Day Zero

’Til now, I’ve not talked much about one relevant detail that impacts my same-day application and acceptance of a warehouse job at Amazon: I have a wife and kids . For many years I was the primary breadwinner, but in the past seven months, that role has fallen to my wife, Tanya, as I loafed around the house, unsure what to do with my life. In the past few months, I had, in fact, sunk into a depression. On many days, I found it hard to get out of bed before noon or 2 p.m.; I’d often go back to sleep after being up a few hours because I just wanted the day to end. Simple conversations were overwhelming; appointments and anything mandatory were overwhelming. However, part of me suspected, as all the literature on depression says, that I would benefit from routine — an enforced, obligatory routine — the type of thing that hourly employment would provide, emphatically with no “flex time.” This, when I’m honest, was one of the deeper motivations behind my sudden enthusiasm around getting an Amazon warehouse job: I wanted it to save me from my downward spiral.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Day Zero. For those of you just tuning in, I recommend starting this serial podcast from the beginning so you’re caught up and everything makes sense.

Tanya had been patient with me over these months, never pushing me hard to get a job immediately, supportive of my figuring out the right next step to take work-wise. I hadn’t mentioned my interest in working at an Amazon warehouse because up until the day I applied, it had been mostly idle imagination. I didn’t expect, when navigating Amazon’s recruiting page, that I would be offered an actual job within two minutes of clicking a few buttons. Now that I officially had an offer in hand, I really needed to find a time to broach the subject with Tanya. It’s not often in relationships, certainly the one between Tanya and me, where someone gets a job offer even before speaking with their partner . With my other jobs, like Microsoft and Facebook — and even with my application to Jamba Juice — I had kept Tanya in the loop from the beginning. The Amazon job was a glaring exception, not because I was trying to hide anything, but more because idle clicking on the internet ended in a written offer within two minutes of applying. The rapidity of developments from what began as idle musings and turned into An Actual Job was completely unexpected by me. I could only imagine how much more unexpected it would be for her.

Tanya had always been supportive of my many, sometimes dramatic, changes in career. She supported my moving from Microsoft, where I had reached just one level below Partner — considered a pretty lofty milestone only ever achieved by under 2% of the employee population — to Facebook, letting $2M of stock options expire and starting over as an individual contributor, just a coder, with no title and with what I thought, at the time, was also no seniority level during the heady pre-IPO days, when everyone was laser-focused on just making the company successful instead of asking about their own careers. We spent just three weeks considering the opportunity for me to launch Facebook London’s engineering office with the help of twelve others from Seattle and California, and to be its Site Director, before Tanya and I together decided to move our family to London for what we thought was two years but later turned into a halcyon five. We had just nearly bought a house in Seattle, but, as with all adventure in our lives, Tanya was completely open to changing everything if it gave us a chance to experience something new. She similarly was thrilled when I considered taking a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to start a software nonprofit, a move that entailed taking what I, at the time, thought of as a significant pay cut. But I had never before proposed the idea of making $37,000 a year, when we currently pay half that just in property tax alone.

But I knew Tanya well enough to know that the money wouldn’t likely bother her. She has always been the more frugal of the two of us. But also, given I’ve been unemployed for eight months, we could look at the $3,000 a month as pure upside. Going from zero to anything is an improvement. I was more concerned about two things: whether she’d see the move as a sign that my mental health had deteriorated significantly, and whether she’d be in some way ashamed to go from having a partner who built an engineering office for a major tech company from twelve people to 600 in five years, in London of all places, to having a partner who’d soon handle more packages every day than most people do in an entire lifetime. I thought about exactly how to open the conversation, to explain that I not only have been thinking about working in an Amazon warehouse, but that I had already been offered the job. Given Tanya was busy working the entire day when I applied, I had even finished the drug test without having talked to her and was expected to start the job on November 15. I weighed a few different openings:

“Guess who’s going to be buff from lifting nearly three thousand packages a day? This guy!”

“Do you have any plans for November 15, a little over a week from now? I do!”

