The Circle: Non-spoiler Oddities

1) There are enough races at a typical college cross-country meet that an athlete would forget which one she's supposed to run in. (p. 14)
2) Women wear skirts in a building with glass floors. (pp. 15, 147)
3) A multibillionaire's personal library of 10,000 books is thought to be astoundingly large. (p. 26)
4) No one sees surveillance devices the size of very large thumbs. (pp. 62, 63)
5) An extremely innovative and inexpensive electronic device is going to market in a batch of only one million. (pp. 63, 68)
6) One of the rare times that the narrator chooses to give a detailed description is to tell us that a harbor seal's head is "rounded, grey, with the glossy sheen of polished marble". (p. 80)
7) It seems to be suggested that the U.S. has twelve thousand abductions per year in which a child is in serious peril. (p. 88)
8) A glass wall is used to provide a blank background for a visual display. (p. 145)
9) Foster kids don't know the addresses of the houses they live in. (p. 200)
10) In a book with generally basic vocabulary, "dissemble" is twice used in its archaic, obsolete sense (OED) of "disassemble". (pp. 237, 400.)
11) Gays are thought to account for at least ten percent of the population. (p. 284)
12) Creatures brought back from the Marianas Trench are kept in an unpressurized aquarium. (pp. 307, 315)
13) An object is described as "perfectly translucent". (p. 345)
14) Smallpox is still in the wild. (p. 374)
15) A camera is, in one place, described as giving worldwide viewers a panoramic view of its surrounding, while in another place it is described as allowing them to see only straight ahead. (pp. 308, 352)
16) Ten-pound tuna are considered large. (p. 473)

#12 bothered me SO MUCH! Thank you for these. I'm double-checking, but I think everything left on my similar mental list is spoiler-y.

Ya, that's one big thing as well for me, #12

#10 I probably glossed over that. There was another word I had to look up, which came back a few times, which was notable because the rest is indeed very easy to read. Can't remember it now of course.

I don't agree this is non-spoiler though. But I'm one of those people who closes their eyes and hums/yells lalalalalalala through the preview of the next week or for a film...

I also hate spoilers but I don't think anything in this list is spoilery. Maybe there's something that's given away somewhat if you're reading it already? But to one who hasn't picked it up yet, I don't feel like anything here is giving away anything.

Re:11 It's actually a pretty typical number that is often thrown about. It's not quite accurate, but eh. It's not like he went with the apparently typical guess of 25%.

1: 3) A multibillionaire's personal library of 10,000 books is thought to be astoundingly large. (p. 26)
Heh. I expect everyone on LT to laugh at this.

Excellent idea for a thread! I’ve been highlighting (e-book) so maybe I’ll have additions...

4>

I heard the 10% figure a lot in the 90s, but currently GLAAD's media guide directs readers to the Williams Institute for social science research, and that institute says 3.8% identify as GLBT.

And I've seen other figures in the 4% etc. There's no real way to know, since you can't ask everyone, plus all the people who aren't "out" etc. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a few percent higher than the figures show. *shrug*

It was recently proposed elsewhere on LibraryThing that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has an unreliable narrator. Can we conceive that The Circle's narrator is not intended to possess complete statistical accuracy?

>8 timspalding: I think the narrator needs more than just a dispensation for bad statistics. Or bad numbers.

8>

It's not the narrator who gives the stat; it's the guy with the astounding 10,000 volume library. Or is your point that the narrator may be lying about what that guy said? Heck, maybe the narrator's lying about the whole thing, and instead of the story we read in the book, something plausible and interesting happened!

>10 cpg:. Heck, maybe the narrator's lying about the whole thing, and instead of the story we read in the book, something plausible and interesting happened!

Hilarious!

10: LOL! Literally.

>10 cpg: As reviews go, that is pretty succinct.

>10 cpg: That's taking the concept of unreliable narrator to a new level :P

Love the oddities by the way :)

#2 - !!!! LOL

Nice oversight Mr. Eggers. NFW would I wear a skirt in that building. Wish fulfillment?

>15 Bookmarque: I really don't think any woman would...

Perhaps they're dressing in skirts and leggings, like the cool kids wear today…

Well, obviously I'm not one of the cool kids ;) I'd say that's not exactly office attire, but clothing varies per work environment, so yeah, who knows :)

Another oddity I've noticed is 'The Chute'. It opens and closes throughout the day. Surely a company like The Circle would offer 24/7 access to its Customer Service, sorry, Experience people...

19: Yeah, it's like a factory assembly line, weekdays 9-5 with strict lunch breaks, and a backlog from customers waiting on Monday morning. Though at one point Mae opens the chute herself when nobody is around, so access is possible.

