Burnout Fever

by P. Orin Zack

Overview

Everyone gets job burnout at one time or another, but what if you didn't recover from it? What if nobody did?

Freelance writer Melanie Stroub was happily trashing webevangelist Wilfred McQuarry�s weekly rant about angels when she got it, and ended up fixated on angels. It was like that for everyone: whatever you were doing when you got 'Burnout Fever' was carved into your soul. Following a free-ranging conversation was no longer possible, and everything had to be translated back to your fixation. For some, it made little difference; for others, it spelled disaster.

Barry Lieber knew all about it. He'd watched helplessly while Melanie succumbed one morning over breakfast, and it drove him into joining a grassroots effort to find a cure. His activist friend Derek had good contacts in D.C., even in Congress. But there were others who looked at Burnout Fever as an opportunity, and when McQuarry incited a religious war over the victims, it stopped being just a health issue.

Nobody was safe. Every promising lead turned sour. The righteous, the wealthy, and the powerful all sought shelter from the madness, from the logic-defying pattern of contagion that stymied even the Centers for Disease Control. It defied explanation, but without a cure, the Earth would vanish like a bad dream. And time was running out.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014511469
Publisher:	Philip Zack
Publication date:	04/13/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	886 KB

About the Author

Ever since I learned to speak binary on a DIGIAC 3080 training computer, I've been involved with tech in one way or another, but there was always another part of me off exploring ideas and writing about them. Halfway to a BS in Space Technology at Florida Institute of Technology during the Apollo years, I ditched out and walked into a data center job with Franklin National Bank a few years before it made history. Software contract houses, like the one I signed up with after the layoff, not only offered paid benefits, but kept paying you between contracts while they searched for your next gig. Of course, by then, I'd already been infected with the ideas of Edward de Bono, so my approach to problem solving, and therefore every part of my life, including writing, was tacking towards uncharted territory.

Since then, I've worked on a remote weather station for NOAA and on NASA/JPL's Deep Space Network, diddled with a huge database for a DOD competition at what used to be McDonnell-Douglas, subverted the design of the database driving one of the Air Force's aircraft test sets, wrote tech docs in the 'Dead Languages Group' at Microsoft, and even created the entire IT infrastructure for a manufacturing business I co-owned.

And all along the way, I wrote. So far, there's three novels, as well as lots of short stories and essays.