Читать книгу Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com - Mike Daisey - Страница 9

That I was actually able to believe in something created in me an uneasy mixture of pride and embarrassment. I think a lot of people my age feel similarly. We grew up immersed in irony—most of my life feels like someone else’s movie unfurling scene by scene as I watch. I wanted to take control of the camera and finally do something that would matter. The degree in aesthetics probably didn’t help, either.

All this detachment had made me hungry for the fruit of earnestness. I wanted to pick up an apple and know it was an apple and not some abstracted, twice-removed notion of an apple. I wanted an end to endless doubt and ironic equivocation. I wanted to feel as if I was entirely alive, making a difference, which is a blasphemy in the modern world—no one gets to be alive at their job. Looking back, I realize I would have been a perfect candidate for the Peace Corps, the Boy Scouts, or a fundamentalist branch of the Kiwanis Club if Amazon hadn’t found me first.

I can’t tell you how exciting, how stirring it was to be in the thick of something so deadly earnest, to be given permission to invest myself in a group. These people, my coworkers, were serious about Amazon, serious about our work, and everything was on the line. I’d never been in a group of hardworking people who all believed in the same thing—I had grown up Catholic. This was communism, but you got rich doing it, and that made it OK.

And that was the hook, you see: just as the disaffected intellectuals of ages past took their grievances and their angst to the Communist party, so now we took ours to capitalism. Whether you’re talking Lenin or McDonald’s the fever remains the same; if a leader can find the language needed to awaken people’s zeal, he or she can receive blind devotion in return. You cannot buy that with money; although the lure of unrealized stock served as the spark for Amazon, it wasn’t the essence. The essence was Jeff.

From beginning to end Amazon.com has always been a one-man operation. A one-Jeff operation. We may have been coached morning, noon, and night to believe that each and every one of us was equal, but the moment you met Jeff you realized that it simply wasn’t true. He was a god, the still point around which the Amazonian world revolved—always has been, always will be, amen. Religions have their popes and prophets, and we had Jeff.

For a god, he was a plain guy. Of medium height and slight build, he resembled nothing so much as a bright and studious elf—Santa’s second lieutenant. He had wispy brown hair, looked his thirtyish age, and was almost invariably dressed in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and nice shoes. In a sense it had become his uniform, and then by imitation the uniform of the dot-com movement.

Jeff’s luminous brown eyes, huge and dewy, can hardly be confined to his face. They gesture. They leap out. They beckon. It is not an act—he is brilliant, deeply charismatic, and totally genuine. He is gentle, a rare trait in humans, particularly CEOs. You would trust him with your children; when you got home he would have taught them how to sequence DNA and how the kitchen sink disposal really works. I have never had a kinder or more human employer before or since—Jeff is amazingly dedicated to connecting with everyone in his company.

Workers at Amazon passed tantalizing details about Jeff back and forth like trading cards:

• Jeff grew up in Cuba and escaped to America as a young man. (False)

• Jeff repaired windmills as a teenager. (True)

• Jeff spent some of his childhood in a bubble due to an autoimmune deficiency. (False)

• Jeff used to brand, vaccinate, and castrate cattle. (True)

• Jeff started his own school for gifted middle-school children while in high school. (True)

• Jeff trained himself to have photographic recall. (False)

• Jeff loves The Lord of the Rings and Dune. (True)

• Jeff is worth billions but rents an apartment and drives a Toyota hatchback. (True)

• Jeff worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com. (True)

• Jeff only sleeps three hours a night. (False)

• Jeff still responds to email at his public address: jeff@amazon.com. (True)

The last fact is the one that made the greatest impression on me early in my training. It tasted so wonderful in my mouth, like when as a child I thought that Santa hung out at the Pole all day reading our letters and taking notes. I asked a coworker about the email thing in the break room between sessions.

“Hey, msmith.” His surname was Smith, but shortly after arriving at Amazon we started referring to everyone by their login—the abbreviated version of their name used to log into the network. I was mdaisey, he was msmith. Pronounced emsmith. Some names worked, some names didn’t, but it could be addictive—if you started doing it for some you found yourself doing it for lots of people. It totally took over my speech patterns.

“Yeah?”

“We can write to Jeff at jeff@amazon.com … Did you hear about that?”

“Yeah. Weird.”

“Do you think he writes back?”

“I wouldn’t if I were him but … yeah, I bet he does.”

“Yeah, I bet he does too.” Pause. “Do you think I should write to him?” The words just came out of my mouth. I hadn’t even thought them before that moment.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“I don’t know. Just to … talk.”

