Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