Читать книгу Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com - Mike Daisey - Страница 7

What I didn’t know, and what Amazon wasn’t telling, was that they were fishing for a very particular kind of worker for their customer service department. After all, the net was everywhere, so location would no longer be a factor, and every website basically looked the same, give or take a few design widgets and Flash-animated dancing monkeys. So to win you would have to provide the world’s greatest shopping experience, and to get that you would need smart, intelligent, motivated people who wanted to perform the mind-numbing routine of telephone customer service.

Normally it would be a Herculean task to find bright, college-educated people willing to work in customer service farms for a starting salary equal to that at the local Taco Bell. But these were not normal times. By 1998, fairy tales of boundless riches and glorious stock options were percolating through the media like a morphine drip, and Seattle was awash in disaffected intellectuals. Easy meat.

To catch their prey Amazon was anxious to prove that it was no ordinary company. That’s why SAT scores were requested, GREs if you had them, please, your college and high school transcripts as well as a written examination made up of book report-style questions about literature and grammar tests. It created an air of exclusivity: you felt as though you’d beaten out hundreds for this rare and special chance to work for nine dollars an hour answering the phone.

My first meeting with the recruiter was a revelation. She was a polite and talkative lady with thick glasses and an over-bite. Her favorite maneuver was to breathe in through her mouth, flare her nostrils, and then blast the air back out her nose—a human air conditioner.

She had called me on the phone right away, she told me, because of my background.

“My background?”

“Your degree.”

“Oh. I’m sorry about that—” I began, preparing to launch into my standard corporate apology for not having a background in human resources or political science and why I was still employable, please, give me a chance, I won’t let you down.

“I think you are exactly what we are looking for.”

That stopped me dead. No one had ever said that. I thought for a moment about what this job was: customer service. Selling books over the Internet. Unless there was a hidden element of art criticism to the job I really couldn’t see how aesthetics applied.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes, we have placed a large number of Ph.D.s and M.A.s at Amazon. It’s a very literate group, very cutting-edge. Young. I think that with your background you’d fit right in.”

“Oh.”

“Amazon is about broadening horizons, interfacing with technology, and taking a can-do approach to corporate solutions.”

“I like technology … I like horizons.” Jesus, I was giving a terrible interview. I was normally very good in interviews, better at them than at actually doing work, but I still couldn’t believe this woman actually thought I was qualified to do something. No one should believe that. It was throwing me off.

“Great! You know, Amazon is a very diverse workplace.” She put particular emphasis on diverse, as though it were a proper noun. “A lot of people with noserings, purple hair and tattoos, things like that … you know?” She verbally nudged me with her elbow. “You know?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s part of why I’m … ah … interested.” They have purple hair?

“Excellent! You know,” she said conspiratorially, “Amazon is always telling us to find them the freaks. They want the freaks, you know, people who might not fit in elsewhere. So when I saw your résumé … ah … ” She lost track of her tact for a moment. “Ah … I thought you would really find a home here. People need a home to work in, you know?”

“Well, I agree with that.”

She nodded vigorously. I nodded as well. She nodded back at me. We both sat there, nodding at each other like a couple of windup toys working through our hiring script. I was nodding to say: Yes, please give me a job. Her nodding said: Yes, you are a freak. We nodded all the way to signing me up for an informational meeting about the company and the job.

Years later I found out that the staffing company had a bin for the Amazon applications separate from all other assignments. The receptionist saw that the bin was labeled F.P. and asked what it stood for. “Oh, that’s for Freak Parade,” she was told. “You know, the Amazonians.”

The informational session for prospective Amazon recruits was what really convinced me to join the company. It was held in a fantastic conference room at the top of one of Seattle’s skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the Olympic Mountains, the Space Needle, and Puget Sound sparkling and glinting below. It was a postcard. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids from those lofty heights, or if Amazon had gone to the trouble of having them digitally inserted.