He sighed. “It’s your job, man.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think that would be cool. We’re in training. They can fire us for, you know, looking funny. Saying the wrong thing.” Smith was rail-thin and had sharp eyes behind his glasses. He was holding a cookie and gesturing with it like it was a power tool. “I don’t think he would be all that interested in a critique from us.”

“No, I would bet not.”

“Funny, though … ” He was thinking. Smith was the meanest, most sardonic person in the class, so I had naturally gravitated to him. Mean people keep you warm.

“What?”

“Maybe you could get the Mullet to do it.” He smiled and bit through the cookie.

The Mullet was the resident weirdo of our training class. I found out later that every class had at least one. It’s a side effect of a selection process that screens and selects for freaks: you occasionally end up with the wrong kind of freak, one who has antisocial tendencies in the extreme, or a funny smell, or that indefinable something that made villagers in the Middle Ages spontaneously drown certain folks in the local creek.

The Mullet had a mullet, naturally, but he was so much more than his choice of hairstyle. He practiced tai chi in the break room, an activity so repellently anti-break room that it set everyone’s teeth on edge immediately. No one does tai chi at ten A.M. in front of their coworkers around a coffee kettle unless they want to be hated. He talked about fighting battles with padded staves in the Society for Creative Anachronism on the weekends and how they would drink homemade mead afterward and sing with someone’s lute. His pants fit strangely around his crotch so that it looked like he had a constant, gigantic erection.

None of this was forgivable, but the real backbreaker was his behavior in class. After each point in the trainer’s lectures, like clockwork, his arm would drift upward, he would sigh audibly, and then his voice would fill the room like the smell of rotted eggs: “But I don’t understand why … blah blah blah … if I had designed this tool … et cetera.” Like so many other geeks, the Mullet expressed his need for love and adulation by preening and claiming authority. He was king schmuck, and we all hated him for it.

It takes equal parts hate and love, I suspect, to really motivate employees. Just as Lee Marvin learned in The Dirty Dozen, having someone to hate unites the rest of the group. Some of us may have been resistant to programming and uncertain of our place in this bewildering crusade, but we knew with utter certainty that we loathed the Mullet. It welded us into shape.

Msmith’s idea was that we would get the Mullet to write to Jeff, and the pungent force of the Mullet’s personality would result in an instant dismissal. Like so many office vendettas this one went unfulfilled. No one wanted to talk to the Mullet for any length of time, even if it was for the good of the company and might help get him fired—it just wasn’t worth it.

Jeff’s email address was still rattling around my head once I was back at my seat in the training class. While the instructor gave another eloquent example of Amazon’s inevitable victory, I fired up my email. It was near the end of training. I sat at my seat with the address I had typed in staring back at me

jeff@amazon.com

daring me, wanting me to say something, say anything, speak and press send.

I did not. I closed the program. But the next day I wrote a few lines and then put the message in my draft folder. Soon another followed it, and another, and I could not resist the pull of writing them, of writing to him. I didn’t realize for a long time that I was falling in love.

I vividly remember the first time I met Jeff. I like to believe we touched each other’s hearts that fateful summer day, but I like to believe a lot of things and that doesn’t necessarily make them so.

It was during my last week of training, which I took as an auspicious sign. At this point we were pretty certain that since we had not yet washed out we would soon receive offer letters and become full-time employees. The excitement of this development was tempered by the requirement that we work on express phones four hours a day out in the main room, an endless floor cut apart by cubicle walls as far as the eye could see.

Take the most boring thing you have ever done, double it, and you’ve captured the dynamic essence of express phones. In those olden days of the net there were a lot of people who did not trust computers to receive their credit card information when placing one of these newfangled Internet orders. This wasn’t due so much to actual fraud occurring in great quantity as it was to the massive media coverage that the issue received, usually with headlines like: ARE YOU SAFE FROM THE CYBER-THIEVES? and WILL HACKERS STEAL ALL YOUR MONEY IF YOU TYPE THINGS AT A COMPUTER? Pop-culture tip: when the title of a human-interest story ends with a question mark, the answer is always: “Yes, and it could kill your children. More after the break.”

As a result you could talk until you were blue in the face about rock-hard encryption, firewalls, isolated servers, and an impeccable security record, but people were still convinced that someone named SkoolK33dZ_57 would be buying Thai hookers with their hard-earned credit.

