Day One
When you enter the floor-to-ceiling security turnstiles at Amazon’s flagship fulfillment center, BFI4, just south of Seattle, the only words printed on the twenty-foot white wall towering above are, I’m sure un-ironically, “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” I could very well believe I’d need to work hard. I was hoping I’d have at least some fun. But make history? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, was recently only the second man to found a private company that launched him to the boundary of space. Amazon is currently the world’s fifth most valuable company. But I’m guessing neither of those is the history they refer to. The one historical thing I know for sure that I’d be contributing to is Amazon’s rise to become America’s largest employer, which, at 950,000 employees and growing quickly, it’s on track to become by mid-2022. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We should first talk about Day One, my first day at Amazon.
Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Day One.
I got up earlier on my first day at Amazon than I had for the entire eight months I was unemployed, hopped in the minivan, and hit Record.
“It’s 6:50 in the morning on my first day at work, Day One, heading out the door here. I have no idea what to expect today. They didn’t even say which door to enter through. Since the building is a third of a mile wide, it’ll be interesting to see. I nearly forgot some important things today. I normally wear non-laced shoes, slip-ons, but today I have to wear laced shoes, so I’ve worn the best laced shoes I have, which are not the Zappos shoes I was looking for, and not composite toe, but it’ll have to do for now. I also nearly forgot my vaccine card, which is required on the first day.
“I love the feeling of the first day at work. You don’t know what your boss will be like, you don’t know what your coworkers will be like. You really don’t know how hard the job will be. I think, with every job I’ve ever had, I’ve always felt the sense of potential imposter syndrome when I show up on the first day, not sure if people will find out I’m not actually good at the job that I’ve been accepted to. I think first days at work are a lot about hope and promise, you know. It always feels like there’s so much possibility ahead. Anything could happen. And at any job you have, you only have the first day once.”
I ended up arriving thirty-five minutes before my shift. Parking, which I was previously concerned about, especially during shift changes, was no problem at all. Perhaps that’d get worse as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach. In any case, the parking lot was filled with cars of all sorts. A pair of Lexus SUVs were parked like twins next to each other. Nearby sat a blue BMW 3 Series. For some reason, Jeeps seemed to be especially popular, followed by SUVs and crossovers. I was one of the few associates sporting a minivan.
I watched as people began arriving before the 7:30 morning shift. Many sat in their cars huddled over their phones, their faces glowing with a patchwork aura of colors as they scrolled through various feeds. I’d later learn this is a common practice because you’re not allowed to enter the facility more than five minutes before your shift starts. A lanky white teenager walks by toward the front doors of the building, looking official with his reflective vest already on. A petite Asian lady strides quickly past my car wearing shorts. I find myself wondering about the indoor temperature of the building as more and more people pass, dressed for conditions ranging from what I’d call “sub-arctic tourist” all the way to “new money beachside.” It reminds me of a Boeing factory tour guide who once proudly announced that their Everett, WA facility — the one that builds the 787 — is so large that it has internal weather patterns. Perhaps BFI4, this third-of-a-mile-long building, is also large enough to require different outfits depending on where you work within. Two Black women arrived together, their hair held back by multicolored wraps, chatting and laughing happily. One of them soon returns and drives away; perhaps she was simply accompanying a friend. A couple walks by, wife plowing forward energetically, husband lumbering behind reluctantly. Most arrive alone. The youngest person I see looks like a late teenager. The majority look to be in their twenties or early thirties. I get out of my car and join the other associates streaming into the building when it’s time.
I’m full of nervous anticipation like with all my other jobs. I wonder about the hierarchy of desired jobs within. A friend of mine had once worked at McDonald’s, and his job in the beginning was to clean the grease traps and to take out the trash. You can probably imagine why cleaning out an industrial grease trap is sickening to the point where many initiates retch. But the trash, I had learned from this friend, can be quite shocking your first time, in that most people who’ve never processed the trash of an industrial fast-food chain don’t expect all the sudden internal movement if a bag accidentally punctures open, powered by clusters of maggots that multiply in the warm heap of food waste that compounds throughout the day. I wondered whether Amazon warehouses would feature similar hazing, where beginners are given the worst of the jobs, sometimes sent off deliberately without warning so that some bound-to-come surprise catches the new associate completely off guard as experienced onlookers laugh uproariously. Would there be hazing? Or would there be bullying, even amongst new associates so as to establish a clear pecking order? Would base human instincts come to the fore as they do when situations apply tremendous stress, like in prisons where the civility and aspirations of advanced society are shed in favor of clustering quickly with those of the same race in order to guarantee protection in numbers? Would I need to prove myself not the weakest by first punching the largest guy in the warehouse? I already had my mark as we approached the front doors: a guy in a black sweatshirt, looking to be about 220 pounds, sporting a tattoo across the back of his neck. If needed, I’d unleash repeated haymakers and expect a beating from him, knowing that gawkers would know to leave me alone after seeing that the grossly imbalanced confrontation was completely unprovoked, instigated by a man who’d apparently be liable to do just about anything.
