notebook paper. A lot of hay was made in those days about how Amazon.com had turned database management into an art form, and Amazon was eager to perpetuate this illusion. After all, Amazon’s technology was the most tangible of its ethereal assets—the one most often cited when stock analysts rhapsodized about the glorious future that lay in wait for the company. Brick-and-mortars had the resources and the market share, but Amazon.com had the technical brains.
The only stumbling block was reality. As would become clearer and clearer over the years, life at Amazon.com was one long, horrific emergency, an endless series of triage decisions made at breakneck speed. The fact that so many lucky guesses and gut instincts actually worked is testament not to careful forethought but to the battlefield efficiency and tenaciousness that Amazon sought in its recruits. Heroic IT personnel spent their days and nights handcuffed to systems that were constantly breaking down under ever-increasing loads. They were an army of industrious, bleary-eyed Dutch boys plugging holes in the dykes, praying for some never-realized downtime when they could finally make the systems work correctly.
Then, usually under peak load, the servers would seize, the build would break, one of a thousand balanced variables would go wrong, and the net effect would be the same each time: it was as if all those Dutch boys suddenly had their thumbs cut off, leaving them to stare helplessly as the waters rushed in. Not pretty. This happened constantly, and each time heads would roll. Amazon.com is the world’s most aggressively marketed beta product, descending directly from Microsoft—where the original book on this way of doing business was written.
When the databases went down the effect was always the same for those of us in the trenches: we could do absolutely nothing. We couldn’t answer a single question, fix a lost package problem, or even wipe our own bottoms. We were dead in the water. As a PR move we had a carefully rehearsed script: we would tell people who called that we were down for “scheduled maintenance” and that we would contact them shortly with the answer to their query. Occasionally someone would ask why we chose to do maintenance in the middle of the day—we’d laugh and say in one breath, “As-a-24-hour-global-provider-of-books-music-and-more-we-try-to-schedule-our-maintenance-periods-so-that-they’ ll-impact-our-customers-as-little-as-possible-I-am-saddened-and-disappointed-that-we-failed-in-this-case,” and then promptly go to the next call and say it again.
If you were unlucky enough to be stuck on express phones during one of these outages you were instructed to say nothing to customers calling in—they were skittish about their credit cards as it was. Instead we took down their precious numbers on scratch paper so that later we could enter them into the database. Often the systems would be down for so long that you would need to take stickies and Post-its covered with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of transactions and put them in piles to be entered when and if anyone ever found the time. Sometimes people would forget and leave them at their desks—or even take them home. I used to find scraps of highly sensitive financial data in my pants, enough to go to Mexico and live extremely well.
The day Jeff walked into my life I had been on express phones for three hours and was solidly in the zone. It had been a good day—sharp calls, good pacing, and the Oracle database had not crashed, yet. My soul had taken a lovely walk down by the world-famous Pike Place Market and was ensconced at a particularly fabulous doughnut cart, where it languished, wishing my body could keep it company. That was how I missed the swirl of whispers, stares, and smiles that heralded Jeff’s visitation.
I was sitting next to pperry, who in his civilian life went by Pete.
“Look!” he told me. I stared at him between calls, uncomprehending. All my higher functions were wrapped up in batter and waiting to be dumped into the sweet boiling oil of the fryer. I tried to speak.
“Thaaa. Thaaa. Whaargh?” Lovely, lovely doughnuts. My pretties.
“It’s Jeff! He’s right over there!” This was the most exciting thing that had happened during training—serious red-letter shit.
“Where?”
“Over by cdawson—by the door.”
I have to admit, at first blush I was disappointed. I think I was expecting something more visible, like a nimbus of energy around his body or a halo of fire that would spell out BILLIONAIRE! over his head. I had been augmenting the propaganda we received every day with some websurfing and research of my own, so I felt as if I was already something of an expert on the subject of Jeff Bezos—a feeling shared by everyone in the room. It made it even more bizarre to see him in the flesh. You never suspect that Chairman Mao will be visiting your textile plant. How could you ever come face-to-face with your god?
This god came down the aisle between our tiny stations, seeming incredibly approachable. That was one of his most striking traits—he radiated easygoingness, which is remarkable for a guy who runs the most uptight company in the dot-com world.
He stopped by my station. He was going to speak to me. For a moment I was certain that I must have fucked up and sent him the email I had intended to keep secret … and even more briefly I found my heart lifting, hopeful that my exquisite prose and hipster flattery might have touched him deeply, just as he was touching me now with his soft brown eyes, that I had found a secret place within him that could see I was his son … his geekish apprentice, potential laying dormant, waiting for the firm hand of a true leader to whip me into a paragon of Amazonian deliciousness.
It all seemed possible in that moment as I experienced Jeff’s gaze for the first time. Like great leaders and snake-oil salesmen Jeff possesses the uncanny knack of making those to whom he speaks believe that they are the only people in the entire universe—he can focus all his attention in the present and listen with such acute intensity that you are compelled to fall into him as he speaks with you. Steve Jobs at Apple has it, Clinton has it, Hitler had it, St. John the Baptist was swimming in it—call it the reality-distortion field. Saints and sinners all, the greatest and the worst … but Jeff is probably the most unassuming man who carries this gift within himself. He looks like the boyish uncle you adored as a child, who would never suspect just how seriously you’d take his every suggestion. He spoke, and his voice was clear, articulate, and completely unexpected.
“How is it going?”
“I’m in training.” This did not actually answer the question.
“Great. Are you planning to stay with us at Amazon?”
I loved the way he turned the decision over to me, like a Scientology or self-empowerment guru who assumes that the world is simply about making up your own mind—there are no obstacles, only opportunities. Had I made my decision for Christ? For Amazon? I answered like an expectant bride: “For so long as you’ll have me.”
This made him laugh.
Jeff’s laugh defies description. He is constantly laughing: it defines him. Many have tried and failed to capture that laugh in words, but all the similies and metaphors come up short. Let me try: Keep a child in a lightless box for a number of years and play the sounds of hyenas and Henny Youngman on a constant loop. Every couple of hours, whenever he seems relaxed, strike this child with a wooden stick. When you release this child at eighteen from the box, he will sue you for inhumane treatment and win. The noise the box child will make on the courthouse steps as he delights in the victory that sends his sadistic tormentor to the poorhouse for the rest of his life will sound a bit like Jeff’s hooting, barking, and genuinely disturbingly arrhythmic guffaws.
Just as Jeff began laughing I could feel the atmosphere change in the room—something had happened. My first thought was that nearby workers were disturbed by the bizarre sounds coming out of our spiritual leader, but everyone was used to that. No, it was the system again—it crashed.
Jeff walked away toward other worker bees, still laughing, a kind word here and a thoughtful glance there as we scrambled to hide the wreckage as calls kept flooding through the dykes. Everyone worked a little faster than normal, a little more smoothly, to avoid showing Jeff that something had gone wrong; there was a slight smell of shame, as though we might have been the ones who knocked the system offline with a misplaced phrase or a misdirected thought.
As