Day Two: The Real Job Begins

It was too late for me to say anything by the time Anju, the unflappable associate I was working with, tossed the dripping package onto the conveyor belt. We watched — and here I use the royal “we,” because Anju didn’t care enough to watch anything other than her Netflix videos — as the package streaked oil down conveyor after conveyor as it wended its way through the warehouse. I had been warned during orientation that you should never put a leaky package onto a conveyor; a mere month ago, the building had smelled of vinegar much of the day because an associate let just one such leaky package sow its contents along the miles of speeding belts snaking through the warehouse. But it was too late. I’d have to accept that it wasn’t going to be an auspicious start to my first day of real work.

It was a far cry from my start at Facebook, back in 2010, at a time when the company only had 500 engineers and when Friendster was still rumored to be coming back. Google+ had yet to be announced, though folks on the inside were pretty sure that such a product had to be in the works. There were so few engineers, in fact, that only one other engineer, Simon Cross, started the same day as me. We sat alone in a dark cavern, an area reserved for new hires that Facebook called “bootcampers,” next to a large loading dock door, trying to be useful. The rule at Facebook was that you’re required by the end of your first week to have launched some new feature or bug fix as a rite of passage. Working alongside Simon in our dim corner of Facebook’s building in Palo Alto, made infamous later by Elizabeth Holmes when she based Theranos in the same building, I implemented the first version of Facebook photo tagging on mobile phones. I managed to do so only a few days after joining the company, and was thrilled to see seventy-four million people use that feature within a day of its launch. This wasn’t because I was somehow an amazing engineer; it was because Facebook was set up back then to emphasize innovation velocity above all else. It felt electric for my work to so quickly impact millions of people worldwide.

In contrast, no matter how quickly I eventually learned to work at Amazon, I would be forever fated to handle one package at a time. My hands — my body — would never scale the way my mind could. Ideas change millions; software, when done right, can manifest the best ideas and distribute them efficiently worldwide. The work of my hands would never compare, could never compare. It’s a reality I’d be forced to accept the longer I worked in the Amazon warehouse.

But that’s all to come later. In the moment, I watch as the oil-soaked package dripped its way down the entire conveyor and eventually turned a corner out of sight. Anju had long since moved on.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Day Two: The Real Job Begins.

Akin to many software teams, Ship Dock associates start each day with a team standup meeting. Everyone clocks in at the front of the building at 7:30, and it takes a while to wend your way through the maze of conveyor belts and heavy machinery until you arrive at the back of the building where the Ship Dock is located. Standup meetings are a catchy thing in the software world because, ha ha, the meeting can be kept intentionally short because everyone needs to stand for the entire meeting, as opposed to sitting in $700 Aeron chairs around a sleek conference table sipping free sodas. In the Ship Dock, such a moniker, though still used, carries no such additional implication because associates stand all day anyway, ten to 11.5 hours each day. A morning team meeting in Ship Dock is a standup not because it encourages brevity through its white-collar novelty of not being allowed to sit during a meeting, but because the entire Ship Dock has no chairs by design. The novelty in Ship Dock would be to arrive one day at 7:30 to the sight of chairs.

The day-shift Ship Dock lead, Harris, rallies people around him in a standing circle and begins coordinating calisthenics. Each morning and each time after lunch, the entire Ship Dock team is led through a series of stretches, which Amazon has no doubt deeply researched with its bevy of ergonomics consultants in order to maximize associate wellness, or alternatively, to minimize lawsuits. Harris tells everyone to start with wrist rolls — and, to my surprise, everyone actually does. In fact, although it’d be too much to say that engagement in wrist-rolling was fanatic, motions were universally enthusiastic, bordering even on chipper. Through twenty-three years of working in the software industry, I had become cynical of any sort of corporate requirement that involved bodily movement. Most of the time, in a software company, if you’re told what to do with your body, it’d likely be something like “close your eyes,” because some trainer in a course titled “Crucial Conversations” is asking you to visualize your future communicational success.