I entered the building through a tight cluster of workers in the shadow of the neck-tattooed guy, all senses heightened.
—
Entering an Amazon fulfillment center for the first time evokes the same awe you’d imagine upon entering Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, at least for an engineer like me. After two decades of buying from Amazon, I had at last entered the place where all the magic happens . The first thing that strikes the senses is the clatter, bang, and hum of literally miles of conveyor belts: overhead, alongside, and even sometimes under the paths you walk. Wide belts. Narrow belts. Black rubber belts like those of a treadmill. Gray belts of slatted plastic that end in rows of silver rollers like what you get out the back side of an airport TSA X-ray machine. Straight runs as far as the eye can see. Tight 90-degree curves against which harder items suddenly clang. Even the occasional two-story high twisty slide reminiscent of children’s playgrounds where packages descend like brown, rectangular toddlers smashing playfully into their friends below. There and everywhere the familiar cardboard boxes with the smiling Amazon arrow, held closed with black tape advertising Amazon Prime, or sometimes the latest movie or product promotion. Occasionally there are large television screens that show the warren of conveyor belts interweaving across all of BFI4, color-coded like the circulatory system of a vast mechanical beast, that juggernaut of automation, efficiency, productivity. Seeing the inside of an Amazon fulfillment center feels like vivisection — you stand within the animal, which yet lives and breathes; you dare not touch anything lest you interrupt its rhythms; you feel you’re looking somewhere forbidden, somewhere off limits, and yet you can’t look away because the inner workings are shown to be all the more wondrously complex despite the outside being so simple. Yesterday, you clicked on a web page and boxes landed on your doorstep. Today, and every day after, you at last recognize the depth of choreography required behind the scenes to render useful that one little button that says Buy Now.
As an aside, although most people will never see the inside of an Amazon fulfillment center, nearly everyone can smell the inside of one. The secret comes in the form of the little air packs that are often put in an Amazon package to buffer its contents from damage during shipment. Within the warehouse, those air packs start out as flat rolls of plastic film. Just before a packer pulls a few out to insert into a box, a little machine inflates and seals each air pack with air from its surroundings. So if you want to smell the inside of an Amazon warehouse, simply puncture the next air pack you receive from Amazon and quickly insert your nose into the resultant hole, inhaling the air pack’s contents before they diffuse. You should smell the faint scent of machine oil, the smell of billions of dollars grinding out through the hands of a million associates.
I can’t help but look everywhere, staring mesmerized, letting a hundred fresh questions bloom with every new vista. I feel a serendipitous connection with an anonymous Seattleite when I spot the same type of dog treat zipping by on a belt below me as I had myself purchased just weeks ago. My instructor for Day One orientation, Monica, snaps me out of my wonderment and directs me into a conference room on the upper level designated for training new associates. The rooms are all named after Seattle bands like Foo Fighters, Macklemore, Temple of the Dog, and the one I’m assigned to: Nirvana.
I’ll spare you the four hours of PowerPoint slides that followed, except perhaps to say that wholly a third of the time was spent on detailed specifics around the tracking of time itself. Clocking in, clocking out, where it’s OK to clock in, when it’s not; past abuses thereof, terminable offenses therein. Different types of leave: paid time off or PTO, which is different from Vacation in that PTO does not need to be requested and approved by a manager; there’s Voluntary Time Off, where associates are offered the unpaid opportunity to go home early if, say, a certain part of the fulfillment pipeline stops or breaks down. And then there’s Unpaid Time Off (UPT), which gets debited whenever there’s the equivalent of an unexcused absence. Going negative on UPT is a definite no-no, totally fireable. It’s like being tardy to class too often, except in this case you get expelled.