And my God, those people! The four Amazonians who came to speak with us had the clearest, cleanest skin that I’d ever seen. Two men, two women—they said they worked in customer service, which they referred to as “CS.” Two of the four wore REI fleece vests, and all four had some slight variation of the same khaki Dockers pants. And that hygiene. These folks must have an amazing medical plan that includes plastic surgery or genetic reprogramming, I thought. I was encouraged in my quest to prevent tooth decay.

I would never see those people again in my entire time at Amazon. I assume they worked for a black-ops section that specialized in providing fake employees who are startlingly sharp, attractive, and painfully fit.

We settled back and they began to talk about Linux tools and server uptime, and I suddenly realized that these people were geeks. Serious computer geeks who looked and smelled great.

“Amazon’s back end database is compiled nightly … ”

“Yeah, we play hard and we work hard.”

“Website builds are served from a main template … ”

“Please wear whatever you are comfortable in and express yourself—Amazon is a free environment for your mind to play in. We work hard and we play hard.”

“You’ll be learning UNIX tools to work directly with the database, which is hard, but you know, you learn a lot and that’s part of why it’s great to work so hard.”

“You need to be prepared to give a hundred and ten percent here … but we play hard, too.”

There was a certain inescapable sameness to their responses. They seemed fixated on the words working, playing, and Jeff. Jeff came up constantly. I had no idea who Jeff was.

“Jeff’s great. He works hard and plays hard, and he’s around all the time.”

“Jeff’s got an unforgettable laugh. It’s really … wow, I mean, it is really him, you know? It is really Jeff.”

“Jeff built this company out of nothing, really just himself and a few guys in a garage and now … all of this.”

Ah, Jeff must be the founder.

I really wasn’t clued in to what was going on, but from the way the sexy tech workers talked about Amazon.com, it appeared I’d really missed the boat. Contextually I picked up the first rule of many I would learn during my time at Amazon: The illusion that something has momentum and drive is as valuable as having momentum and drive. This led to an instant corollary: You can create something from nothing, if you spin it correctly.

To give you an idea of how clueless I was, I had originally assumed that Amazon.com was a lesbian Internet bookstore, owing to the historical origins of the word Amazon along with the company’s reputation for being “progressive.” Luckily, the geeks set me straight early in the presentation:

“AMAZON.COM IS CALLED AMAZON.COM BECAUSE THE AMAZON IS THE EARTH’S LARGEST RIVER, AND WE ARE THE EARTH’S LARGEST STORE. OUR GOAL IS TO PROVIDE THE MOST CUSTOMER-CENTRIC EXPERIENCE IN HISTORY FOR THIS ENTIRE PLANET.” I don’t know how management types at Amazon succeed in speaking in capital letters and in boldface, but they do.

I was enchanted. These tech-savvy, attractive, and well-spoken workers appeared blissfully happy. They were everything the folks I had worked with at all my temping assignments were not; they had everything my actor friends lacked in their work-a-day drudgery.

I had always had a love affair with geekdom but it sadly wasn’t reciprocal. I loved geek talk and did geek things but lacked some essential introvertedness that would allow me to really be one of their kind. My friend John diagnosed me during a heated discussion about George Lucas’s decision to allow Greedo to shoot first in the Cantina scene on the remixed DVD version of Star Wars: “Michael, your problem is your geekness lacks conviction. You do not bear the Mark of Kirk.” When I asked John what the Mark of Kirk was, he snorted derisively and I lost another ten points.

These Amazon folk weren’t supermodels, but they were embodiments of a kind of higher geek ideal: people who could make a UNIX box dance from the command line, look great while doing it, and then go dancing at a rave. The opportunity to be near them, surrounded by their coolness and learning from them while being paid, sounded like heaven itself. If I couldn’t be a geek, at least I could be in their company.

