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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       4 Geek Messiah

      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: [email protected]. (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 [email protected] … 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 СКАЧАТЬ