One other thing stood out to me about all the presentations. There was a segment featuring the “Loss Prevention” team. The Loss which they’re Preventing is the loss of Amazon goods stolen by warehouse employees. The entire warehouse is full of cameras through which you’re told the Loss Prevention team is constantly looking. We were told the most common stolen item is cell phones, which makes sense: they’re small, high value, and quite easily resellable. Because of this, there are X-ray machines at the exit of the building, and you’re only allowed to take things in and out of the building in clear plastic bags issued by Security. Interestingly, there are no X-ray machines at the entrances, even though weapons were said to be banned at multiple points in the presentations. It turns out that while most tech companies keep saying that their most important assets are their employees, in Amazon’s case the most important assets to protect are clearly the cell phones. These X-ray machines guard every exit, and once in a while they go off randomly, or so it’s said, in a manner that’s exactly analogous to what the TSA says, including all the necessary caveats around the machines not stopping you simply because you have a turban on. When they do stop you, you’re asked to go through secondary screening where everything is removed from your pockets and put into little trays as you walk through a real metal detector. You then — and here’s the most important step — are asked to unlock your phone to prove that it’s not a stolen one. The method of proof is never quite explained. Days later, when I got randomly selected for this process, the security guard simply looked at the unlocked phone and declared me fine. Perhaps it’s the collection of apps you’ve chosen to download? It’s weird to me that they assume you can’t easily set up a new cell phone with a bunch of apps during your lunch break. It’d make a lot more sense for them to, say, force you to open Candy Crush, at which point they’d begrudgingly admit that there’s no way you could have reached level 70 within one workday.
Hours later, after watching a parade of slide decks with the same interest you’d have viewing a neighbor’s vacation photos, it was finally time for lunch. You must clock out for lunch and take the full thirty minutes. You can’t clock back in even a minute sooner because the law doesn’t allow. The digital time card machine will blink red if you do, and will tell you to wait it out. But you also can’t clock in any later than thirty-three minutes, at which point you eat into UPT.
At all the jobs I’ve had, employers have always given out some goodies at the end of orientation. At Microsoft, they gave out T-shirts, key chains, notebooks, and a variety of other gifts in a large box labeled New Employee Orientation. They even had the president of Microsoft Office, Jeff Raikes, come in to do a special hello and Q&A. At Facebook, the swag was even better — every employee got a brand-new iPhone, a hoodie, a MacBook Pro, and other gear.
Right before lunch, an Amazon manager handed out its new-employee gifts. Everyone got a single gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bag containing only the following items — and here I’m truly giving you the full list of all items — which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the job:
A black cloth face mask with a little blue Amazon A–Z arrow, the one that looks like a smile, embroidered on the side
A small packet of All Sport Zero Sports Drink Mix
A packet labeled “BioFreeze Gel Menthol Pain Relief”
A McKesson Cold & Hot Compress, one of those clear plastic bags with the little blue pellets inside it, proudly declaring in big letters: “Reusable. Microwaveable. Non-toxic.”
If the Amazon manager hadn’t handed all the bags out with such a straight face, I would have thought it was a big joke. The Ziploc bag and its contents were nearly perfect satire, exactly the type of gift you’d be given as a prank by some obnoxiously loud fraternity brother upon learning that you were starting at Amazon. But no — this was serious. Amazon was showing its care for the welfare of new associates by providing one serving of a sports drink, one packet of some sort of muscle rub, and an ice pack.
The Amazon warehouse I’ll be working in contains seven different break rooms, which is good not only because there are hundreds of employees, but because the building itself is six football fields wide and four stories high. When you have only fifteen minutes of break, you do not want to be spending eight of those minutes walking to and from a break room. Even with seven break rooms, I’ll eventually find that reaching the nearest takes two minutes, so almost a third of break is spent commuting to and from the only place in the warehouse with chairs.
The break rooms are filled with little folding tables, the cheap kind you see rented for outdoor receptions under makeshift tents. But Amazon’s too cheap to give each employee their own tiny table, so instead two employees share each table, one at each end, sitting no more than four feet across from each other. Your two-square-feet allocation of tabletop is largely dominated by various accoutrements related to COVID: one bottle of hand sanitizer, one box of generic facial tissue, one classic vertical black metal napkin canister typical of diners, and one humongous — and I do mean absolutely huge — jug of sanitation wipes proudly listing the dozens of diseases it kills using scientific names that only biology majors would recognize, so many that the font used is comically small, like the side effects of drugs advertised on TV seconds before the ad fades. All this mandatory equipment leaves enough table surface for perhaps one open lunch box, the type brandishing cartoon characters that kids took to school in the ’80s.
This first day at work, my experience in the break room had the same anxiety surrounding it as finding a cafeteria table to sit at on the first day of school. Except in this case, it turned out there was no need to worry because everyone avoided eye contact and pretty much stayed in their own worlds, staring at their phones the whole time. This isolation was further enhanced by large plexiglass partitions that ran table-to-ceiling around every seat, including between any two employees sitting across from each other at the same stubby table. This COVID accommodation makes the entire room have the effect of relatives visiting prisoners where both sides need to pick up a corded phone to talk across three feet of distance. Every employee sat in their own little plexiglass-partitioned space arranged in a grid, dressed in various colors and styles like life-sized Christmas baubles.