“Ankle rolls!” shouts Harris. He shouts not as a drill sergeant, but as someone who can barely be heard over the din of industrial machinery all around. I look to the left and to the right as, once again, I’m met with unexpected enthusiasm. I can’t decide whether the experienced employees have come to see the value of these twice-daily stretches through hard-earned personal experience from ignoring them, or whether this ebullient chorus of movement was the equivalent of laughing loudly at the boss’s joke when you work in a warehouse where the sound of jokes can’t travel more than three feet. Perhaps my coworkers’ vigor of engagement was a visual way to say, “Yes, I hear you, Harris, and you have great ideas. Ankles do need to be stretched lest they get damaged.” But my cynicism fades a bit when Harris transitions to the next stretch. “Everyone hug yourselves,” he says, holding each shoulder with his hands and twisting at the waist to demonstrate stretching of the lats. “How can you love others if you don’t learn to first love yourself?” People genuinely chuckle at this. Harris’s joke is a wink to all participants that, yes, he, too, understands this is partly about litigiousness — but, hey, let’s get what lighthearted benefit we can as we complete this requirement.

Harris looks to be around nineteen or twenty years old. You can identify him as an area lead because he wears a blue vest, whereas plebeians like me wear orange vests. He’s rather short and doesn’t seem impressively fit; I find myself wondering how he came to be a day shift area lead, and what one does to rise in the ranks of Ship Dock.

Chuckles fade as Harris changes into his Serious Area Lead Voice. “Peak is starting soon.” “Peak” is what Amazon calls the busiest period of the year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Peak is legendary for its madness. People proudly wear shirts commemorating Peaks from years past, a testament to the fact that they not only survived, but they continued on, undeterred, ready to endure it this year as well. Banners in BFI4 memorialize key accomplishments in past Peaks. The largest one that greets you on the way into the warehouse says “Peak Fest 2020: 722,338 Outbound” — that’s the number of boxes processed in one single day. These banners, each declaring various departmental records and covered front and back with the scrawled signatures of associates who contributed, can be seen hanging in various places throughout BFI4, much like the types of banners you see hanging from gymnasium rafters in high schools famous for winning state basketball championships. “Peak,” Harris continues, “means MET.” Here he’s referring to the acronym MET, mandatory extra time. “This year’s MET hasn’t been officially declared yet, but you can be sure there will be MET. Most likely eleven-hour shifts, and one extra day.” That is, we’d likely bump from a forty-hour week to a fifty-five-hour one. And Amazon has the right to announce a MET day as late as noon on the day before; that is, you could be told during Friday lunch that you’d need to come in for eleven hours on Saturday.

“It’s going to be crazy,” he says in summary. I’ve now heard this from several people in just the first day or so of working here. I’m excited to have joined at such a pivotal time, but I’m also curious what everyone is really talking about, because it’s the week before Thanksgiving and nothing looks crazy as I walk around BFI4. Perhaps this is just the naïve musings of an innocent who doesn’t properly interpret clouds before a storm. I’ll likely feel very differently when I get through Peak this year, assuming I get through at all, and earn my very own Peak 2021 shirt.

The day’s first task is easy. Six-foot-high metal cages on casters, called “go carts” in Amazon parlance, need to be unloaded from trucks and set in various parts of the warehouse so packages can be stacked within them and rolled around for further processing. These carts are folded upright so that they nest tightly within the tractor-trailer. The job is to walk into the cavernous truck, pull out a cart, actuate a series of levers and clasps in order to unfold it fully, lock the rear wheels in place so that you don’t careen out of control around any corners, and roll the cart to areas in the warehouse where they are most needed. It’s the first time I actually get to do something in my new job; it’s the first productive action I’ll take as an associate.

The job is easy and uneventful. I’ll later learn that, in comparison with other tasks, unloading go carts has some benefits. It’s not strenuous, compared to, say, the seemingly similar but fundamentally different job of pushing around go carts packed full of boxes. You get to walk around a bit, unlike the many jobs in the warehouse that require standing in one spot for hours. In walking, you pass some coworkers, most of whom look elsewhere so as not to make unwarranted eye contact, much less undesired conversation, but some of whom eventually will become your friends, giving you an opportunity to exchange a smile or make a wisecrack that breaks the monotony. There’s even a little thinking to be done. Why’s this wheel stuck? Why won’t the front gate of the cart stay closed? How can I best nest this into the other nearby carts to park them tightly together?