“You’re not going to believe what just happened. I was idly clicking on a few buttons on Amazon’s website — you know how we love Amazon — and before I knew it, someone named Darnell was demanding that I put saliva on a plastic probe. Next thing you know, Amazon’s demanding I show up at a warehouse in Kent at 7:30 a.m. two Mondays from now. I’m expected, you know. What can I do? I’ve gotta go, right?”

In the end, there felt to be no good way to break the news other than to straightforwardly tell her what happened. I’d been trying to get out of depression for months unsuccessfully. I wanted something outside of me to force structure and discipline on my life. I wanted people to tell me what to do, every minute of the day, during a time when even the smallest of decisions involving personal initiative was hard. I thought Amazon would be perfect for that. We’ve been loyal customers for years. I hear they have robots. And I’m told the work is hard. Right now, hard might be good for me. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. I feared you might feel ashamed of me. Please understand that I think I need this.

I brought up the topic, at last, before we went to bed. Tanya listened to my meandering explanation, and, when I had stopped talking, didn’t hesitate a moment before saying she was happy for me. She would support me taking the job, despite us having to reorient our home life around it, because she understood how the structure might help restore some balance to my life and also add a bit of practical grounding to my outlook. I felt so relieved she understood, and grateful for her support.

When it came time to tell the kids, my thirteen-year-old daughter Chloe was curious whether she’d be able to visit the warehouse. I told her probably not, in that Amazon likely doesn’t want to be responsible for any harm that might come from non-employees walking the floors of a fulfillment center filled with industrial machinery. I’d later learn that Amazon used to allow visitors, but COVID put an end to all that. Given that no recording equipment was allowed, Chloe would need to instead imagine the things I’d describe to her over the coming weeks. Caleb, my fifteen-year old, asked if I was taking the job to “see how the other half lives.” This phrasing hit hard at a source of guilt I’ve felt around this project: that I’m voyeuristically diving into a world in which I don’t belong , a world I expect to be very challenging and difficult, not because I need to but because I have the luxury of entertaining my bourgeois curiosity without the burden of deleterious consequence. I have other motives, ones that ennoble this entire enterprise (at least in my mind), but in truth, this question of whether I’m reveling in others’ suffering will imbue all the insights and learnings I derive from this project with a backdrop of justly deserved guilt. I set this aside to convey my stronger motivations.

First, I’ve been interested for many years about the future of work. When I quit Facebook four years ago, I was very concerned about the rise of what’s being called “technical unemployment,” where robots and computers are replacing people. I worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence, a sort of glorified intern, at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle to research whether I could start a company that would bridge the rising income gap in America. Though I had set this work aside when an opportunity arose to start a global health software nonprofit , a big part of me is still both interested in and gravely concerned about a future where people are increasingly less employable as computers and robots continue their inexorable rise. Working in an Amazon warehouse would put me at the very vanguard of witnessing this juggernaut of permanent societal change.

Second, I wanted some enforced routine in my life. I thought the structure would help alleviate some of the decision-making that felt difficult during periods of depression. I was attracted to the idea of a job that starts mandatorily at a precise minute every day, where I’m told exactly what to do at all times, where, exactly the opposite of the bar in Cheers, absolutely no one knew my name. For many years, I had held jobs where more people knew my name than I knew theirs; it was appealing to think about a job where I was essentially anonymous, having no responsibility greater than to do exactly what I was told. No worrying about the future of the team, no ruminating about past mistakes I had made — just an all-consuming present.

Other than the benefits of enforced routine, curiosity lies at the core of why this job interests me. Caleb and Chloe are too young to remember that Walmart used to dominate popular conversation about predatory capitalism and terrible work conditions. But after all the press furor, we’ve essentially not heard about that aspect of Walmart for perhaps a decade. The new baddie in town is now Amazon. We end the discussion on this point — that perhaps it’s hard for people to see the largest companies as anything but evil. I had joined Microsoft in the late ’90s after the hugely popular release of Windows 95 only to weather the terrible press around the dot-com era with the Department of Justice investigations around Microsoft’s monopoly. Similarly, I joined Facebook just in time to see all the positive press around the Arab Spring and feel the international optimism around how Facebook was connecting the world, only to later see it fall from grace. Could it be possible that no matter how well Amazon behaved — and here I’m not excusing all the obviously bad things that have happened — that we inevitably build up the underdogs only to tear them down when they finally succeed in rising to the top?

