Team Player

New Book Spoofs Work in the New Millennium

Based on his 25-year roller coaster ride in the Information Technology (IT) industry, Biff Mitchell's latest novel, Team Player, explores the world of work in the 21st Century. The story is set in an uncomfortably close future where the world is run by homicidal marketing managers who kill for love, company, and the almighty promotion.

Aside from the talking brain cells and the rampaging neutrinos, says Mr. Mitchell, the angry Italian ghosts and the Bolshevik computers, and the thirty naked pagan women who save the universe with help from a man who thinks he's a tree aside from all that: this story could actually take place in any global IT company headquartered in the tallest building in the world, which might be built as an amplified replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

In one scene, 32 new hires are laid off before their first day of work. At the mandatory farewell lunch they're told: 'And, yes, you will be missed - all the potential, the energy and enthusiasm, the positive attitudes that were the reason you were hired in the first place will be noticeably absent in the lives of the people who would have been working with you. But, then, that's the software business.' Heads around the table nod in agreement.