We do this task for several hours, until the morning break that happens precisely at 10 a.m. Other than aspects of the task itself, the only thing I learn in this period is about my coworkers. Four of us started on the same day and were assigned to Ship Dock. Three of the four, myself included, seem eager to make a good first impression, working energetically and helping each other when running into issues. One of us, however, is clearly already practicing how to pace himself, working quite slowly, pausing long before continuing to the next cart when done with the first. He’s also clearly the oldest of us, perhaps around fifty. Perhaps he knows something we don’t. Perhaps he’s deliberately lowering the bar of our manager’s expectations so that his pace will be accepted as the natural long-term pace that all of us will be measured against. Or maybe he’s just optimizing, testing the lowest bound of what’s acceptable as an associate without being fired. I don’t struggle long with this mystery; I frankly don’t care what the answer is. I pull my cart out left of him as if the warehouse floor had lanes and pass him quickly, merging back onto the shortest route to my cart’s ultimate destination.

—

After break, a new task. When you order an item from Amazon, it’s first picked by an associate from a marked bin and placed into a gray tray, reminiscent of the shoe trays used in airport security lines (but with higher side walls). The tray is whisked by a series of conveyors to another associate who packs it into a bag or box. A labeling machine then sticks labels one after the other onto a conveyor belt of packed bags and boxes from above at a mesmerizing pace. These packages, for reasons yet unknown to me, end up in large, jumbled piles on a much wider conveyor before they’re separated and individually sorted into six-foot-high bins according to destination. This separation of piles of labeled packages into individually sortable units is called Induction in the fulfillment pipeline. The warehouse contains eight elevated platforms, numbered Induct #1 to Induct #8, where this task is done by associates.

An induction station has two parts. The first is a large, tapered incline, starting eight feet wide at eye level, descending like a flat slide with high sidewalls and tapering to perhaps two feet wide at waist height. Running across the top of the incline is a wide conveyor that brings piles of labeled bags and boxes, periodically dumping dozens of them down the incline, much like a slanted rooftop full of snow releasing its melting load in an avalanche that lands on the ground below it. The second part of an induction station is a different waist-high conveyor belt, this one personal to the associate working the post, which shuttles a single bag or box between the associate and a high-speed conveyor carrying outputs from all Induct stations. The associate stands between the avalanched pile of packages and their personal conveyer. Their job is to free individual packages from the jumble, locate the label, and orient the package onto their personal conveyor such that an overhead scanner can read the label before sending the package onward. The package then, with remarkable choreography, slides onto the high-speed conveyor perfectly between packages already inducted by other associates, like the smoothest merge you’ve ever seen on a highway where no one needs to change speed or make space, where all the cars travel in tight lockstep indifferentiable from being parallel-parked street-side.

If you’re doing things right, the personal conveyor with its overhead label scanner can accept packages as quickly as you can orient and position them. And I do mean literally “as quickly” — when the high-speed conveyor highway is empty, meaning no other associate’s packages block yours from merging, I have yet to see an associate load faster than their personal conveyor and label scanner can ingest. Whenever your pile of packages whittles down past a certain point on the incline, the wide conveyor at the top of the incline disgorges a fresh batch to refill your mound. In its steady state, your personal conveyor is a voracious beast who can’t be sated, with you feeding it from a fount of consumerism that never runs dry. You will never reach the bottom of your pile because there is no bottom. You’ve simply dipped your toe into a torrent that runs straight from China onto porches daily nationwide, whose gravity is the almighty US dollar.

The associate working the induction task is sometimes accompanied by a sidekick who uses a sort of rake, shaped like a farmer’s hoe, to encourage packages down the incline that feeds the entire process. The apparent purpose of the raker is to reduce the times that the main associate needs to reach into the incline to grab more packages, thus maintaining their pace. I was taught briefly how to rake and then assigned to a platform labeled Induct #8 to be a raker.

The main associate on Induct #8, Anju, didn’t say anything back when I stepped onto the platform and greeted her with an enthusiastic hello. Instead, she turned from her task and looked at me like I had run over her cat — it was two years ago, but she wasn’t about to forget it. She loved that cat. Once Anju was sure I had registered her displeasure, she merely pursed her lips in the direction of a rake, grunted as if to say, “That’s yours; the rest is mine,” and returned to her work. She didn’t look back again for — and this is not an exaggeration — 105 minutes. I’m sure, because morning break ends at 10:15 and lunch begins at noon; that’s 105. Well, actually, 100 now that I think about it. Anju called it quits for lunch five minutes early, a pattern I’d soon discover was, as marketers like to say, “on brand.”

