"Please Report Your Bug Here"

Josh Riedel worked at tech startups for several years before earning his MFA from the University of Arizona. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Joyland, and Passages North, among others. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Riedel applied the Page 69 Test to Please Report Your Bug Here, his first novel, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“You can trust them,” she said. “They’re like us, more interested in what you can do with tech than how much you can make.”

I appreciated Noma’s favorable view of me, but it wasn’t like I was that altruistic. I still wanted a paycheck. I still needed a paycheck. “What if the Corporation finds out?” I asked. “Any potential deal could fall through.” I worried if the Corporation couldn’t acquire us, they’d clone our app and crush us. We wouldn’t be the first.

“The Yarbons won’t leak this,” Noma assured me. “You’ll see when you meet them. I want you to visit, before an acquisition makes that less possible.” We made plans to ride BART together into West Oakland the next morning. “This is their warehouse,” she said, handing me her phone, open to a satellite image. The warehouse was nestled near the train tracks, close to the Port of Oakland, where cargo ships arrived with supplies from the other side of the world. I handed her phone back. “Meet at Civic Center?”

“Sure,” she said, sliding her phone into her pocket. “But be patient. I’m taking the N.”

- - -

Two N MUNIs passed Civic Center station, seventeen minutes apart, and Noma still hadn’t shown. I waited for a third before taking the escalator up to ground level to find reception. A few texts appeared.

Have to fly home for Dad’s bday

Mom scheduled party for today even tho we agreed on Sunday (his actual birthday)

Go without me

I emailed directions

Back on the BART platform, a group of Santa Clauses passed around a flask as we waited for the train. It wasn’t even lunchtime and they were already drunk. I boarded a different car. Coffee and vomit stains on the seats, toenails and stray hairs on the carpeted floor.

At Embarcadero, a woman about my age sat down next to me.

This is a fairly decent introduction to Please Report Your Bug Here. It features our narrator, Ethan, and Noma, his coworker at DateDate, a dating app startup, talking about whether they can trust a third-party--the Yarbons--with a secret. That seems fairly enticing! Unfortunately, if a browser didn't know anything else about the book, they wouldn't know from this page alone that the secret is that Ethan and Noma have discovered a mysterious bug in DateDate that transports people to other worlds, nor would they know that the Yarbons are members of an off-kilter art-tech collective called Yarbo.

Please Report Your Bug Here has been called a literary sci-fi thriller, but it's also a novel about work, and this section on page 69 highlights that. Ethan appreciates Noma's view of him, but he also admits that he needs his job to support himself. In other words, while he's interested in tech, that's not the only reason he's working in startups. He needs money to support himself and also to pay off the six-figure debt he amassed as an art history major at Stanford. This tension between work that you love and work that earns you money is central to the book. As is the fact that this is a San Francisco novel, which this brief section captures. Anyone who's ever lived in San Francisco knows that the N can take forever to arrive, that BART might not always be the cleanest place (though the new cars we have now are nice!), and that SantaCon is, well, kind of annoying!

All in all, I'd say the Page 69 Test works fairly well for my novel, touching on the fact that Ethan and Noma have a secret to keep, as well as the themes of money, work, and San Francisco.

Visit Josh Riedel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue