my time at Amazon: The illusion that something has momentum and drive is as valuable as having momentum and drive. This led to an instant corollary: You can create something from nothing, if you spin it correctly.
To give you an idea of how clueless I was, I had originally assumed that Amazon.com was a lesbian Internet bookstore, owing to the historical origins of the word Amazon along with the company’s reputation for being “progressive.” Luckily, the geeks set me straight early in the presentation:
“AMAZON.COM IS CALLED AMAZON.COM BECAUSE THE AMAZON IS THE EARTH’S LARGEST RIVER, AND WE ARE THE EARTH’S LARGEST STORE. OUR GOAL IS TO PROVIDE THE MOST CUSTOMER-CENTRIC EXPERIENCE IN HISTORY FOR THIS ENTIRE PLANET.” I don’t know how management types at Amazon succeed in speaking in capital letters and in boldface, but they do.
I was enchanted. These tech-savvy, attractive, and well-spoken workers appeared blissfully happy. They were everything the folks I had worked with at all my temping assignments were not; they had everything my actor friends lacked in their work-a-day drudgery.
I had always had a love affair with geekdom but it sadly wasn’t reciprocal. I loved geek talk and did geek things but lacked some essential introvertedness that would allow me to really be one of their kind. My friend John diagnosed me during a heated discussion about George Lucas’s decision to allow Greedo to shoot first in the Cantina scene on the remixed DVD version of Star Wars: “Michael, your problem is your geekness lacks conviction. You do not bear the Mark of Kirk.” When I asked John what the Mark of Kirk was, he snorted derisively and I lost another ten points.
These Amazon folk weren’t supermodels, but they were embodiments of a kind of higher geek ideal: people who could make a UNIX box dance from the command line, look great while doing it, and then go dancing at a rave. The opportunity to be near them, surrounded by their coolness and learning from them while being paid, sounded like heaven itself. If I couldn’t be a geek, at least I could be in their company.
And what company! Though I hadn’t known who they were until that day, I was convinced they were making history. That phrase came into my head right from the beginning, and I’m certain they placed it there. I had a vague sense of riches, of future glory. No one spoke in specifics—they did say that there were stock options, which sounded glamorous compared to hourly wages. For all the sound and fury we left the meeting knowing about the same amount as when we walked in … but I was now filled with a lust I had never experienced for working at a job.
I took the elevator back down to earth full of hope, and the first thing I saw while waiting for the bus was the cover of the Seattle Weekly, featuring a one word splash: AMAZON.CULT.
The article caused quite a stir locally. It was a rather straightforward story: someone had joined Amazon in the very same position for which I was now jockeying, experienced a lot of weird stuff, and fled.
The details of the weirdness were striking. The author said that the employees were aggressively cheerful, dogmatic, and obsessive. He said that Amazon took micromanagement to a new level, that the corporate culture demanded unwavering loyalty, puritan devotion, and a zeal that could not be justified by the pay or the experience. Finally, he revealed that he had left Amazon and ended up with a contracting position at Microsoft, which I now believe must be like trading the third circle of hell for the sixth—different tortures, different bosses, same consequences.
Now, this is just a piece of advice I offer for free: if you should ever be in a position where you’re going to join a company but haven’t yet signed any papers, and if a major newspaper publishes a feature about how the company you are about to go to work for is a cult … say no. Thank you, no, it’s all right. Sorry to have wasted your time.
There are jobs out there that don’t require you to drink the Kool-Aid. Even if you are desperate, signs like these should give you pause. And I was far from desperate; I was a well-educated white man with a shiftless streak. By all accounts, I should never have gone back for the training—everything in my character would seem to rebel against it. It should have. It really should.
I told Jean-Michele about it over coffee at the Allegro, one of Seattle’s ubiquitous coffee houses. It is a conversation I cannot forget because so much was unsaid, and as I talked and talked I could hear a peculiar timbre creeping into my voice, foreign zeal and enthusiasm taking root between my verbs and adjectives.
“It was great. They’re good-looking, and the people are sharp, and sales are growing end to end in a paradigm of growth.… It’s a very explosive net business.” I had only a tenuous grasp of what I was talking about.
“Hmm.” She seemed unimpressed. “Why did they want your SAT scores?”
“Uh, to … you know, quality control.”
“I don’t know anybody who does that.” She stared at me over her latte. She has a killer stare that can rattle me, but this time I sailed through it.
“Oh, that just speaks to the, ah, the quality people they want for this.”
“Hmm.”
“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,