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 in the break room, an activity so repellently anti-break room that it set everyone’s teeth on edge immediately. No one does tai chi at ten A.M. in front of their coworkers around a coffee kettle unless they want to be hated. He talked about fighting battles with padded staves in the Society for Creative Anachronism on the weekends and how they would drink homemade mead afterward and sing with someone’s lute. His pants fit strangely around his crotch so that it looked like he had a constant, gigantic erection.
None of this was forgivable, but the real backbreaker was his behavior in class. After each point in the trainer’s lectures, like clockwork, his arm would drift upward, he would sigh audibly, and then his voice would fill the room like the smell of rotted eggs: “But I don’t understand why … blah blah blah … if I had designed this tool … et cetera.” Like so many other geeks, the Mullet expressed his need for love and adulation by preening and claiming authority. He was king schmuck, and we all hated him for it.
It takes equal parts hate and love, I suspect, to really motivate employees. Just as Lee Marvin learned in The Dirty Dozen, having someone to hate unites the rest of the group. Some of us may have been resistant to programming and uncertain of our place in this bewildering crusade, but we knew with utter certainty that we loathed the Mullet. It welded us into shape.
Msmith’s idea was that we would get the Mullet to write to Jeff, and the pungent force of the Mullet’s personality would result in an instant dismissal. Like so many office vendettas this one went unfulfilled. No one wanted to talk to the Mullet for any length of time, even if it was for the good of the company and might help get him fired—it just wasn’t worth it.
Jeff’s email address was still rattling around my head once I was back at my seat in the training class. While the instructor gave another eloquent example of Amazon’s inevitable victory, I fired up my email. It was near the end of training. I sat at my seat with the address I had typed in staring back at me
daring me, wanting me to say something, say anything, speak and press send.
I did not. I closed the program. But the next day I wrote a few lines and then put the message in my draft folder. Soon another followed it, and another, and I could not resist the pull of writing them, of writing to him. I didn’t realize for a long time that I was falling in love.
I vividly remember the first time I met Jeff. I like to believe we touched each other’s hearts that fateful summer day, but I like to believe a lot of things and that doesn’t necessarily make them so.
It was during my last week of training, which I took as an auspicious sign. At this point we were pretty certain that since we had not yet washed out we would soon receive offer letters and become full-time employees. The excitement of this development was tempered by the requirement that we work on express phones four hours a day out in the main room, an endless floor cut apart by cubicle walls as far as the eye could see.
Take the most boring thing you have ever done, double it, and you’ve captured the dynamic essence of express phones. In those olden days of the net there were a lot of people who did not trust computers to receive their credit card information when placing one of these newfangled Internet orders. This wasn’t due so much to actual fraud occurring in great quantity as it was to the massive media coverage that the issue received, usually with headlines like: ARE YOU SAFE FROM THE CYBER-THIEVES? and WILL HACKERS STEAL ALL YOUR MONEY IF YOU TYPE THINGS AT A COMPUTER? Pop-culture tip: when the title of a human-interest story ends with a question mark, the answer is always: “Yes, and it could kill your children. More after the break.”
As a result you could talk until you were blue in the face about rock-hard encryption, firewalls, isolated servers, and an impeccable security record, but people were still convinced that someone named SkoolK33dZ_57 would be buying Thai hookers with their hard-earned credit.
So those of us still in training, perhaps as a final breaking of our spirit, would have the following phone conversation:
“Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I have your order number?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“That’s okay!” (We were aggressively chirpy.) “How about your name?”
“Sure, my name is Some Bastard Ordering Yuppie Shit at Amazon.”
“Okay, hold on … here you are. What card will you be using?”
“Visa.”
“Okay, I’m ready for that number.” This was the moment of truth—you wanted the words to glide out smoothly so they wouldn’t put up a fight and ask you to prove it was safe.
“4426 6787 4513 7081.”
“And the expiration date?”
“Oh-six oh-one.”
“Great! Your order is processed! You will be receiving your Pile of Things in five to seven days via U.S. ground shipping! Thanks for calling Amazon.com! I will always love you!”
And that was it. To really get the feel of the process, remove all the humor from the above conversation, then get a friend and use it as a script—it should take you about forty-five seconds to get through. After a few tries you should be able to do it from memory.
Now keep having that conversation. Have it three hundred times. Take breaks between conversations if you need to, but time them to ensure that they don’t add up to more than fifteen minutes. You’ll find that your soul slips out of your body pretty quickly, goes for jaunts to escape the suffocating boredom. At least sweatshop workers actually make some physical object; express phone operators have nothing tangible to show for their efforts at the end of the day, not even a sneaker, and we had to live with the certain knowledge that what we were doing was error-ridden and pointless.
You see, each and every one of those callers could have entered his or her card number on the website, automatically encrypted and safely delivered, but they were all afraid. So instead they chose to place their orders over the net, call us at Amazon.com, and wait on the phone for up to an hour to give their credit card numbers to total strangers making waiters’ wages without tips who would in