The night I spoke with Tanya and the kids about the job, I laid in bed excited at the prospect of being an Amazon fulfillment center associate. As a dedicated customer and someone who’s read about the types of efficiency optimizations that Amazon has made in their warehouses, I was excited to soon have the chance to see it from the inside. One lingering thought surfaces again as I drift to sleep. It’s unclear to me as yet why the US has relatively high unemployment while a job requiring seemingly almost no prerequisites, with a two-minute online application process, has few people interested. Fifty open shifts in one warehouse alone. Two other applicants in a recruiting lobby built for dozens. The simplest conclusion would be that the job is truly as nightmarish as all the reports through the years have made it out to be. I grew apprehensive — but, frankly, with the type of detached, intellectual apprehension that only someone who doesn’t need the job could entertain.

—

Amazon is fond of referring to “Day One,” based on a letter that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, wrote to shareholders in 1997. The critical sentence headed the second paragraph: “But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets.” At the start of 1997, Amazon had 158 employees, 180,000 customers, and just under $16M of revenue. By mid-2021, Amazon had 950,000 employees, 200M Prime customers, and $386B of revenue the previous year. Nine hundred and fifty thousand employees means that I’m just about one in a million. Three hundred and eighty-six billion dollars of revenue in a year is more than $1,000 per American (that revenue is worldwide, but you still get a sense of the tremendous scale of Amazon’s reach). But Bezos’s admonition to his employees has always been that it’s still Day One at Amazon.

Bezos loved the concept of Day One — the idea of innovation and positive change — so much that he named the building he worked in Day One and even moved that moniker with him whenever he changed buildings. The phrase, in fact, is so popular that Amazon’s emails to me have been referring to my first day as my very own Day One (capitalized proper noun).

It’s now two weeks since I got the job offer and discussed it with Tanya and the kids. Today is Day Zero, less than twenty-four hours before I start my first day as an Amazon Fulfillment Center Associate (Level 1). But I’m missing something essential, something they’ve said repeatedly was a requirement for employment. I’m missing my shoes. Not just any shoes. Amazon requires laced, composite-toed shoes, what people used to call “steel-toed” before innovations in materials science, the type with special protection over your toes lest robot wheels flatten your pedal phalanges in an inspired moment of path optimization. Multiple tantalizing emails from the Amazon Jobs Team had mentioned that I would receive a $110 Zappos coupon with which to buy the aforementioned shoes upon which my employment was conditioned. But I have yet to receive such a coupon, and my job starts tomorrow.

“Amazon Candidate Support” is the team or service that answers questions from new hires as you prepare for your first day of work. I had the opportunity a week earlier to interact with Amazon Candidate Support to address the all-important question: where are my shoes?

I wanted these shoes so badly. Not just because they’re required to keep my job, but for two additional reasons as well. First, I’ve never had an employer that required a specific type of shoe, much less one with a composite toe box. This makes me feel like I’m getting a Real Job — not exactly Bear Grylls braving survival in an alpine forest naked, but certainly more rugged of a job than I’ve ever had before. Composite-toe shoes feel like the type of thing I could casually mention owning at cocktail parties to add a bit of mysterious grittiness to my general, let’s say “analytical,” demeanor. Second, I’ve always been a huge fan of Zappos, after having read Delivering Happiness, an inspiring book written by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh about how we can build businesses that makes customers, shareholders, and employees all happy. Tony Hsieh’s message that commerce doesn’t necessarily have to come at the cost of dissatisfied customers, bankrupted investors, or unhappy employees has been a guiding principle for me ever since. In a footnote of sad irony, Tony Hsieh died in 2020 in a suspicious house fire after years of struggling with drug addiction — an addiction presumably birthed from his search for happiness.

One week before my personal Day One, I had yet to receive the Zappos coupon and was getting worried. The Amazon new-hire website suggested I send a text message to ask the Amazon Candidate Support staff directly.