She started our session together by sitting on the bottom lip of the incline, an action which I’m sure is endorsed by neither Amazon nor OSHA. Packages rushed down and surrounded her like the Von Trapp children upon Maria’s unexpected return. Anju reached down disinterestedly, tossing one package after another loudly onto her personal conveyor as if testing the gods of bubble wrap to prove just how impotent they were against such blasé handling. The more I watched Anju, the more I decided “blasé” was actually unfair. No, it seemed to me instead that she was trying hard, very hard, to imitate Ace Ventura, the ’90s detective played by Jim Carrey, who opens the movie as a deliveryman drop-kicking a package down a driveway until its contents were undeniably shattered, making a sound when shaken that earns the rare judicious use of the word “smithereens.” I learned you can easily learn the weight of a package, and maybe even guess at the balance of its contents’ center of gravity, purely by hearing it bang against the conveyor surface. If you’ve ever ordered a snow globe and received what’s essentially a terrarium in an Amazon box whose bottom is at first mysteriously, and then with sudden realization explicably, wet, that was Anju. If you’ve ever received a bubble-wrap Amazon bag filled with olive oil and two roughly equal halves of what was once its bottle, that was Anju. She cared so little, she would send anything down the line. I saw her load shipping bags that weren’t even sealed. She sent one package down the conveyor completely on top of another, guaranteeing that the bottom one would arrive in, say, Vancouver without explanation. Anju sent multiple leaking packages down the conveyor, packages so discolored by oozing I could nearly guess their contents.

Context doesn’t explain everything, but after an hour or so of working with Anju, I at least understood part of her behavior a bit better. She had placed her phone on a little platform between the incline with its jumble of packages and her personal conveyor. We were both on a platform that was raised above the warehouse floor, such that no one below could see her little secret phone spot. And it turns out that’s important, because Anju had been, this entire time, catching up on the best of Bollywood movies. She was Netflix and Chilling in BFI4. Phones were technically banned. Headphones similarly, but I guess that goes to show at least one benefit of long hair. And certainly Netflix. She was a binger, and nothing was going to come between Anju and her Bollywood fix.

Well, not nothing. Halfway through our afternoon shift together, Anju took off her headphones and turned towards me. Perhaps she was about to drop some Induction wisdom to her young padawan. Just when I thought she would speak, she bent down to plug her illicit headphones into a power socket on the floor. Of course! How long did I think all that tabla music was going to blast before a recharge was necessary? She turned wordlessly back to her work. Once the headphones were charged, she surprised me yet again — you never truly know a person — by forsaking Netflix. It was time to give Spotify a turn. Her phone now showed two men on a white background, an album cover, with big orange letters: “Punjabi Top 20 Hits.” Anju was hipper than I expected, to be honest, for someone in her fifties.

I won’t spend much more time teaching you how to be the antithesis of a model employee, but I will say this — Anju was well-practiced at intentional work slowdowns. Once in a while, the personal conveyor and its label scanner would get into an error state. The conveyor stops, and an error light blinks. You’re supposed to then push a few buttons that retract the packages that have moved down the conveyor but have yet to merge onto the high-speed package superhighway. Once you clear the packages on your personal conveyor, you then reset the entire assembly and restart your workflow. This whole process should take perhaps fifteen seconds for anyone whose name isn’t Anju. If, however, your name is Anju, you sigh and let your shoulders relax when the error light blinks. You then look idly around the warehouse — you haven’t given the rest of it a good look in a while, and it’s important to train your eyes at different focal distances to keep everything sharp — until a minute has passed. And I’ve half a mind that “a minute” is precise; I’m pretty sure Anju knows exactly how long Induct #8 can be stuck in an error state, its light blinking orange for everyone to see, until a lead like Harris is notified and comes looking to assist. Her body language suggests she’s counting in her head, because after staying still in a personal game of Red Light / Green Light for what feels to me to be a long time, she suddenly springs back into action to reset the station and resume activity.

