Читать книгу Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com - Mike Daisey - Страница 8

When I was first born into the corporate workforce I became possessed with an insatiable lust to steal office supplies. What childhood indulgences led to this I do not know—too many Crayolas, a penchant for eating paste—but the compulsion reared its head when I started temping. I also discovered I was not alone.

Let’s be clear—everybody filches some supplies. When you are a cube jockey it’s the safest form of rebellion. I’d find myself acting out passive-aggressive impulses by bringing home pieces of my workplaces and depriving my enemies of the same.

Well, Mr. Hotpants Lawyer thinks he is going to yell at me because his focaccia is dry? Oh, he’s got a world of hurt coming—I am so going to open a can of whupass on this sorry sonofabitch, a can of whupass I like to call, “I Ain’t Got No Dry-Erase Pens.” I know he doesn’t have them, because I’ve got every last one here in my backpack. I’m rich! Shit, I might just give them to friends, let neighbor kids have some, hand them to unemployed folks on the street who look like they might want to write and then erase something. If Mr. Lawyer Man thinks he can tangle with me, he’s going to wake up without his legal pads. Won’t be much of a law office without legal pads, will it? Oh, they laughed at me when I said a temp could rule the world—now, look at the heights from which I mock you all and know despair! Despair! I will bury you! I will bury you! It’s at this point in the fantasy that I take off my shoe and bang it on the table until they take me away.

I think everyone probably steals a little more than they intend to because, in an office world where everything is regulated, every gesture of freedom is prized above rubies. The more you take, the more you know you’ve gotten away with. It’s easy to see how someone with certain flaws in their character might become trapped in a cycle of addiction—the futility of their pointless, deskbound existence writ starkly in the inventory of pointless, extravagant items stolen. I’ve discovered over the years that I am hardly alone. In small, embarrassed voices many have told me how they, too, find some comfort in their collections of Post-its and Wite-Out.

A partial inventory of my filched office supplies:

67 legal pads, yellow

62 transparent page protectors

31 lined pads, 8 1/2” by 11”, white

15 spiral-bound notebooks, white

8 rulers:5 plastic, 2 wooden, 1 drafting

5 staplers:3 full-size, 2 miniature

4 staple removers

4 mousepads:2 Amazon-branded, 1 blue, 1 black

3 boxes black felt-tip pens, 0.5 mm (15 count)

3 bottles Wite-Out

2 gel wrist protectors

2 boxes black felt-tip pens, 0.7 mm (15 count)

2 boxes black Sharpies (20 count)

1 box red Sharpies (20 count)

1 box green Sharpies (20 count)

2 packages Post-its, pink, medium

2 packages Post-its, yellow, medium

1 package Post-its, yellow, large

There are also some odder items that defy logical explanation—the printer cartridge to an ink-jet printer I do not own and the whiteboard markers for whiteboards I will never have. This pirate booty fills up a cheap IKEA cabinet in the corner of our small apartment. Sometimes I like to open the cabinet and rearrange my loot, marveling at its quantity, smelling the markers until I am dizzy with possibility. I imagine this is how dragons in bad fantasy novels feel.

Jean-Michele’s Polish sensibilities make her disdainful of such waste, and she is both repulsed and aroused by my ability to simply take without cause. She insists on revisiting the subject every few months.

“So … you just walk out with this stuff.”

“Yes.”

“No one ever says anything?”

“Nope.”

“I would never do that. I would be scared to death.”

I feel a surge of pride in my desperadoness. It’s nice to have your mate admire you, even if she knows you are an idiot.

“What would you do if they caught you?”

“That’s a good question.” Pause. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“Of course it’s possible.”

“It’s like jaywalking. No enforcement.”

“This is Seattle. They catch and prosecute jaywalkers here.”

“True.” Seattle is America’s Most Polite City, which means that even if race relations go to hell and the homeless are corralled into a few square blocks while anarchists break all the Starbucks windows, police officers will still be available to enforce the jaywalking laws. God bless the Emerald City.