Janani: Hello! This is Janani! Thank you for contacting Amazon Candidate Support. What can I help you with today?
Me: I haven’t received my Zappos coupon yet, for starting work in a week.
Janani: I understand your concern, no worries. I will help you with this. For security reasons, can you please provide me with your phone number and email associated with your application?
I give my phone number and email.
Janani: Can you please confirm your first and last name?
Me: Philip Su.

Janani then goes silent. For twenty-one hours. I begin to get worried about how many candidates she’s supporting. After not hearing back from her for nearly a day, I ping her again. She starts right off as if nothing had happened, as if a rip in space-time had fast-forwarded our conversation straight through one Earth day.

Janani: Once you receive your KNET login, you will be able to place your Safety Shoe order using your $110 annual associate credit through Zappos!

She ends this with an exclamation. She’s apparently just as excited as I am by this prospect. The KNET she refers to is Amazon’s internal training tool, where mandatory training videos are hosted.

Well, it’s Day Zero, and it’s after Nov 13. I got my KNET login days ago, but still have not received the Zappos coupon. I thought about just buying the shoes myself outright, but I want to experience this job the way any employee would. I won’t just buy myself some shoes out of pocket when 40% of Americans say they can’t absorb an unexpected $400 expense in any given month and when the most basic of composite-toe shoes cost a full day’s wages on Zappos. No, I’m going to instead see what happens when I show up on Day One sporting a random pair of laced shoes I already own. Perhaps I’ll be fired before even seeing Day Two. Or perhaps they’ll have a pair of size 9 men’s loaners in clown colors like bowling alley rentals to prevent theft. I’ll live on the edge .

It turns out a KNET login is most needed to complete the mandatory training videos required of all new hires prior to Day One. These include all the classics that those of you who’ve worked in large companies will recognize: videos on the business code of conduct, harassment, safety, and in the past eighteen months, an addendum on COVID. As with all such corporate videos, they alone are all that’s necessary for a future alien race visiting a post-apocalyptic Earth to reverse engineer what our laws must have been. Every aspect of these videos tied directly to something the company could be sued for by either a third party or by an employee. These videos totaled perhaps an hour of content, interspersed with various pop quizzes to make sure you paid attention. Completion of each mandatory video was automatically tracked by Amazon’s HR system.

At one point, I had to rewatch an eighteen-minute video because the system didn’t properly track my completion of it the first time around. But I didn’t mind at all because it was by far the most interesting one, about Safety and Security. It started out innocently enough: “I cannot think of a more important topic for each of us than that of safety: at work, on the road, when you attend a public event, or in your neighborhood. That’s why our global security team collaborated with many teams across Amazon to create this important awareness tool. You’re about to hear insights that could literally save your life…” I was hooked. I wanted my life to be saved. Tell me more! “…in the unlikely event of an incident.” Hmm. That took a bit of a darker turn than I had expected. I thought they were going to talk about the use of Slippery When Wet signs by the cleaning staff after mopping linoleum floors, but I always get a bit nervous when people refer to a catastrophic event as “an incident,” or deploy the ominous definite article variety, “the incident.”

“In some situations, very rare, there could be an active shooter…” Wow. We were starting right off in definite article territory. “It could be a hostile intruder. Maybe somebody comes in with an attitude or a baseball bat.” Did we seriously go from visions of AR-15s to perhaps a Louisville Slugger? Or even just some Louisville swagger? “It’s not always about weapons. It can be about attitude.” Hmm. Tell me more. I’m intrigued by how attitude might be spoken of in the same sentence as shotguns when it comes to safety and security. “Remember that a dangerous person doesn’t have to show a weapon to inflict injury. So please remember that of all the weapons in the world, actually the fist — we all have them — is the most common weapon of all.” I nearly laughed out loud about this but decided they weren’t making a joke. It turns out, as an aside, that there’s only one place in the US where you’re required to register your hands as deadly weapons, and that’s in Guam. In Guam’s law books, Title 10, Division 3, Chapter 62 states that “Any person who is an expert in the art of karate or judo, or any similar physical art in which the hands and feet are used as deadly weapons, is required to register with the Department of Revenue and Taxation.” It goes on to state that the Department of Revenue and Taxation, presumably Guam’s IRS, shall keep a roster of such experts in the country, collecting the required registration fee, $5, from each expert upon entry into Guam. To not register is a misdemeanor.

