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Twenty-One Dog Years
Doing Time @ Amazon.com
Mike Daisey
For Jean-Michele
It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with such an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Contents
When Amazon went to temping companies to recruit future employees, it gave a simple directive: send us your freaks. I know this is true because the people at the temping companies, not the sharpest knives in the drawer, would tell the people they were recruiting that this was the requirement. Not that it stopped me, no sir. I might not precisely regard myself as a professional freak, but as job descriptions go it falls well within my range.
I am a dilettante. I do many things, but none particularly well. It is the art of not applying yourself, the only craft I have studied my entire life. Like so many others of my generation, I cherish the delusion that I have superpowers buried deep inside me. They’re awaiting the perfect trigger—radiation, a child in danger—and in that defining moment I will finally know my birthright: mutant healing factor, terrifying strength, maybe kick-ass retractable admantium claws. In a good daydream, it’s all three.
When you know that you are destined for greatness by virtue of your mutant heritage it is difficult to apply yourself to normal life. Why waste the effort when you know that your potential is so tremendous? Better to wait. Better not to try, to save yourself for the Great Works to come. Nothing you do will ever be more than a footnote in light of your own unimaginable future, so save your breath and bide your time. Nurture your talent. Read a book. Play Nintendo.
It’s a depressing life. The word dilettante derives from the Italian dilettare, meaning to delight in. Well, no one buys that—not even the dilettantes. It’s a tough racket that favors the young: I was twenty-five and rapidly becoming the only practicing dilettante left from my college class. Being a dilettante is the opposite of having a viable career, and most people discover they don’t enjoy starving, so they find a life and quickly settle into their private hells by choice or inertia.
I do have an advantage in the dilettante market; I have a bachelor’s degree in aesthetics. No, really. At interviews it’s the first thing people ask about, and I can tell they want to laugh at me. I think they should—it would be a great release for everyone involved. I should have known something was wrong when the recruiting professional for Amazon said my degree was the reason she had called.
Majoring in aesthetics seemed like a good idea at the time—something that would free me up for the life of a wandering scholar without earthly ties, a book-oriented Caine from Kung Fu. You see, I’d grown up in far northern Maine, in the small town of Fort Kent, at the absolute