Matt Bors

"Hard lock!"

Twenty-five-year-old Adam Theuret hears the call and comes running. Another Xbox 360 has just crashed.

A new update to Microsoft's 11-million-selling video game system is about to go live, and it's being tried out first by a roomful of $8.25-an-hour minions. Outfitted at each desk with a flat-screen TV and three Xbox 360 consoles, the testers are checking that Xbox 360's latest boredom-eradicating features—which enable you to fast-forward through movies before they've finished downloading, and chat with your friends via MSN instant messenger while you download free game samples—can be installed and used without the system freezing or crashing. So far, it's touch and go.

Days from now, every Xbox 360 user will be prompted to install the new upgrade when they boot up their machines. But the testers have to do it first, downloading the software, then performing the new tasks, over and over, on several units of each variation of the console: Those sold in North America, the European Union, Japan, and "Rest of Asia" all differ.

Each row of testers has a designated "lead," who manages the team and copies down the data: IP addresses, software version, serial numbers. The star of the leads is Theuret, a man of unerring precision and efficiency, clad in a black T-shirt with dates of the VMC WORLD TOUR listed on the back. VMC isn't a band, though; it's our employer, the company Microsoft has hired to check the Xbox 360 upgrade for bugs.

The process is both grueling and, from the evidence, ineffectual; last week, Microsoft announced that the "failure rate" of its Xbox 360—which some Web sites have pegged as high as 30 percent—was "unacceptable." The company said it was extending its warranty on the machine from one to three years and will take a billion-dollar hit to cover the mess.

Countless cords are plugged and unplugged. Every few minutes, someone else yells "Hard lock!" as a Microsoft executive and a few leads come running over to assess the situation.

In each row, the nine others—myself included, each of us working since 7:30 a.m.—have no choice but to sit and silently assess the chaos. A guy sitting next to me fiddles with his controller, feeling, as we all do, a mildly suicidal mixture of boredom and panic, and then sheepishly asks: "Are we going to get to play today?"

Not today, my friend.

The "dream job" of being a video game tester may sound like a way to get paid for doing exactly what you'd choose to do in the middle of the afternoon on your own living-room sofa, but the reality is very different. To find out how different, I spent a couple of weeks at Volt, a Redmond company that is the country's largest independent video game tester. Hundreds of testers work at Nintendo and Microsoft during crunch times. More than 50 smaller Seattle-area video game developers—like Surreal, Valve, and Zipper—employ anywhere from five to 20 testers each. But when it's time to contract out some of the most grunt-worthy testing tasks, companies call Volt.

After responding to a help-wanted ad on the Web, I received a call within an hour.

"It says that you're a passionate female gamer," my recruiter began.

My interview consisted of a few questions: What kinds of games do I play? On what kind of system? Can I prove that I'm legally allowed to work in the U.S.? Can I get there on time? The recruiter then started giving me directions.

"Do I have an interview?" I ask.

"That was the interview."

Volt's contract employees—a term meaning, roughly, "no guarantees, no benefits"—pick up their shifts by calling an employment hot line at 2 p.m. If you're selected for a shift, you get an automated confirmation call back that night. Which I did.

I show up at 7:30 a.m. the next day. Volt sits across the street from a golf course on Willows Road in a desolate area in Redmond. Volt's parent company was founded in New York in 1950 as Volt Technical Services, publishing technical manuals during the Korean War. Known today as Volt Information Sciences, it has more than 300 offices around the world and is in the business of temporary staffing, yellow-pages publishing, and information systems. (Its Redmond-based tech consulting unit is called VMC; hence the T-shirt.) Volt's stock has taken a beating this year as its profits have fallen.

In the testers' area of the parking lot, one car has a door attached with duct tape and willpower alone. A few guys in their early 20s, wearing black, are smoking near the entrance. On a counter in the cafeteria sits a row of sign-up sheets, each for a different lab, or workroom, upstairs. I enter and look for a sign-up sheet with my name on it, without success.

"Sorry," chirps one of the receptionists, after telling me that, despite confirming my shift the night before, I'm not working after all. "Maybe get here a little earlier next time?"

My shift has already been taken by someone who wasn't on the schedule, but who came in and signed his name on the "Bullpen" sheet, a kind of day-laborer list.

"It's literally like the 'shape-up' that they used to do at the dock," says Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech). He's referring to an early-20th-century way of hiring longshore workers and deckhands. "You go there, and you kind of hang around, and they say, 'All right, we need five guys to help unload this ship—you, you, you, you, and you. The rest of you come back tomorrow.' It's not any different." Courtney, a former Microsoft employee, has been working on organizing groups like video game testers for almost a decade.