Near the end of my temping career Jean-Michele looked into my cabinet. “You keep taking bigger and bigger things,” she said. “There has to be a point where they notice. I’m afraid I’m going to come home one night and you’ll have a desk and rolling chair. Then you’ll end up in jail and I won’t be able to bail you out and then you’ll be in prison and our future unborn children will have a criminal for a father—if you even get a chance to father them from jail—and we’ll be forced to copulate in the conjugal visit trailer!”

“That really would be something.”

“You’re never going to use all this.” She knew she was losing. “Just try to keep it all in this corner.”

You can understand now that when I entered Amazon for training I had more than a passing interest in the location and quality of the office supplies. This, I have always felt, is the best way to divine the true nature of a workplace; it’s the whitebread modern equivalent of haruscimancy, the Roman art of divination from bird entrails. As luck would have it, the supply area was adjacent to the training room where my first four weeks of Amazonian life would take place, so before stepping in for the first day I quickly scanned the contents.

In a word: schizophrenic. There were huge quantities of supplies in an open arrangement, which usually denotes abundance and largesse, but the pens were Bics and the pads were the low-quality, yellow lined paper ones with chunks of undissolved wood I remembered from grade school. No Sharpies. No staplers. I had never seen such an ascetic display. The setup was brutally efficient and lacked all pretense of fun—and it looked cheap as hell for a thriving corporation with global reach.

Where were the Palm Pilots for all of us, and the personal wireless devices, the cell phones with their soothing ice-blue glow and ergonomically designed contours so our hands would never tire? Or the clear rubber balls that pulsed light when you bounced them? I loved those. Dot-coms constantly gave them away on the streets to “raise awareness”—they were cool, but all they made me aware of was that I wanted more glowing rubber balls.

As I waited for the first day of training to begin I remember wondering why the supplies looked so familiar. It only came to me much later, too late to serve as a final warning. A few months earlier I had worked as a receptionist at the law offices of a public defense fund, and the paper and pen quality there had been the same: aggressively cheap and bottom-rung. Of course the supplies were the same. Both companies were nonprofits, run with higher ideals than the making of simple dollars. I was walking into the Big Tent Revival of capitalism, and the devout need neither stickies nor Sharpies, nor anything as base as roller-tipped, liquid-bearing 0.5 millimeter ball point pens. I didn’t know that, but I was about to find out.

Customer service training at Amazon was a harrowing experience. It lasted four weeks and was intense both in terms of what you learned and in how you were taught to love. In many ways it resembled training for a religious vocation; in the end it becomes obvious either that you were born for the life or that you were never meant to be there and will never be heard from again.

At first glance it was utterly simple: we were going to be phone operators at a catalog company, like Sears, except the catalog would be a website and some of the service would be in the form of emails instead of phone calls. Since a lot of people had advanced degrees this should have been a cakewalk. The class was four weeks long only because Amazon needed to cull the weaker elements and make certain they were getting the troops they needed to win their war.

Our training class began with about thirty people. As it progressed individuals began to disappear—usually two or three a week. It was tacitly understood that anyone who didn’t show up one day would not be coming back, but if you were gauche enough to ask the ever-perky trainers about the missing, they’d stiffen slightly as though they’d seen a wasp. You’d then get an assortment of eerily cheerful responses, always appropriately regretful:

“Jack is no longer with us.”

“Jack has chosen to no longer be with us.”

“Jack had to leave.”

And this particularly creepy phrasing: “Jack elected to cease operations.”

The trainers decided to address the whole Amazon.cult debacle right from the top. It went down like this: we’re sitting in class, and the trainer comes to us and says, “Hello, I’m trainer Mandy, and I want talk to you about an article you may have read? The Amazon.cult article? Yes? Okay? I want to address any concerns that you might have about this? Does anyone have any concerns? Yes?”

Trainer Mandy has bright eyes, an impish smile, and the apparent inability to speak in anything other than rising intonations, making her patter sound like a stream of unanswerable questions. “Yes? You? What is your concern? Tell us?”

A straw-haired kid in an REI fleece: “Um … I was, I was … was … concerned that, uh, about that, the part where, uh, you said, it said you were a cult? It kinda freaked me out?” Apparently Mandy’s disease was infectious.

