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JPod by Douglas Coupland
In JPod, Ethan Jarlewski and his five co-workers (whose last names all start with J) work on a video game for a software developer in Vancouver. Although they do as little work as possible. The marketing director has instructed them to insert a cute turtle (because his son like turtles) into different places in the game to facilitate product tie-ins. Realizing that this will render the game useless, they do just enough work to stay employed, and spend the rest of their time surfing the internet for shocking things, writing up descriptions to sell themselves on eBay, freezing office items with liquid nitrogen, and adding a secret Ronald McDonald to the video game. Ethan's home life is just as strange. His mother sells hydroponic marijuana, his father wants to break into movies and is having an affair, and his brother is into get-rich-quick schemes which include smuggling Chinese immigrants. Douglas Coupland's latest satire of modern culture has received mostly positive reviews with the Rocky Mountain News saying, "It's to his credit that in JPod he's still nimble enough to take the post-modern man - too young for Boomer nostalgia and too old for youthful idealism - and drown his sorrows in a willful, joyful satire that revels in the same cultural conventions that it sends up."
