Doretta Lau’s We Are Underlings turns the corporate workplace into a darkly comic afterlife where incompetent executives, impossible bureaucracy, and reanimated corpses are all just part of getting through another day at the office.
Zita Chang is an Associate Marketing Manager at the Nine Circles, a theme park dedicated to death, dying, and the afterlife. The concept is certainly unusual, but the workplace itself is depressingly familiar. Projects get bogged down in bureaucracy, decisions that should take minutes take weeks, and the people with the authority to solve problems often seem to have the least idea how the actual work gets done. Meanwhile, the underlings—the employees who understand what needs to happen and are actually trying to make it happen—are left fighting their way through an endless maze of approvals, departments, policies, and institutional inertia.
Continue reading “We Are Underlings by Doretta Lau: A darkly funny take on corporate culture and death”