She was Dramamine on an empty stomach. “OK, let’s talk about those feelings? What do they mean by ‘a cult’? Are they talking about our work ethic? What does that mean in their personal context? Their own point of view? The way we get things done?”

She made us feel better. She gave us the talk every day. Every single day. And so by the seventh or eighth day, when Mandy came out and said, “Today let’s revisit the Amazon.cult—”

“No! Actually, that’s cool, uh, Mandy, that’s really, that’s, uh, cool. Does anybody, any of you guys wanna—?”

“Fuck no.”

“Nope.”

“I’m good.”

It was our first sign of consensus.

“We’re all cool, Mandy. Let’s just learn another UNIX tool or more about Jeff’s vision or something. We’re cool, we’re really fine with it.” And in our hearts, we were fine with it. Because we’d heard it over and over again and then made it part of ourselves. That’s how corporate training works: whip, reward, repeat.

The trainers did mean well, that much you could be certain of. All day long they radiated goodwill, a palpable flow of bonhomie that threatened to drown everyone in the training room in which we were all locked together from eight to five.

And it was out of the goodness of their hearts that they shared with us a vision, a vision of what Amazon.com really was, and the part that we might play in its magnificent destiny. They did that by showing us training films like this one.

Imagine the American West as it appears in collectors’ plates from the Franklin Mint, resplendent in grain, mountains, horses, buffalo, and barely sketched details. From the east, across the plains, come settlers, pacing relentlessly toward the camera à la Reservoir Dogs. John Williams is playing, underscoring everything. This is Amazon.com, Earth’s Most Customer-centric Company. More than just a dream, more than an idea, it is a religion, and like any good religion it has an origin myth of equal parts fear and awe. This is its story.

The year is 1995. We begin with Jeff Bezos—geek savant, investment banker, and entrepreneur, like a latter-day Johnny Quest. You can see his face, determined and resolute, as he drives across America in a Toyota hatchback. His wife is at the wheel and he’s composing their business plan. They don’t know what it is they’re going to sell. They don’t know why they’re going to sell it. They don’t even know what city they’re driving to—they’ve told the movers that they will call them from the road to let them know where to go. But they know they’re going to do it on the Internet. They have seen the future and they are going to grab it by the horns.

Jeff Bezos has vision and he’s got moxie, he’s got stamina, he has very little hair, and he’s rolling his way into Seattle, City on the Sea. His wife and he have taken an enormous risk, abandoning high-paying jobs to chase a dream of 400 percent annual growth, which is what the net was doing in those days. All he needs to change the world is a large garage in which he will build a lot of desks made out of doors—flat, cheap doors from Home Depot, thus showing with one sharp symbol that this new company values money, eschews comforts, and has a warm, friendly atmosphere in which the CEO helps the new people build their desks.

You can sell anything on Jeff’s Internet: books, CDs, DVDs, lawn furniture, cat litter, used medical waste, elephant ivory, lunch meat, slaves, anything. Jeff will be there, plugged right into each and every consumer, giving personalized recommendations, and people will find that just what they wanted has been brought right to their door and they will love it.

Thank God for this—before Jeff we were all concerned about the future of commerce. Who knew what they were going to buy next? Who knew what book would go best with their veal? Amazon will be there to guide us, to tell us what our favorites were, are, and have always been, to keep us fed with fresh things.

The army of settlers, outfitted with wagons, babies, and Palm Pilots, hail Jeff. They say, “Yes, you’ve got a vision,” and they have purple hair and piercings and MBAs and greed and hunger and want, and they all crowd into that one garage! No one can stop it from growing and growing until it boils over into the city of Seattle, then America, then the world.

Market analysts, stunned and staggered, kiss the hem of Jeff’s robe. The settlers build huge warehouses with backhoes and bulldozers. CEOs of old-school companies are impaled on spikes beside the road where children from Yahoo!, DoubleClick, and iVillage laugh at them. The digital village celebrates.

Everyone gives thanks that they are selling things, that they are getting big fast and never forgetting their humble origins. “It’s still Day One,” Mao once said—actually that was Jeff Bezos, but it sounds like something Mao would have said about the egalitarian workplace Amazonians now call home, where bureaucracy vanishes and only the best come to work each day.

