Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint… — Max Barry

He is looking for something called The Omega Management System, which is the latest management fad in a tradition stretching back through Six Sigma and Total Quality Management to the practice of bleeding sick patients and investing in tulips.

There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful, Jones. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

The atmosphere of desperate, ignorant terror essential to healthy rumors seeps away, replaced by a silent, wary paranoia. People bunker down, jealously keeping what they know, which is nothing, to themselves.