She pauses for a few other things throughout our shift together, sometimes to see what else to queue up on Netflix, sometimes just to let the sights and sounds of modern commerce wash over her. There was even once when, uncharacteristically, Anju began fixing a label that had begun to peel off. But everything made sense once I realized she was doing a parody of sticker repair, with exaggeratedly gentle and slow motions to peel the sticker cleanly off, first from this edge, then from that. By the time she had lovingly mimed the whole process, the sticker was in curled tatters from all directions like a leaf too close to a campfire the moment before it sets alight. She restored this reminder of autumn onto the box with one determined whack and sent the package flying down the line. I don’t begrudge her these many moments of deliberate delay; every second Anju is idle is another second someone gets their snow globe intact.

—

Just when I had nearly lost hope of being assigned to assist anyone but Anju, I spot Kelvin on the warehouse floor below our platform. He motions for me to come down; it turns out, for reasons unexplained, that I’ve been assigned to rake for someone else for a bit. By now, I know that “reasons unexplained” is basically Kelvin’s middle name; almost nothing he tells us to do comes with exposition. But I needed no reason — it was depressing working with Anju, and I wanted out.

I walk up the six steps to Induct #3 and meet Keisha. She nods hello with a smile and goes right back to inducting, shuffling bags and boxes like she’s saving photo albums from a burning house. Keisha pulls packages off the line regularly, whenever there’s a mistake. An open bag here, a leaky box there, she spots them all. When the main outbound package superhighway stops, forcing all Induct stations to also stop, I expected Keisha to plop down on any unapproved surface like Anju and just wait for things to start up again. I’m gobsmacked when she instead pre-orients unprocessed packages in neat little stacks next to her personal conveyor. When the main conveyor starts up again, Keisha quickly deploys her queued packages, one stack at a time, with efficient flicks of the wrist, like she’s dealing cards in Vegas. At one point during another pause in the pipeline, Keisha grabs a rake herself and rakes packages vigorously and repeatedly toward her like she’s building a snow fort, until packages are piled high enough to nearly spill over the sidewalls of the incline. I’m impressed at how much she puts her back into the task — I can clearly improve in my raking.

Working to support Keisha, especially after Anju, was positively inspiring. Though the actual substance of my work was the same — that is, I worked no differently with either of them — time passed more quickly with Keisha. It was fun watching Keisha work, much like it’s fun to see anyone good at a particular skill perform at their best. Raking for Anju felt like buying stock in a tobacco company; sure, you’d make a buck, but at what cost?

Whereas Anju viewed every pause as a time to relax, Keisha treated each hiccup in operations as a chance to line up packages to make her even faster once work resumed. And yet they’re paid the same — we’re all paid the same. Amazon is famous for metrics, and you can bet the warehouse has many; for instance, screens at every station tell associates their production rate at various tasks. However, so many other factors essential to the quality of a worker are hard or impossible to track. Anju’s rate, around 920 packages per hour, was only perhaps 150 below Keisha’s. What about the oil streaks down the conveyor line? The broken goods? The partially open packages? The technically minded amongst you probably think there’s some sort of tracking that could account for all of that — for instance, tying customer returns all the way back to the associate who inducted their package. But who’s to say that the olive oil was broken by Anju instead of having broken earlier in the process? Or that the bag didn’t split open later down the line? The empiric fact is that Anju remains employed, presumably because Amazon hasn’t measured these aspects of worker performance or doesn’t enforce them.

If you owned a small business, how much more would you pay for Keisha than Anju? It’s a travesty that they’re paid the same. You see this dynamic throughout the warehouse — it’s clear when you work directly with other associates that some are far, far better than others. But can the leads really see it, since they don’t work directly with the associates? Or is it that they do know who’s better and who’s worse, but company policy is too rigid to allow differentiating rewards? Is Anju perhaps unfireable during Peak because Amazon can’t even hire enough associates? Or, distressingly, is it possible that workers like Anju are common, making it futile to attempt replacing her?

I’ve managed software teams for two decades. The work of software engineers is far harder to measure than the work of associates. At least with associates, each person’s top-line productivity is expressible as a single number: number of packages processed per hour. But in software engineering, a lot of the work is done in teams, and one’s effectiveness is often as much about one’s ability to inspire and influence other people towards an idea that improves the business as it is about the lines of code one writes in a day. And even the code itself has equivalents of Anju’s bad behaviors: buggy or lazy things that are ultimately hard to directly attribute to any one person definitively, though you have your suspicions. It doesn’t seem fair when people are paid the same for producing radically different quality of work; but at the same time, objective measurement is often difficult, leading to the inevitable conclusion that differentiated compensation no doubt sometimes ends up rewarding the wrong people disproportionately well. What’s to be done?