After lunch, I’m at last assigned to something more resembling a real job as opposed to mandatory HR training for avoiding litigation. Each new associate on the afternoon of their Day One is assigned to a “Learning Ambassador,” what Amazon calls associates who have volunteered to spend time showing new associates the ropes. They can be spotted throughout the warehouse by their differentiated vests which, in addition to having their title emblazoned on the back, feature thin blue lines highlighting the reflective strips that run down from each shoulder. The distinctive vests are there to make them easily spottable. You’re encouraged to ask any Learning Ambassador a question if you run into issues.
My Learning Ambassador is Kelvin, who stands a lanky 6’2” and usually talks in spurts of three words or less. The most common thing Kelvin says in answer to nearly any question is “Yeah.” “Is that machine supposed to be beeping like something’s wrong all the time?” “Yeah.” “Should we be worried about that flashing blue light?” “Yeah.” No elaboration. No explanation of context. No background to help you better understand how any one particular thing fits into the bigger picture. Three other associates and I are assigned to Kelvin, the nineteen-year-old paragon of brevity.
He leads us to Ship Dock, the area I’m randomly assigned to work. It turns out Ship Dock is in the back of the building, a fact I’d learn over the coming days. But at the moment, there’s really no telling. Kelvin tells us to follow him, four little ducklings fresh from lunch, through a warren of paths that wind over, under, and between various whirring and clacking machines, most of which are connected to or affiliated with the miles of omnipresent conveyor belts and metal rollers within the building. Worse than all the unexplained twists and turns through unlabeled subdomains of the warehouse is Kelvin’s frequent rewinding of paths already trodden. The entire act is indistinguishable from if he were trying to lose police hounds on the lam. By the time we arrive in Ship Dock, you could release me un-blindfolded and I’d still be unable to hit a piñata. Starting from Kelvin’s object lesson in obfuscation, it would take me a few days on my own to figure out how to both get to Ship Dock as well as to leave the building.
Kelvin asks us our shirt sizes and glove sizes. He then proceeds to a machine that looks much like a snack dispenser in most offices — a big pane of glass behind which are rows and rows of items held by spiraling wires of metal that twist to dispense the item you’ve ordered. But instead of Twinkies, this machine holds various shrink-wrapped articles necessary to wear during the course of work in the Ship Dock. Kelvin orders up a large reflective vest for me and a pair of medium gloves. The bright orange vests with yellow reflector strips are mandatory for all associates in Ship Dock presumably because of all the heavy carts being rolled around as well as all the Power Industrial Trucks, PITs — what the uninitiated might mistakenly call forklifts. The gloves, also required, are rubberized on the palm side to make daily handling of cardboard boxes easier. Kelvin doesn’t explain any of this, and also doesn’t explain how to use the dispensing machine. To do so would likely require more than three words, none of which are likely to be “yeah.”
Kelvin spent much of the afternoon leading the four of us to various areas in Ship Dock, explaining nothing, checking his handheld tablet all the time. Well, it isn’t fair for me to say that he explained nothing. He instead adhered to three principles when explaining anything. One: never volunteer an explanation. Topics should only be addressed when an associate asks a question. Two: speak only to the associate who asked the question, drawing him or her a short distance away from the other associates lest they, too, hear what’s going on. Three: when speaking thus privately to the associate, the one who dared to finally ask a question, do not speak loudly enough over the machines so that the explanation can be understood. Do so again when asked to repeat yourself by said associate. Do so a third time when the associate, now embarrassed after a long pause trying to discern what you’ve already said twice, risks being mistaken for a complete dolt and asks you to clarify what you’ve said. Repeat this enough times to make the situation go away; there is no associate who has the chutzpah to go beyond three or four requests for the same thing to be restated a little louder.
I wanted to learn these skills — not only so I'd be great at this job, but also so I wouldn't get run over by a Power Industrial Truck. In my escalating frustration with Kelvin's teaching style, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that he was, after all, only nineteen. As a teenager, I said even less if possible, preferring to get away with just a nod or even simply pretending I hadn’t heard someone I was nervous about interacting with. Kelvin was no different. He likely didn’t have much experience teaching people, especially considering not only his age but the fact that the average Amazon employee quits in eight months. Who knows? Perhaps we were even his very first batch of ducklings — and me, with my critical attitude, the best candidate to be named the ugly one. My frustration at the time was amplified because the stakes felt so high. It’s ultimately not a big deal if I didn’t learn exactly how to scan destination labels on packages quickly, but I felt particularly vulnerable when Kelvin would breeze through topics touching on grave danger — like when and how you can board the back of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer without being driven away to Omaha. At the time, my anxiety around safety manifested as annoyance at his pedagogy.
