus felt like a ghost town at the end of every work week, and it was difficult to conduct meetings and GSD = get shit done. When Free Friday Muffins & Bagels was instituted, Boingers were enticed back to the office […] Presumably, we had reestablished the habit of working from work on Fridays sufficiently enough that we could now GSD without muffins or bagels.”

But once you settle into his rhythms, this becomes a very entertaining story. The glimpse into this very recent era of American capitalism and hype is fascinating, and eventually the characters and plot lines come together to weave a frequently funny narrative.

Much of PROJECT BOING;)’s humor will depend on the reader’s familiarity with the time-period and the corporate cultures being lampooned. If you’ve never heard the term “Tiger Team,” you may not find the fact that Boing;) is absolutely riddle with them (and even has a top-secret mega-Tiger Team whose members are forbidden to speak of it) particularly funny. Without that context, much of the humor is robbed of its real power.

Robinson also makes an odd choice concerning Jocelyn and her perceived suicide attempt. While Glenn takes a new interest in his direct report and makes efforts to engage her, the incident more or less vanishes from the story until the very end. Even after its resolution late in the game, the reader might wonder what the point of it was. The story is primarily concerned with all the absurdity and grinding failure at the company, so Jocelyn’s personal demons don’t contribute much of anything to that aspect of the story and never elevate to a place where they matter all on their own.

Though it suffers a bit from low stakes, this is a funny, interesting, and well-written novel that will amuse—especially if you recall the time when Yahoo! could have bought Google for $1 million and turned it down.

Brian W. Robinson’s PROJECT BOING;) offers a sleek and efficient satire of a specific era of dotcom corporate culture.

~Jeff Somers for IndieReader