Soon she is supervising newbies and wearing a headset, through which she is asked survey questions all day long about various consumer projects.

Time passes Mae gets more responsibilities and more screens. I don’t know about you – but to me this is my idea of hell. When he sends her multiple invitations and she misses them because she is getting acclimated to her new job, Alistair complains to HR and she ends up being reprimanded by the company. Her Circle account automatically connected with her previous social media accounts, and somewhere in the history of her Facebook account, Alistair found photos of a trip to Portugal that she took years ago. The first time Mae is reprimanded, it’s because she did not respond when a co-worker named Alistair invited her to a Portuguese-themed party.

These social media platforms are not just entertaining distractions they are job requirements. One screen at her desk shows an endless feed of comments from other employees at the Circle ( Way to go newbie Mae! and so forth) another shows a broader social media platform that connect millions of people worldwide who have Circle accounts. In addition to responding to customer queries, Mae is slowly given more and more duties, most of which involve meaningless chit-chat with insipid people. Mae’s position is entry level – she responds to customer queries and complaints in the Customer Experience department – but she is happy to be there and is assured she will move up in no time. Annie has risen quickly through the ranks at The Circle and is part of the “Gang of 40,” a group of high-level Circle execs who counsel and advise the company’s three founders, who are known collectively as the Three Wise Men. This novel’s protagonist is the twentysomething Mae, who sometime in the not-so-distant future lands a job at The Circle – a tech giant that makes Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and so forth obsolete by combining all their functions into one – through her college friend Annie.

The circle dave eggers sparknotes