#19 -- I had the same thought about "the chute." With as many employees as The Circle has, you would think they would have stumbled on the groundbreaking concept of "shifts" for their Customer Experience people.

I think the point of the "chute" is to emphasize its similarity to working conditions during the industrial revolution. Or perhaps The Jungle.

Yes, I think the concept of "the chute" rather than 24/7 customer service bothered me more than any of the other anomalies. And everyone giving them very close to 100% satisfaction rating if not 100% - now that is real science fiction. And if I got a follow-up wondering why I didn't give 100%, my rating would go down instead of up. I don't like badgering.

Oh yeah, and the ultra-deep sea creatures being brought up and put into aquariums. That one was pretty awful, too. I hated that whole part of the book.

i didn't take 'the chute' as literally opening and closing - just that a user was signing in to be available, and queries would be sent to available representatives. it did seem as though there were people working 24/7 at the circle, and they were signing in and out on their shifts. i did have a job, years ago, in a call centre, receiving in-bound calls and the system would trigger calls to our phones/computers once we signed in. i had my job at a time just before the internet became the go-to resource for everyone. so all of my work (or most of it) was telephone-based inquiries, along with a small % of internal requests for information or help that sometimes came by inter-office e-mails. we were tracked for our performance percentages on every shift and had targets we had to hit. (our pay was not based on it though. it wasn't telemarketing or sales. i worked for a credit card company helping existing customers.)

>25 JooniperD:, that's how I understood opening the chute too. Just opening up YOUR access to it.

But the image Eggers painted of the office was it opening in the morning and closing in the evening. He didn't make it very clear if there were other offices in other parts of the world. At least that hasn't stuck with me

>23 TooBusyReading:

I don't know. I think a lot of people if they're going to be seen making a judgement would be over generous. I think Mae rating (forgotten his name)'s sexual performance was spot on. He was crap but there's no way you're going to say that to someone's face. In a situation where everyone expects 100% I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be swayed.

>25 JooniperD:

It reminded me of my time in a call centre too (inbound sales). Everything is monitored and you're rated, and paid, on performance.

re: #27 jerrymmm

hi jerry. i also don't recall any specific mention of formal work hours, but i came away from the read feeling like there were just always people around, working. it seemed regular business hours happened, but so much more was expected of circle employees, hence all the at-work events and dorm rooms. and mae logging in to work at 2am or 3am.

On page 84 of my edition it says: "The morning was busy, as Dan had warned her it would be. He'd gathered her and the hundred-odd other CE reps at eight a.m., reminding them all that opening the chute on Monday morning was always a hazardous thing. All the customers who wanted answers over the weekend certainly expected them on Monday morning."

I think that implies that no one was answering questions over the weekend, or prior to eight a.m. on Monday.

30: That was my understanding too. 9-5 IIRC (somewhere there's mention of the times she clocked in and out). Also she's always having to time her lunch break to the minute, and that too was a group deal; the supervisor released them all at once. Though there is a scene where Mae is opening the chute on her own after hours. It's not a highly consistent book...

ah, right! thanks norabelle! i recalled that scene, but then did some sort of weird extrapolation in my brain that even though there were business hours, so much more was expected of employees and they were just around a lot. so yes, it would be weird to have no access to help for two days, if the company is at the level of the circle. but their department was not dealing with regular users, right? it was dealing with business partners or people using the circle for business purposes?

I think that The Circle itself has no business hours, but there are particular hours during which people who work in CE are expected to answer questions/requests.

CBG! You would be a kick-ass copy editor! wow.

#32 -- My understanding is that Mae and the rest of the CE team was working with the companies that advertise on The Circle. As with Facebook, advertisers are the customers; users are just the product.

A few more...

This is a Nook e-book, w/ 333 pages, so adjust accordingly.

* The company that has invented a universal secure identification system requires a birth certificate from new employees. (35)
* A password to company devices is provided on a slip of paper, and apparently can’t be changed by the employee. And why is a password necessary? (36)
* A biochemist is working on facial recognition and figured out how to embed an electronic chip in bone. (45)
* The brand new auditorium for the campus of 10,000+ employees has 3,500 seats, and it’s assumed the newbies are present. (46)
* A screen is a physical device with a dedicated function that has to be activated. (71)
* An organic medical sensor is swallowed, and remains in the body collecting data to send to a wrist device. (109)
* All medical records have been retrieved and consolidated but the doctor has to ask about prescriptions. (111)
* Counting the grains of sand in the Sahara by algorithm? (163)
* Nobody knows what happened in meetings with transparent politicians. (225)
* Genealogy research starts from the middle ages and goes forward. (288)