And what company! Though I hadn’t known who they were until that day, I was convinced they were making history. That phrase came into my head right from the beginning, and I’m certain they placed it there. I had a vague sense of riches, of future glory. No one spoke in specifics—they did say that there were stock options, which sounded glamorous compared to hourly wages. For all the sound and fury we left the meeting knowing about the same amount as when we walked in … but I was now filled with a lust I had never experienced for working at a job.

I took the elevator back down to earth full of hope, and the first thing I saw while waiting for the bus was the cover of the Seattle Weekly, featuring a one word splash: AMAZON.CULT.

The article caused quite a stir locally. It was a rather straightforward story: someone had joined Amazon in the very same position for which I was now jockeying, experienced a lot of weird stuff, and fled.

The details of the weirdness were striking. The author said that the employees were aggressively cheerful, dogmatic, and obsessive. He said that Amazon took micromanagement to a new level, that the corporate culture demanded unwavering loyalty, puritan devotion, and a zeal that could not be justified by the pay or the experience. Finally, he revealed that he had left Amazon and ended up with a contracting position at Microsoft, which I now believe must be like trading the third circle of hell for the sixth—different tortures, different bosses, same consequences.

Now, this is just a piece of advice I offer for free: if you should ever be in a position where you’re going to join a company but haven’t yet signed any papers, and if a major newspaper publishes a feature about how the company you are about to go to work for is a cult … say no. Thank you, no, it’s all right. Sorry to have wasted your time.

There are jobs out there that don’t require you to drink the Kool-Aid. Even if you are desperate, signs like these should give you pause. And I was far from desperate; I was a well-educated white man with a shiftless streak. By all accounts, I should never have gone back for the training—everything in my character would seem to rebel against it. It should have. It really should.

I told Jean-Michele about it over coffee at the Allegro, one of Seattle’s ubiquitous coffee houses. It is a conversation I cannot forget because so much was unsaid, and as I talked and talked I could hear a peculiar timbre creeping into my voice, foreign zeal and enthusiasm taking root between my verbs and adjectives.

“It was great. They’re good-looking, and the people are sharp, and sales are growing end to end in a paradigm of growth.… It’s a very explosive net business.” I had only a tenuous grasp of what I was talking about.

“Hmm.” She seemed unimpressed. “Why did they want your SAT scores?”

“Uh, to … you know, quality control.”

“I don’t know anybody who does that.” She stared at me over her latte. She has a killer stare that can rattle me, but this time I sailed through it.

“Oh, that just speaks to the, ah, the quality people they want for this.”

“Hmm.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” She did know. She wasn’t saying. I took the initiative.

“They’re a customer-centric company. We want to be the most customer-centric company in the world, and you need really intelligent, sharp people to pull that off.”

“We?”

“They. I mean they. But I’m hoping it will be we.”

“I thought you were just going to do this until you heard back on the editing position?” I had some leads on an editorial assistant job.

“Yeah, I’m still doing that. I just mean that while I’m here I want to, you know, fit in. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, you know.”

She stirred her latte. Anything worth doing is worth doing well. How unlike Michael to say that, she must have thought. It was a summer evening in Seattle and night was falling. We were in the upstairs section, which was open air. Warm night. Beyond her I could see the colors changing behind the University of Washington, where Jean-Michele was studying theater.

“Did you read the article?” she asked me neutrally.

“In the Weekly?”

“Yes.”

“The one about Amazon?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I did read that. Yes.”

We sat in silence as it got darker. She wouldn’t ask more; she was happy enough that I might be working, and with enthusiasm—that was more than she’d dared wish for.

In the weeks ahead I would vilify the article’s author, explain that he had never been an Amazonian—why, he hadn’t even made it through training! A sissy! He exaggerated, I said. He was cold and ironic and didn’t get Amazon. As if Amazon were an infection you could catch. As if.

But in that moment we were quiet. There was no anger or disagreement, only a simple, unspoken question: What are you thinking, Michael? Tell me. I said nothing to that. You can’t tell someone what you don’t know yourself.