Up to this point, the video was mostly amusing, suggesting visions of coworkers with attitudes and Jean Claude Van Damme working next to me on the packing line. But things were about to get suddenly, jarringly, dark. The video transitions into a scene within an Amazon warehouse. “We have learned so much from survivors of different incidents that have occurred at work, school, theaters, concert halls, and elsewhere, and I wanted you to know a little bit about what we have learned.” By “survivors,” what he meant was those who witnessed mass shootings. The video showed a man entering an Amazon warehouse with a semiautomatic handgun looking like Bruce Willis from Die Hard with a reflective safety vest on . “The first is that if you ever find yourself in an active shooter situation, or one where there’s just a hostile person who may have a weapon, please make a decision quickly. Whatever you do, make a decision quickly.” “Security experts remind us that you really have three options. You can run… You can hide… Or you can fight.” Whoa. I completely did not expect an employer to tell you that an option was to directly fight an active shooter.

“Now, if you fight, you have to do so with every ounce of energy in your body.” This strikes me as something that doesn’t need to be said. I’d expect anybody fighting a gunman using just fists and attitude is going to do so energetically. “Use any kind of instrument, whether it’s your fists, or kicking, or throwing an object. Whatever you use, whenever you try to do it, you have to be all in.” This poker phrase must have resonated with the video producers in that they subsequently sprinkle it in a few more times whenever the option of fighting is mentioned. And it’s mentioned surprisingly often.

“You have the right to survive, and to overcome this criminal.” I find this such a funny statement. It’s first a Declaration of Independence-level affirmation that you, too, have the right to live. But it’s also a reminder that, for whatever reason, Amazon spent far more time discussing your “option” to fight a gunman in the warehouse than they did explaining that you could run or hide. All in all, this entire section of the video seemed unnecessary; it’s not clear to me that what the Amazon security team recommends, other than fighting a gunman with your kicks, fists, and an all-in attitude, would be any different from what anyone would naturally do should such a devastating incident occur.

“When law enforcement arrives, the situation will be chaotic — just assume that.” Here, the video transitions to some harrowing scenes. The earlier reenactment of an active shooter entering the Amazon warehouse whilst employees ran and hid was already, to me, a bit unexpected and scary. But at this point, the reenactment showed police entering the building, guns drawn, stepping over multiple bodies of Amazon Fulfillment Center Associates sprawled in various positions, lifeless, throughout the warehouse floor. “The officers will be yelling at you, but not because they’re mad at you. So if they tell you to put your hands above your head, there’s a reason for that. They want to make sure that you don’t have a weapon. Try to remain as neutral with yourself as possible.” The video continues on through various reenactments, showing scenes all too familiar from action movies and news reports, but made all the more disturbing in that I hadn’t — until this point, until Amazon spent a significant portion of this mandatory training video explaining its three-prong “stop, drop, and roll”-style recommendation for confronting active shooters — considered the now quite believable possibility that I might be caught in such a situation. Furthermore, I had graduated high school several years before the Columbine High School massacre and the subsequent mass shootings that eventually led to the type of lockdown drills that most American students as young as kindergarten are now subjected to regularly. I had always known in the back of my mind that Caleb and Chloe participated in these drills. I had just never considered whether drills were ever accompanied by reenactment videos like the one that I was now watching, and frankly, even if not, whether children would carry with them the same sort of vague, unsettling feeling of having a heretofore unimagined possibility now ingrained deeply, viscerally, in their psyches. I’d catch myself even weeks later looking up from my work in the Amazon warehouse towards loud, unexpected sounds to see whether associates were running, hiding, or perchance even fighting.

