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:
“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.
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 СКАЧАТЬ