am so going to open a can of whupass on this sorry sonofabitch, a can of whupass I like to call, “I Ain’t Got No Dry-Erase Pens.” I know he doesn’t have them, because I’ve got every last one here in my backpack. I’m rich! Shit, I might just give them to friends, let neighbor kids have some, hand them to unemployed folks on the street who look like they might want to write and then erase something. If Mr. Lawyer Man thinks he can tangle with me, he’s going to wake up without his legal pads. Won’t be much of a law office without legal pads, will it? Oh, they laughed at me when I said a temp could rule the world—now, look at the heights from which I mock you all and know despair! Despair! I will bury you! I will bury you! It’s at this point in the fantasy that I take off my shoe and bang it on the table until they take me away.
I think everyone probably steals a little more than they intend to because, in an office world where everything is regulated, every gesture of freedom is prized above rubies. The more you take, the more you know you’ve gotten away with. It’s easy to see how someone with certain flaws in their character might become trapped in a cycle of addiction—the futility of their pointless, deskbound existence writ starkly in the inventory of pointless, extravagant items stolen. I’ve discovered over the years that I am hardly alone. In small, embarrassed voices many have told me how they, too, find some comfort in their collections of Post-its and Wite-Out.
A partial inventory of my filched office supplies:
67 legal pads, yellow
62 transparent page protectors
31 lined pads, 8 1/2” by 11”, white
15 spiral-bound notebooks, white
8 rulers:5 plastic, 2 wooden, 1 drafting
5 staplers:3 full-size, 2 miniature
4 staple removers
4 mousepads:2 Amazon-branded, 1 blue, 1 black
3 boxes black felt-tip pens, 0.5 mm (15 count)
3 bottles Wite-Out
2 gel wrist protectors
2 boxes black felt-tip pens, 0.7 mm (15 count)
2 boxes black Sharpies (20 count)
1 box red Sharpies (20 count)
1 box green Sharpies (20 count)
2 packages Post-its, pink, medium
2 packages Post-its, yellow, medium
1 package Post-its, yellow, large
There are also some odder items that defy logical explanation—the printer cartridge to an ink-jet printer I do not own and the whiteboard markers for whiteboards I will never have. This pirate booty fills up a cheap IKEA cabinet in the corner of our small apartment. Sometimes I like to open the cabinet and rearrange my loot, marveling at its quantity, smelling the markers until I am dizzy with possibility. I imagine this is how dragons in bad fantasy novels feel.
Jean-Michele’s Polish sensibilities make her disdainful of such waste, and she is both repulsed and aroused by my ability to simply take without cause. She insists on revisiting the subject every few months.
“So … you just walk out with this stuff.”
“Yes.”
“No one ever says anything?”
“Nope.”
“I would never do that. I would be scared to death.”
I feel a surge of pride in my desperadoness. It’s nice to have your mate admire you, even if she knows you are an idiot.
“What would you do if they caught you?”
“That’s a good question.” Pause. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Of course it’s possible.”
“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