I frankly tuned out of a lot of the remainder of the safety video, sobered by Amazon’s various reenactments and unable to concentrate, until I was snapped back to attention by the upbeat voice that closed the video with some practical good news: “Remember, too, that this information can be used at other environments as well — at the mall, movie theater, airports, nightclubs, and concerts. Remember, you can have an impact on your own security by being aware, and by bringing concerns to your security team. Thank you for keeping Amazon safe.” I can’t help but wonder whether the last statement was particularly addressed to those associates whose dispositions would be to fight instead of to run or hide. I sincerely hoped that I would be placed next to a coworker who would be legally obligated to register their fists if they ever went to Guam.

The rest of the videos were thankfully not at all scary and mostly covered territory that any reasonable employee should arguably already know. For instance, dating relationships need to be disclosed to HR, and shouldn’t happen in reporting chains. The training covered all sorts of harassment, complete with examples and pop quizzes. “Bribery is illegal, and Amazon employees may not bribe anyone or accept bribes.” Just obvious things like that.

Or perhaps it’s not at all obvious to some people, and videos like this truly do need to be produced and mandatorily viewed by all employees. I’m told, for instance, that AOL trained its employees to know the countries where bribery is legal — not so its employees would know where to employ bribes, but so they would understand the cultural context and not be as shocked if it were suggested. Similarly, I remember once being quite bored at a Microsoft “sensitivity training” session in a huge room with hundreds of employees when the trainer brought up the topic of inappropriate jokes. It was all pretty standard and boring stuff until one employee raised his hand to reinforce the trainer’s point by broaching a hands-on example of what type of joke really isn’t appropriate. This employee, in a manner that truly seemed earnest and well-intentioned, proceeded to launch into a full retelling of an inappropriate joke, the crux of which I have long since forgotten but for the fact that it involved Jews and some crude punchline. The mortified audience gawked at this slow-motion train wreck, desperate yet unable to stop it, until the joke was at last mercifully over. The trainer seemed genuinely relieved that no one was laughing, paused a beat, and went on as if nothing had happened.

The last thing that drew my attention came in the final video briefing new associates on what to expect when starting. “Now that you know a little bit about Amazon’s mission and culture, let’s review what you need to know for a successful Day One. We’ll cover what to bring and what not to bring, dress code guidelines, badging basics, clocking in and out, and final reminders.” These all seemed like practical things to know, so they definitely had my attention. But then, unexpectedly, this was the first thing they chose to focus on: “Did you know that taking or consuming any food item Amazon stocks is considered theft, and may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination? This is called grazing. To avoid being tempted to graze during your shift, be sure to bring food for your breaks, and water.” A few years ago, food delivery services experienced the same issue, where drivers were taxing the fries or taking small libations from the drinks they were delivering, prompting many such services to now use stickers to tape the top of food delivery bags closed. But I had not realized the same possibility of foraging existed in Amazon warehouses, or that, by implication of it being listed first in a video about important job tips, it was such a big problem. I’d later find, after starting at Amazon, that many of you — you know who you are — apparently subscribe to Frito-Lay’s “Ultimate Snacking Subscription Box,” the attractive red labeling of which tempted even this podcaster more than once to consider whether anyone would see me chewing if I continued working alone in more remote parts of the warehouse.

My first job after college was at Microsoft, a company which, back in the day, set the gold standard for perks by giving each employee their own office and unlimited free sodas. The latter was especially attractive to me because I had been raised in a family where sodas were too expensive, reserved only for times when we invited guests over. So, during my first year at Microsoft, I made it a personal mission — actually, more of a moral obligation — to consume as much soda as I could bear. To do anything less would have been to thumb my nose at privilege. Twelve years later, Facebook would raise the bar of my moral obligation even higher by offering not only free sodas, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner free as well, along with shelves full of all sorts of chips, snacks, and candies to grab at any time.

Through the years, grazing had become the norm for me at work. A typical day involved eight to twelve coffees, teas, or sodas, two to three meals, and many snacks in between, all free, all buffet. The real trouble with previous jobs was keeping my weight under control given the perpetually flowing font of food and drink. At Amazon, this won’t be an issue because grazing is apparently a terminable offense for fulfillment center associates. Good to know.

