The Bob Watson audiobook

Bizarre, hysterical and very moving in the end. (Neanderthals, Conployees, Mandarin speakers, the "Bob Watson".) Read it.

If you've ever been trapped in a boring meeting, you will find the opening to The Bob Watson hilarious. Bob Watson is an expert at ducking out of meetings. That alone is enough to make this a fun read. But as the plot develops and the characters are piled on, the story starts to feel like a crazy clown car whose brakes have been sabotaged, careening down a canyon road. At one point I was convinced that every single character was insane. Then the bricks all fall neatly into place and it has an extremely satisfying ending.

At first, I was a little worried that The Bob Watson did not have a booklength idea. The idea is fun — Bob Watson is a kind of superhero, with the power to slip out of a meeting unnoticed, and even slip back in (the “reverse Bob Watson”). But that idea only goes so far. Fortunately, the Bob Watson sprouts into something much bigger.The first part of the story is about the Bob Watson. Rick Blanco is a Silicon Valley grunt, working in “bottom tier data transformation”. His hero is a former colleague named Bob Watson, whose abilities Rick has emulated and, as the story goes on, seems to have extended and perfected. And he puts them to use for his own sanity in a mind-numbing, never-ending, acronym-laden operations meeting.But a superhero needs to serve the good. And that’s where the bigger story comes in. Rick has a nephew, Collin, who needs his help. The day of the story is Collin’s last day before his success-obsessed parents, Rick’s sister and her husband, move to Argentina, taking Collin away from the normalizing influences of his nanny, Audrey, and his Uncle Rick.Audrey is really the catalyst for Rick’s heroic mission. She promises to go to the Greek Theater in Berkeley to an English Beat concert with Rick if he will do something special with Collin. That’s Rick’s dream date.The story becomes a mega Bob Watson for Collin, driven by Rick’s genuine care for the kid, the kid’s obsession with Neanderthals (you have to read the book to find out about that), and Rick’s dream for a date with Audrey. Rick has to rescue the kid from his parents’ obsessive drive to make him a success (at age 8, he’s already taking an SAT prep class) — a Bob Watson from the deeply controlled life he lives. And if Rick is successful, Audrey will go to the concert with him.Things get pretty surreal from that point on — but Rick’s and his sister’s dealing, mostly unsuccessfully up to now, with the circumstances of their parents’ death, intertwined with Rick’s deflating attempts to find romance in his life. Neanderthals, inhumane HR strategies, ex-cons, a seemingly crazy old lady, and other things I can’t even remember flow into the hero’s struggle.In the end, like a lot of heroic struggles, the hero may not get what he was searching for, or he may, just differently than he thought.It’s a good book — I felt better for having read it. And if there’s a moral to the story, it’s that “Maybe it’s about getting a little crazy.” Stay in the meeting, where it’s safe and boring, or slip out and take your chances. There’s more to life than Key Performance Indicators.

This book was not at all what I expected, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I was hoping for a more fun, less graphic romp in comedy. I got a heart-felt message about what really matters in this world.

This is a fun and unusual book. Sometimes one doesn't know where the story is headed, then suddenly it all becomes clear. What seems like a tale of a bored worker trying to find ways to get out of work, but it really is a story about love, guilt, commitment, and coming to grips with life itself.There is humor along the way, and some really unusual characters, which make it all the more interesting.I would give this book a 4.5.

Fasten your seatbelt. The Bob Watson is a madcap race against time and conflicting priorities in California's go-go Silicon Valley - a raucous parody of the valley's twisted family and corporate values.

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hilarious