At night, the settlers huddle around their fires as crotchety old-timers recount stories of the old days to growing masses of eager newcomers. A man eerily reminiscent of Lorne Greene speaks: “We’d sit by the fire, every day after work, cookin’ a pot of beans, just thankful for the hard, hard work we’d done, makin’ history. Thankful for the stock options. Ah … the stock went up twenty-five points today. Why?” He grins. “Nobody knows why. It’s a mystery, just like the stars above are a mystery. Just like Amazon.com is a mystery.”

And if we look up into the digitally enhanced stars, we can see Jeff Bezos himself, as a great Prudential ad, appearing as a seven-hundred-foot-high, googly-eyed Jesus, telling us, “You know, it’s more than that—it’s our dream. If you dream hard, if you work hard, and if you believe hard, you can make anything happen. Everybody who works at Amazon knows that. It’s what brings us back to work every day.”

Now we can see the workers and owners of Amazon.com triumphant, standing on the bodies of their enemies. Drunk and magnificent, the employees chug microbrewed beers and drive SUVs recklessly across the prairie, hitting buffalo. These noble workers were brave enough to say, “Goddamn yeah, we’re gonna work hard” and “Goddamn yeah, get rich too!” They put their hearts and souls on the line, and the world did listen, and the markets did listen too. And the stock did rise and rise and rise and Amazon had a bright future ahead of it for at least the next twelve fiscal months.

You hear the sweeping power chords, watch the slowmotion doves flying into the sky like a bad Hong Kong flick. As we head off into the future it seems certain that Amazon.com will be the single-most customer-intensive company in the history of the world. Amen and hallelujah, praise Jesus and God and Shiva, and may the market forces bless and protect us in infinite growth, all our charts running up and to the right in infinite progression, amen.

Then the training film fades to black, the word END appears, the lights come back on, and we blink in the brightness of the new day.

In retrospect it seems so foolish—many will read this and wonder how grown men and women could get so worked up over a website that sells books. It seems impossible that we could have believed that it would change the world, but the evidence was all around us: the television coverage, the magazine and newspaper articles our trainers showed us in endless succession. Immersed day after day in the language of success we became heated and insistent to everyone who asked, letting people know that the digital revolution was happening right now. Quick, get on board before it’s too late!

There was the Old World and the New World, and a war was coming in which Amazon would play a vital role, vanquishing bad, brick-and-mortar corporations. We began to believe that by supporting Amazon.com we would be helping to crush chains and monopolies and faceless bureaucracies. We were hopelessly naïve.

Overwhelmingly white, pale, doughy, and directionless before arriving at Amazon.com, we now talked incessantly about what books we were reading, and in the process discovered that our new colleagues were very well read, well spoken, highly educated. There were anime lovers, film critics of obscure Japanese horror pictures, scholars of Middle English literature, botanists. Pick your flavor of obscurity. We didn’t know it at the time because we were all too well read, but we had another common denominator: we all wanted desperately to believe in something.

“Jean-Michele?”

“Yes?” We were in bed.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Amazon picnic this weekend.”

Jean-Michele cleared her throat, stalling for time. “Ah … you want to go to the Amazon company picnic?”

“It’ll be really cool—they’re going to have thirty different kegs, with a different microbrew in each one, and the Velcro wall thing, and Jeff will be in a dunking tank along with David Risher.”

She counted out her points on her hands: “One, you never like to go to company picnics—no one does. Two, we’re supposed to be performing at a fundraiser. Three—who the hell is David Risher?”

“He’s a vice president of operations.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was way out of my league.

“You want to meet a vice president?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind. I mean, he’s a person, too—you shouldn’t judge him so narrowly because of his success. Success is something we create.”

“Michael, you aren’t even hired yet. You’re still a trainee.”

“I know.”

“You want to go to a picnic with a company that hasn’t hired you?”

“Yes.” My voice was small.

Jean-Michele sighed and turned on her side. I wonder what I sounded like, there in the dark making my small confession. “We can talk about it in the morning,” she said. But we never did.