I finished the required videos, which, when it comes to training videos mandated by company lawyers, were actually pretty good. I could have done without the overachieving, Oscar-baiting active shooter scenes, but at least I learned a little about Guam and my option, as well as Amazon’s subtle suggestion, to duke it out.

—

Every weekend, fulfillment center associates are emailed a newsletter containing the type of things you’d expect to see on any caricature of a workplace cork board in a break room. I received one on the night of Day Zero, sent at 1:50 a.m., with the subject “BFI4 HR Newsletter 11.12.21.” BFI4, you’ll recall, is the name of the fulfillment center I’m assigned to. I learn through the banner emblazoned as a header of this newsletter that BFI4 apparently has its own emblem as well: a shield-shaped crest rendered in the same blue and green as the Seattle Seahawks, showing the Seattle skyline below a huge, bold “BFI4.” Below the skyline are the words “Kent, Washington. Est. 2016.”

The newsletter is an eclectic mix of naggy workplace rules and pleasant little surprises, with important announcements impacting your job and continued employment hidden between. Each little blurb in the newsletter had its own visual design: a little logo or icon, its own colors and aesthetic, blocks of differently sized fonts splashed here and there, none of it coordinated with any other blurb. The overall effect was akin to opening one of those thick ValPak marketing envelopes that keep showing up in your mailbox: a sudden kaleidoscope of uncoordinated color, yellow flash bursts declaring “New!,” “Sale!,” or “Under new management!,” and proof again and again that the ValPak company will print just about any PDF — and I mean any — that a small business owner sends them.

Most of the items were about mundane things — cellphone usage rules, reminders to wear your employee badge, a food truck schedule, and a promotion of the legendary Zappos shoe coupon as part of the so-called Working Well Project. If those shoes are part of working well, I'm clearly in trouble on that front. I’ve yet to get the much-ballyhooed shoe coupon, and am increasingly convinced folks on the Amazon Jobs Team are just taunting me.

Then there was a section headlined “Anytime Pay!” This was arguably more exciting than its single exclamation point suggested . “As part of our long-term vision to become Earth’s Best Employer, we’re introducing Anytime Pay to all Ready and Seasonal (Class M) employees. Anytime Pay gives employees the opportunity to access up to 70% of their eligible earned pay, whenever they choose (24x7).” Payday loans are used by 10% of American workers each year, with seven out of ten borrowers using their loan to pay for recurring expenses like utility bills and rent payments. The average loan size is $375, for which the average worker pays $520 in fees. Workers pay far more in fees than the loan itself, given industry interest rates of 400% (that’s right — that’s two more zeros than your typical car loan). Typical payday loans have a duration of two weeks and are meant to act as short-term funding to bridge a worker with no savings just until their next paycheck. By offering Anytime Pay, Amazon will give employees the ability to tap early into their upcoming paycheck without paying fees. This will hopefully reduce the amount that workers rely on payday loans, saving some of the $9B in loan fees paid annually by American workers. This great news was announced alongside a graphic that inexplicably shows a calendar in the clouds (that is, a sort of airborne calendar) with some coins scattered across it.

Another item caught my attention: “How to get paid after getting COVID vaccinated.” Hmmm. Interesting. Amazon pays bonuses up to $100 for getting vaccinated. But I had apparently missed the biggest excitement where, just a few months ago, Amazon awarded $2M in prizes and drawings for employees who got vaccinated, including several $100,000 cash prizes, cars worth $40,000, a $12,000 vacation package, and various other Bob Barker-esque Price is Right–ish prizes. The handful of $100,000 prizes particularly surprised me, in that it’s three years’ worth of wages. That’s positively life-changing money, and I had missed it. I’d become even more confused, weeks into Peak, as warehouse managers occasionally distributed raffle tickets to win $50, an amount which, compared with $40,000 cars and $100,000 cash prizes for vaccinations, seems inexplicably low given the 11.5 hour shifts and near-60-hour work weeks soon to be announced, except to the cynic who might speculate that employee morale is worth a lot less to the bottom line than, say, an entire fulfillment center shut down due to an outbreak of COVID.