At the end of the workday, I grab a chance to chat with Harris a bit to better understand my prospects.

“I love the Induct job,” I tell Harris, “but I don’t see why the raker is necessary. I put more packages through without a raker than the associate I was raking for. Why does that job exist?” Harris mumbled something, looked around to check who was in earshot, and then told me in a low voice that it was related to politics within the center. It was only my first real day doing the job, so I didn’t fully understand the nuance. But it had something to do with one department not wanting to “give up” their folks to help speed another department, and thus those folks are deployed as rakers. I hadn’t misjudged the job in my naïveté after all — it was truly a pointless job while being more physically demanding and less intellectually interesting at the same time. I was getting a taste of office politics in a completely different setting. The taste, though familiar, is one that repulses me. Then again, doesn’t it everyone? Workplace politics is like Hootie and the Blowfish — everyone you met in the mid-’90s swore they hated the band, and yet Cracked Rear View remains the third-best-selling debut album of all time (after Boston’s eponymous album and the record holder, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction). What we call workplace politics is, after all, just the patterned behavior of people interacting together, the melding of disparate individual motives on the way towards one collective goal. BFI4 was not immune. The raking continues.

I shift the subject to career progression. I ask Harris what he looks for in a star employee. Harris, who looks young enough that this is probably his first management job, thinks for a moment and replies, “Attitude. What’s most important is attitude, and it seems to me you have a good one.” I’m pleased that Harris has made this career-impacting observation within two minutes of meeting me. “You want to scan between 180 and 200 packages an hour.” This rate is for boxes, weighing between two and forty-nine pounds each, which require manual scanning, sorting, and placement into go carts. I’d later learn that a good rate for processing flat bubble-wrap envelopes, like the ones Anju and Keisha worked on today, is around 1,350 an hour. Harris continues his exposition. “Don’t disappear” — here he’s referring to how huge the warehouse floor is and how easy it is to simply be unfindable for large blocks of time — “and be active and engaged on the floor.” I mention to him that I want to learn all the things, try all the things. I didn’t bring up that I’d also like to try the other departments like Picking or Packing; it’s too early to mention that yet, and it’s unclear whether inter-departmental politics would make it unwise to reveal that I might transfer one day. After all, leads make all the Ship Dock work assignments, and I’d hate to be relegated to the Amazon equivalent of Siberia.

I head home after my first full ten-hour shift completely sore. My heart rate throughout the day was around 105–110. My ankles are especially sore from standing on concrete the whole time. The only chairs in the building are deliberately in the break rooms; even perfectly safe places to sit, like the two-foot-wide elevated stepstools scattered throughout the warehouse, are labeled with huge stickers that say, “Do Not Sit.” My back is thoroughly sore after having moved more than 2,000 packages in a day. I’m relieved to have reached the end of the first day. I wonder whether I can keep this up.

Upon arriving home, I find on my porch two large, bubble-wrap-lined Amazon mailers, both sent from BFI4! I’m unexpectedly happy about this, the new, deeper connection I have between the things I buy and the work that goes into delivering them. And I’m particularly amused by the possible serendipity that I might have processed my own package earlier that same day. This isn’t as unlikely as it might at first sound. All of BFI4 has only eight induction stations that process all bubble-wrap mailers in a day. I had worked at two of those stations for many hours in the day, so there’s a credible chance I would have touched the same package earlier. The other almost meta happenstance is that one of the packages contains the Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles I had especially ordered to help reduce the amount of ankle and foot strain I’d feel from standing all day. I’m fascinated by the whole circle of consumerism: I work at a warehouse because we all want Prime deliveries; the warehouse hurts my feet; I order special gel insoles that are most easily available on Amazon; my order thus creates yet another package on the endless pile of goods being processed in the warehouse; and to top it all off, I might have been the one to process said package. I don’t think about this overly much; tomorrow’s another ten-hour shift, so I just open the Dr. Scholl’s, cut it down to size 9, and prepare my shoes for the next day. The adventure has only begun.

Coming next week: am I able to hack it at the warehouse, or do I end up crying softly to myself as brown cardboard inundates me? Will Harris follow up on noticing my good attitude, or will I be just another one of the hundreds of nameless employees forgotten on the warehouse floor?