What do you do if you're an artistic, creative person, and -- having stumbled up the corporate ladder at a well-known dot-com -- you have one of those "Who am I? How did I get here?" moments?

If you're Mike Daisey, you get out your rapier pen and collect the gems into a sparkling one-man show called "21 Dog Years: Doing Time @Amazon.com."

Currently in previews at the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan, "21 Dog Years" (which opens on May 9th) is Daisey's creative take on his odyssey to Amazon.com. It starts in 1998 where he landed, armed with a degree in "Aesthetics" from Colby College, as a Customer Service Representative in the call center.

As a result of his 26-month gig, audiences are learning about the dreaded "workflow" siren, a bleating, blinking light triggered when workers' "metrics" -- the speed with which they revolved calls -- trailed off.

By February 2000 he had left the company following about a year in Business Development (what do we do? we link!). Daisey's show takes the audience to a land where "server up time" and "process loads" are more than just jargon with the blue-shirted, khaki pants-wearing Amazon.com employees.

This is where "paradigm of growth" is taken as fact (pre-Nasdaq crash, of course), a world where Amazon.com's shares surge by 25 percent in one day "and no one knows why!"

Freed from a Non-Disclosure Agreement that once had him muzzled, the Maine native can now gleefully skewer the "cult of Jeff" (Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com) in the show. (For more info, go to: http://www.21dogyears.com.)

Following a preview this week, AtNewYork.com chatted with Daisey about the material.

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Q: The flashing red light in the show -- was it like that at Amazon.com?

There was a light but it wasn't as bright as that. There was this horrible piercing sound to let us know about our workflow. It's actually pretty standard in all call centers. We call it a corporate culture that works on these principles of shame and humiliation.

The siren goes off (if workflow falls) and everyone feels guilty that they might be helping to make that happen, and everyone then wants to work harder to shut it off.

The minute that siren happens, everyone leaps on the phones and the number goes back down. It's brutal and it's effective.

Q: This sounds like the constant "measuring" of people's results at their workstation that helped spark a union organizing movement at Amazon.com Were you there for that?

Yes I was. I ended up working with people who organized the union.

Q: What do you want former and current dot-commers to get from the show?

Hmm. I haven't really thought about that because I really feel the show's appeal and drive are for anyone in a corporate situation. I had two women working in the court system tell me they loved the show and that they are bringing friends back to it.

I don't have that much advice for people in however many dot-coms are left. But I think what's horrible is that for a while, and I think this always happens in corporate culture, the (long work weeks) at dot-coms became the norm, the rationale being: work very, very hard and you'll get this (stock option) lottery payoff in the end.

But what's happened is the lottery has turned out to be false and the hours didn't go back down, and it's filtered down to all corporations. There's research to support this. Americans have become the hardest working people on the planet. We take almost no vacation time. We work on average 53 hours per week. And it's going up. And people are not compensated for that generally, nor are they compensated in human dignity and respect.

I think it's really terrible. I'm not agitating for tons of vacation time. But really, it scares me the way corporations treat people and the way it becomes the norm. It doesn't take long until everyone's being treated in a dehumanizing fashion.

Q: Did you know during your Amazon.com time that you were collecting material?

While I was working at Amazon.com, I didn't think about it because I was too busy, and I was a true believer. It didn't occur to me at the time, which is a reflection of how blinded I was. It was only after I left and after I went to Spain and after watching the (Seattle) Kingdome implode (to make way for a new one), that I started to think about a show about this experience. I think I needed some distance and time.

For a long time my identity was that I worked in Amazon.com, which was strange because before I had nothing to do with the corporate world. I was an artist, a performer. It's strange to enter that world and lose your identity and have to find it again.

Q: Were there any redeeming qualities about your Amazon.com experience?

I am the person I am now. Before, I didn't know nearly as much about marketing. I learned from Jeff how to market, how to write, how to cultivate media, how to seek out and find sources of power, and sculpt an image of yourself. I learned that from him.

Q: Has 'Jeff' seen the show?

I don't believe he's seen it. I know from friends of his that they've discussed it at Amazon.com and that they've debated what to do. When they heard about the book (based on the show, due out in June) they were freaked out. He's visited the Web site, so I think he's clued in about what's going on.