Kelvin’s tablet, I discovered after succumbing to a near-irresistible curiosity to give it a glance, contained what seemed to be pages and pages of bulleted text summarizing key aspects of various roles and stations within Ship Dock, often with accompanying photos to illustrate tricky machinery or processes. It’s no doubt a teaching tool designed to help Learning Ambassadors not miss important information to convey to their new coworkers. Kelvin instead treated the tablet and its screenfuls of text and images much as you would your Facebook feed. The four of us spent many idle minutes standing next to him as he, head bent over the glow of the tablet with its rubberized, heavy-duty case, scrolled page after page, pausing occasionally at certain sections, skimming others, periodically even letting out a little sniff or chuckle as if he had been reminded of something amusing. Mind you, he never looked up to share any of this information. It instead seemed almost like he was privately taking an online refresher course for working at Ship Dock, and that the four of us were hovering around him for reasons unclear. Every once in a while, Kelvin would get to the end of skimming a section on his tablet, likely explaining how to use the machinery or station we were standing next to, and look up, satisfied he had read it all, and begin walking wordlessly away. Several times, the four of us were unsure whether we were meant to follow him. At times, in hindsight, it turned out the answer was yes. At others, Kelvin had merely spotted a friend and wanted to share a little laugh or some warehouse news as we looked on.
This pantomime of confusion drew mercifully to an end when Kelvin suddenly turned around and said, “OK, we’re done.” That, too, you’ll notice fit into three words. “We can go home now?” I asked, given it was only 2 p.m. in a shift that should have lasted until 6 p.m. — not to mention, we were just warned that morning, via hours of presentations, of the various ways in which clocking out at the wrong times would be punished — the Eye of Sauron, as it were, was all-seeing from its panopticon. “Yeah. You can.”
And with those three words, I was free. No one had called out my non-compliant shoes, the ones that left my toes vulnerable to crushing this entire time. Day One was complete. I clocked out, picked up a clear, Security-approved bag for future entries into the building, and left for the day. I couldn’t wait to tell Tanya and the kids all about it.
I was deep in the honeymoon period that happens with many jobs. My first day ended hours before a regular day would; furthermore, I had sat half the day listening to HR presentations instead of standing on flat concrete for ten hours wearing industrial shoes. I was naïve to the difficult road ahead. Instead, I was all excitement when I described my day to Tanya, Caleb, and Chloe, detailing my wonderment at entering an Amazon fulfillment center for the first time to see how the sausage was made. I breathlessly conveyed what I had already learned: the hundreds of thousands of packages processed daily in our very own warehouse; my assignment to Ship Dock — which, to the inner geek in me, sounded reminiscent of a job in space; the endless conveyor belts smelling of machine oil; the ability to foretell this Christmas’s most popular gifts by simply standing overhead and watching as products zipped by. Everything seemed magical. The promise of Jeff Bezos’s Day One rang true for me. Adventure awaits!
But part of me saw hints already that The Good Place might eventually turn out to be The Bad Place in disguise — things like the bit where Tanya and I had a good laugh about the Ziploc bag of goodies that Amazon sent home with me. We had spent more than one spring cleaning in the past giving away Columbia Sportswear jackets and other fancy gear custom-embroidered with the names of various product teams I had worked on at Microsoft and Facebook. I had even given away books, gift baskets, and even more expensive items sent my way not by my employers, but by companies I had merely interviewed with. I knew even when laughing at the gallon-sized freezer bag that the Cold & Hot Compress wasn’t there for bourgeois relaxation, say, after a tricky but deft ascent to Base Camp in preparation to scale K2 alongside a pack of sherpas — face it, you’re good, and you make it look easy with all your rockface poise — but instead for nights you were tempted to quit due to pain because wasn’t it, after all, just a lark? There’s a way laughter can leave your eyes but stay on the rest of your face when realizations such as this arrive partway through the levity. There’s a way you look at the corner of your partner’s eyes, searching for the same moment, wondering if both of you had suddenly encountered the same worry. But in the moment, it feels better to not search too carefully, and instead embrace the humor wholeheartedly.
It can all wait. Today was Day One! Not every nascent shoot needs to be trampled immediately underfoot.
Coming next week: Day Two, when the real job begins, where I experience the best of Bollywood and Punjabi music for hours.