Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey
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Название: Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com
Автор: Mike Daisey
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала
isbn: 9780007394470
isbn:
The lazy indulgences would have to go. I wasn’t playing “find yourself” as my parents had, or fighting a war, or even learning tai chi. I needed to pull my own weight, get things moving, and acquire some direction. So I would find a job. Not more temping, a Real Job™. In the morning, first thing.
I did nothing the next day. Or the next. Rinse, repeat. Every night in bed I would tally the reasons I had to work, think of how we could not afford to live like this, watching the bank account dip and dry up. Rinse, repeat. You can lead a horse to water but that doesn’t mean he’ll go to the office. Rinse, repeat.
My perversity saved me—more specifically my obsession with tooth decay. There was little wrong with my teeth, but I reasoned it was only a matter of time. One of my foremost neuroses is the condition of my teeth. They have tiny cavities, and I’m always afraid that these tiny cavities will become Huge Cavities, which will in turn offer easy access to a Tooth Infection, which will expand into a Gum Infection and then a Jaw Infection, which will finally climb up into my head and become a Brain Infection. Then my brain will swell up inside my skull and I will die, a condition I saw once on St. Elsewhere.
I knew that this was both true and possible because my mother, bless her black heart, had sent me a newspaper article on the phenomenon, which I read and then attached to the fridge with magnets. Once it’s on the fridge it is more real than real: it is fact.
This meant that it was time to get real health insurance, and real health insurance meant getting a Real Job™. Jean-Michele liked the idea. She thought employment would make me more attractive—not only to Babcia but to her. It was like a wake-up call from God. Faced with the prospect of losing my girlfriend and dying like a toothless bear of some third world-style gum infection, I was now on a serious job hunt.
My first call was prompted by an ad in the Seattle Weekly under the nondescript heading: CUSTOMER SERVICE TIER 1: LAME TITLE—COOL JOB. The rest of the ad mentioned good pay, flexible hours, and a “hip and quirky work environment.” I faxed them my SAT scores and my transcripts, which was odd for an office job—no one had ever cared about my academic background before. I was thrilled when they called me five minutes later.
When I needed a Real Job™, there, like my white knight, was Amazon.com.
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 СКАЧАТЬ