The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise by Georges Perec

having carefully weighed the pros and cons you gird up your loins and make up your mind to go see your head of department to ask for a raise so you go see your head of department let us assume to keep things simple--for we must do our best to keep things simple--that his name is mr xavier that's to say mister or rather mr x

If you don't want to read this entire book (all 80 of its small pages) you can instead look at the flowchart below which was the inspiration for the exercise. Georges Perec, possibly the most member of the experimental writer's group Oulipo, is probably best known for his 800 page Life: A User's Manual, but this slim volume is really the novelization of the flowchart, written in the way Perec imagined a computer might speak--there's no punctuation between sentences, no capitalization, no direct dialog. And given that, it's the perfect length.

The premise is in the title: the protagonist, unnamed, wants to ask his boss for a raise. A number of obstacles may or may not arise--if/then is one of the computational structures Perec structures the book around, alongside the loop--and depending on those, different options present themselves and so on. Branching narratives are common in Oulipe texts, and TAOAYBFAR's twist is to present all possible options and then follow them to their terminus which is, in reality, just another, slightly modified version of the loop the proagonist is stuck in.

For 70 of the pages, the narrator is entirely unsuccessful in asking for his raise. He's blocked by Fridays, weekends, vacations, measels, Lent, angry coworkers, and, most cleverly, the absence of his boss who is in fact stuck in the same loop of approaching his own surperior and being denied. You might think this would be tiresome and horse-beating, but in fact Perec is not much like a computer at all because he inserts a biting and poignant narrative between the lines. The protagonist may not get much closer to his raise in these 80 pages, but we do learn that he's been at the firm since he was a teenager, that he's now married with children, and during the time span covered by the iterations in the book itself, we know that he's at least 5-6 years closer to, well, death by the time he finally gets his ask.

It's not much of a spoiler, perhaps, to reveal that the end of the book is just the beginning of another iteration of the loop--after asking his boss for the raise, which is only an additional 9 pounds per month(!), he's given what amounts to a polite brush off as his boss says he deserves it but it needs to be sent up the ladder, a ladder that both the reader and the protagonist know is ultimately unscalable. Maybe in six months, the dispassionate text says, or maybe 6 months after that.

But the text isn't really dispassionate either. One of the funniest, most poignant jokes is the repetition and mutuation of passages:

you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organization of which you are an employee
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of one of the biggest firms in one of the key sectors of one of the nation's most infulential industries
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the consortium which pays you a pittance while grinding away the best years of your life

Perec shows his cards in the second person narration: the protagonist doesn't have a name because their name is your name, their endless loops are your endless loops, the slow grinding away of the best years of your life under the crushing machinery of capitalism is the day-to-day existence of most people, and tiny mutations in the sequence are the rays of hope, which are always yanked away but promised again. But at least Perec makes it funny.