"Ever found yourself all at sea at work? Suffered from information overload? " "If you have, Houellebecq's grim, funny and clever tongue-in-cheek exploration of corporate jargon, psychobabble and the ineffectual use of long words is for you. " "Just thirty, with a well-paid job and no love-life, our narrator smokes 4 packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories - cows and all - in his spare time. He's tolerably content in his boredom - until he's packed off with the unimaginably ugly Raphael Tisserand to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system. "--BOOK JACKET