So those of us still in training, perhaps as a final breaking of our spirit, would have the following phone conversation:

“Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I have your order number?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“That’s okay!” (We were aggressively chirpy.) “How about your name?”

“Sure, my name is Some Bastard Ordering Yuppie Shit at Amazon.”

“Okay, hold on … here you are. What card will you be using?”

“Visa.”

“Okay, I’m ready for that number.” This was the moment of truth—you wanted the words to glide out smoothly so they wouldn’t put up a fight and ask you to prove it was safe.

“4426 6787 4513 7081.”

“And the expiration date?”

“Oh-six oh-one.”

“Great! Your order is processed! You will be receiving your Pile of Things in five to seven days via U.S. ground shipping! Thanks for calling Amazon.com! I will always love you!”

And that was it. To really get the feel of the process, remove all the humor from the above conversation, then get a friend and use it as a script—it should take you about forty-five seconds to get through. After a few tries you should be able to do it from memory.

Now keep having that conversation. Have it three hundred times. Take breaks between conversations if you need to, but time them to ensure that they don’t add up to more than fifteen minutes. You’ll find that your soul slips out of your body pretty quickly, goes for jaunts to escape the suffocating boredom. At least sweatshop workers actually make some physical object; express phone operators have nothing tangible to show for their efforts at the end of the day, not even a sneaker, and we had to live with the certain knowledge that what we were doing was error-ridden and pointless.

You see, each and every one of those callers could have entered his or her card number on the website, automatically encrypted and safely delivered, but they were all afraid. So instead they chose to place their orders over the net, call us at Amazon.com, and wait on the phone for up to an hour to give their credit card numbers to total strangers making waiters’ wages without tips who would in turn write their precious bank numbers down on notebook paper.

Yes, notebook paper. A lot of hay was made in those days about how Amazon.com had turned database management into an art form, and Amazon was eager to perpetuate this illusion. After all, Amazon’s technology was the most tangible of its ethereal assets—the one most often cited when stock analysts rhapsodized about the glorious future that lay in wait for the company. Brick-and-mortars had the resources and the market share, but Amazon.com had the technical brains.

The only stumbling block was reality. As would become clearer and clearer over the years, life at Amazon.com was one long, horrific emergency, an endless series of triage decisions made at breakneck speed. The fact that so many lucky guesses and gut instincts actually worked is testament not to careful forethought but to the battlefield efficiency and tenaciousness that Amazon sought in its recruits. Heroic IT personnel spent their days and nights handcuffed to systems that were constantly breaking down under ever-increasing loads. They were an army of industrious, bleary-eyed Dutch boys plugging holes in the dykes, praying for some never-realized downtime when they could finally make the systems work correctly.

Then, usually under peak load, the servers would seize, the build would break, one of a thousand balanced variables would go wrong, and the net effect would be the same each time: it was as if all those Dutch boys suddenly had their thumbs cut off, leaving them to stare helplessly as the waters rushed in. Not pretty. This happened constantly, and each time heads would roll. Amazon.com is the world’s most aggressively marketed beta product, descending directly from Microsoft—where the original book on this way of doing business was written.

When the databases went down the effect was always the same for those of us in the trenches: we could do absolutely nothing. We couldn’t answer a single question, fix a lost package problem, or even wipe our own bottoms. We were dead in the water. As a PR move we had a carefully rehearsed script: we would tell people who called that we were down for “scheduled maintenance” and that we would contact them shortly with the answer to their query. Occasionally someone would ask why we chose to do maintenance in the middle of the day—we’d laugh and say in one breath, “As-a-24-hour-global-provider-of-books-music-and-more-we-try-to-schedule-our-maintenance-periods-so-that-they’ ll-impact-our-customers-as-little-as-possible-I-am-saddened-and-disappointed-that-we-failed-in-this-case,” and then promptly go to the next call and say it again.

If you were unlucky enough to be stuck on express phones during one of these outages you were instructed to say nothing to customers calling in—they were skittish about their credit cards as it was. Instead we took down their precious numbers on scratch paper so that later we could enter them into the database. Often the systems would be down for so long that you would need to take stickies and Post-its covered with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of transactions and put them in piles to be entered when and if anyone ever found the time. Sometimes people would forget and leave them at their desks—or even take them home. I used to find scraps of highly sensitive financial data in my pants, enough to go to Mexico and live extremely well.