Nevertheless, I was still in time to capitalize on several other giveaways. “Holiday T-Shirt Handout,” announced a block with traditional fall colors. I could collect my shirt — a nice orange one with “BFI4” imprinted over a landscape best described as Desert Mesa Northwest — if I went to a place called “Career Choice” within the building during what they called “third break.” I’m definitely getting some of that.

But shirts aren’t all! Another orange-colored block announced a “Pumpkin Pie Handout.” “As a thank-you to all of our associates for working so hard during this holiday season, we will be handing out pumpkin pies.” When! Tuesday, November 23 and Thursday, November 25. Where! As you exit the building through security! Times! At the end of your shift! The exclamation key nearly broke making this particular block in the newsletter, no doubt. I especially wondered whether I’d get two pies, given I work on both Tuesdays and Thursdays. (Spoiler alert: I do. And by the time I do, I’m a lot more thankful for them and a lot less snarky.)

Then, after all the hilarity and good vibes, a small blue block with the grave announcement: “Peak Vacation Freeze.” So as to emphasize the literal nature of this vacation ban, each letter in these words was adorned with plentiful snow. The entire top edge of this block was overrun by icicles of various sizes, threatening to puncture not only the dreadful words below, but also any reveries you might have had of you spending time with your family enjoying the holidays. “In order to prepare for peak, BFI4 will have a vacation freeze in effect from November 21 to December 24. All vacation requests during this timeframe will be denied.” This policy of denying all vacations between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as requiring mandatory overtime during this period, must be hugely unpopular. I’ll soon find out personally what it’s like to spend Thanksgiving in BFI4.

But it’s not all bad news. There’s an opportunity for double overtime pay. “We need the entire team’s support to get through our backlog and deliver for our customers, which means many departments are in a difficult situation of needing to call VET or MET.” That’s voluntary and mandatory extra time, respectively. All associates are required to be on call for up to 17.5 hours of mandatory overtime a week in order to keep their jobs. But the iron fist that threatens termination is wrapped in a velvet glove of monetary incentives as prequel. “As a thank you” — here I’m assuming their gratitude is for the implied convenience of not having to fire you for refusing mandatory overtime — “we’re offering the double overtime incentive for overtime hours worked between November 14 and November 20. All L1-L4 hourly associates will receive double their regular rate of pay for every overtime hour worked during that week.” Double overtime effectively bumps my $18.55 to $37.10 per hour, equivalent to an annualized salary of $77k. I can completely see how double overtime would be really tempting, skipping all family obligations and working until your muscles fail. This particular announcement was accompanied by images of gold coins each sporting a pair of blue angel wings — wings which will fly that extra gold straight into my wallet during the week before Thanksgiving. I’m definitely working overtime.

And lastly, an opportunity. A pastel block loudly proclaims, “Calling all BFI4 Associates! Would you like to join the fun committee?” It then explains that you’d volunteer time outside your shift, and that applicants should write a few sentences about why they’d like to join the fun committee. Probably a bit too much for me to tackle as a new employee, especially since I wasn’t prepared for an essay question. I’d eventually decide that joining the committee would likely make me feel discouraged and dejected, as, for instance, I learned an example of the type of “fun” they were able to institute on shoestring budgets included a Coloring Activity where you could use crayons in the break room to color monochrome printouts of Star Wars scenes for a chance at winning one of four $25 prizes to be chosen randomly from a site with nearly 3,000 associates.

With the newsletter and training videos finished, it was time to head to bed in preparation for my Day One tomorrow. I was originally hoping to ask for Thanksgiving off, and perhaps Christmas Eve too, but that’s clearly not going to happen. I’m looking forward to a free T-shirt and one or two pumpkin pies, though I also know that any other grazing will get me fired. I’m eager to work double overtime and to try the food trucks. All in all, I’m even more excited about starting at Amazon now that I have a little more context around the types of things going on in BFI4. Tomorrow’s going to be amazing.

Coming next week: I see the inside of an Amazon warehouse for the first time and witness its splendor. Finding a place to sit at lunch evokes the same nervousness I experienced as an unpopular kid in school. And I find at last which House I’m assigned to by Amazon’s Great Sorting Hat in the Cloud.