The day Jeff walked into my life I had been on express phones for three hours and was solidly in the zone. It had been a good day—sharp calls, good pacing, and the Oracle database had not crashed, yet. My soul had taken a lovely walk down by the world-famous Pike Place Market and was ensconced at a particularly fabulous doughnut cart, where it languished, wishing my body could keep it company. That was how I missed the swirl of whispers, stares, and smiles that heralded Jeff’s visitation.

I was sitting next to pperry, who in his civilian life went by Pete.

“Look!” he told me. I stared at him between calls, uncomprehending. All my higher functions were wrapped up in batter and waiting to be dumped into the sweet boiling oil of the fryer. I tried to speak.

“Thaaa. Thaaa. Whaargh?” Lovely, lovely doughnuts. My pretties.

“It’s Jeff! He’s right over there!” This was the most exciting thing that had happened during training—serious red-letter shit.

“Where?”

“Over by cdawson—by the door.”

I have to admit, at first blush I was disappointed. I think I was expecting something more visible, like a nimbus of energy around his body or a halo of fire that would spell out BILLIONAIRE! over his head. I had been augmenting the propaganda we received every day with some websurfing and research of my own, so I felt as if I was already something of an expert on the subject of Jeff Bezos—a feeling shared by everyone in the room. It made it even more bizarre to see him in the flesh. You never suspect that Chairman Mao will be visiting your textile plant. How could you ever come face-to-face with your god?

This god came down the aisle between our tiny stations, seeming incredibly approachable. That was one of his most striking traits—he radiated easygoingness, which is remarkable for a guy who runs the most uptight company in the dot-com world.

He stopped by my station. He was going to speak to me. For a moment I was certain that I must have fucked up and sent him the email I had intended to keep secret … and even more briefly I found my heart lifting, hopeful that my exquisite prose and hipster flattery might have touched him deeply, just as he was touching me now with his soft brown eyes, that I had found a secret place within him that could see I was his son … his geekish apprentice, potential laying dormant, waiting for the firm hand of a true leader to whip me into a paragon of Amazonian deliciousness.

It all seemed possible in that moment as I experienced Jeff’s gaze for the first time. Like great leaders and snake-oil salesmen Jeff possesses the uncanny knack of making those to whom he speaks believe that they are the only people in the entire universe—he can focus all his attention in the present and listen with such acute intensity that you are compelled to fall into him as he speaks with you. Steve Jobs at Apple has it, Clinton has it, Hitler had it, St. John the Baptist was swimming in it—call it the reality-distortion field. Saints and sinners all, the greatest and the worst … but Jeff is probably the most unassuming man who carries this gift within himself. He looks like the boyish uncle you adored as a child, who would never suspect just how seriously you’d take his every suggestion. He spoke, and his voice was clear, articulate, and completely unexpected.

“How is it going?”

“I’m in training.” This did not actually answer the question.

“Great. Are you planning to stay with us at Amazon?”

I loved the way he turned the decision over to me, like a Scientology or self-empowerment guru who assumes that the world is simply about making up your own mind—there are no obstacles, only opportunities. Had I made my decision for Christ? For Amazon? I answered like an expectant bride: “For so long as you’ll have me.”

This made him laugh.

Jeff’s laugh defies description. He is constantly laughing: it defines him. Many have tried and failed to capture that laugh in words, but all the similies and metaphors come up short. Let me try: Keep a child in a lightless box for a number of years and play the sounds of hyenas and Henny Youngman on a constant loop. Every couple of hours, whenever he seems relaxed, strike this child with a wooden stick. When you release this child at eighteen from the box, he will sue you for inhumane treatment and win. The noise the box child will make on the courthouse steps as he delights in the victory that sends his sadistic tormentor to the poorhouse for the rest of his life will sound a bit like Jeff’s hooting, barking, and genuinely disturbingly arrhythmic guffaws.

Just as Jeff began laughing I could feel the atmosphere change in the room—something had happened. My first thought was that nearby workers were disturbed by the bizarre sounds coming out of our spiritual leader, but everyone was used to that. No, it was the system again—it crashed.

Jeff walked away toward other worker bees, still laughing, a kind word here and a thoughtful glance there as we scrambled to hide the wreckage as calls kept flooding through the dykes. Everyone worked a little faster than normal, a little more smoothly, to avoid showing Jeff that something had gone wrong; there was a slight smell of shame, as though we might have been the ones who knocked the system offline with a misplaced phrase or a misdirected thought.

As the daily disaster unfolded I could not resist keeping an eye on him as he continued working the room, row by row through the cubicle maze, showing his honest and heartfelt love with laughter that simply would not stop.