Gonna Make You Sweat

One egregiously hyperbolic line from C+C Music Factory’s iconic one-hit-wonder, which everyone thinks is titled “Everybody Dance Now,” is the one that goes, “It’s gonna make you sweat ’til you bleed. Is that dope enough? Indeed.” Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s definitely gotten dope enough, indeed, for me in this Amazon warehouse job, because there’ve been two times where it made me sweat until I bled.

Specifically, the job has, if you can believe it, made me bleed from — actually, let me stop here to warn sensitive listeners as well as those with young children to consider skipping this episode, after which I promise this podcast will never again mention where I bled from. Go ahead and fast forward now. I’ll wait.

So far in my time in Amazon, I’ve twice bled from the place where two cheeks meet — that is, the skin starting about an inch left and right, respectively, of the anus. Not profusely, thankfully. Enough to need to do laundry discreetly, but not enough to be questioned in the middle of the day by concerned coworkers. I only ever wore black shorts anyway, so the amount of blood we’re talking about would have never justified serious public inquiry.

It all started innocently enough. But to this day, I’m still not sure exactly what caused the bleeding. I certainly hope it never happens again in my life. But here’s what happened.

On the two days that this ever happened in my life — total, so I don’t want any of you asking me how I’m doing or, worse yet, peering occasionally at my pants — I had felt a decent amount of sweat developing in the groin area during the particularly vigorous workday. This would reduce friction, no? That’s exactly what I thought. I was even a bit happy about it when this first started, both because it was proof positive that I was at last getting some serious exercise after months of sitting around the house, but also because, you know, natural lubrication. Everything seemed to move around more easily.

But as the day wore on, things took a much darker turn, both figuratively and literally. Instead of everyone downstairs gliding easily around, I began to feel the — at first occasional, and by the end of the day, incessant — sensation of plucking … of the hairs around my butt cheeks which I, if you choose to believe this, and I really assert I am not making this up, had not until this incident known I had. Not sure about you, but I don’t regularly go mirroring around down there. The point is, it felt like the motion of walking was beginning to pluck at hairs down there. And not the type of Brazilian-waxing sort of quick, confident plucks that usually end in success, or so I’d imagine, but a sort of insistent sudden pulling that lets go just before the hair is uprooted.

I at first tried walking, let’s say, more “cowboy-like,” in hopes that it’d create some space for everyone to get along. When that didn’t work — I wasn’t willing to be so dramatic in my bowleggedness as to be asked questions — I dialed it all the way to eleven on the opposite end of the spectrum and began walking determinedly, some might even say furiously, forward, so much so that I had to lean in order not to fall on my face, all the while trying desperately to rub my legs together with each lashing step like an inept model nearly falling off the catwalk. The premise, of course, was that I could generate enough tugging force to pull out the hairs, thereby robbing my nemesis, this heretofore unimagined source of bodily ail, of its wiry minions. This, too, frustratingly did not work. I finished the rest of my day resigned to these pinprick snags, a paragon of learned hopelessness, and instead turned my attention to maintaining the type of poker face that even Lady Gaga would envy.

I would only later find out after work when reaching my car — you’ll recall that BFI4 deliberately has no chairs except in break rooms — that it stings to sit. With judicious scooching and a sequence of adept single-cheek lifts, you can actually settle into soft seating in a way where the most painful areas neither touch each other nor the chair. At least this is so in my case; I suppose every physique is different. I drove home ever so delicately, gripping the wheel especially taut during turns so as not to upset the separate peace I had negotiated betwixt the two parties.

You’d think home would be sweet victory, an oasis of balms free of restrictive clothing, but you’d be every bit as mistaken as my naive mind was the first time this happened. I had expected to see the blood that I dabbed from the locus of pain once I reached the privacy of my own bathroom. But I was in no way prepared when I stepped into the shower for the level of pain that ensued.

Now I need to be careful not to relay the pain of showering to sound like Wesley in the Pit of Despair when Humperdinck cranked it up to 50. You shouldn’t be imagining triple takes rising from my shower out over my house, neighborhood, and city, followed by villagers looking up from their hard labor to hear the sound of my screams resounding through vale and hill alike. This was much less than that — perhaps a 1 or 2 in Princess Bride parlance. You should instead imagine me turning the water on, expecting at last some salve for the pain, but instead suddenly bolting upright, face frozen in astonishment, as the water reached the critical region and generated a startlingly potent amount of pain for what little had happened.

And to this day I can’t really explain what happened. I suspect the bleeding was from severe chafing instead of from hair follicles harassed too mightily. At least the amount of blood would suggest real skin was broken. There was some discussion — I’m not going to say with whom, nor am I going to reveal whether it might even have just been discussion within my own head amongst competing factions — around whether Vaseline, talcum powder, or other available household products might somewhat mitigate the situation, and whether various other necessary bodily functions, or more precisely the cleaning thereafter, might cause an infection. In the end, none of this turned out to be necessary. All that was required was some delicate body positioning while sleeping, coupled with a sincere hope that I’d either never experience this again or become so calloused as to not have this problem. By the end of my time at Amazon, this, shall we say, “phenomenon” only ever happened once more, again without explanation and thankfully without longevity.

But this episode isn’t about bleeding from the glutes. It’s about more serious injury and the dangers of factory work.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Gonna Make You Sweat.

Amazon seems to follow all the expected safety protocols in its warehouses. When walking throughout BFI4, you see dangerous places clearly marked and cordoned. Ladders leading to even more injury possibilities are closed off with signs designating what level of clearance you need to use which types of ladders reaching where: “Only burgundy badges allowed to clear jam using this ladder.” You’re warned not to sport loose hair or clothing lest you get pulled into whirring machinery. You’re issued break-away lanyards that separate when snagged so that your neck isn’t pulled into any gears. The entire field where robots operate, moving their stacks of goods held atop their rather low heads, is enclosed in chain-link fencing. Prominent signs warn you never to enter while robots are operating — which, if you are at all perceptive, turns out to be basically the same as simply saying “never.” Overall, the Amazon warehouse associate job seems no more dangerous than any other factory job, and certainly a lot more safe in many ways imaginable.

Jobs often entail a tradeoff between safety and compensation. Since taking this warehouse job paying $18.55 an hour, I’ve started noticing local job postings that pay more and thinking about why that differential exists. There’s a 76 gas station a few miles from my house with a sandwich board out front advertising $20 an hour. It’s a seated job in a well-lit, heated environment. Instead of driving half an hour each way to and from the Amazon warehouse in Kent, I could instead drive twelve minutes to Bellevue. Isn’t the job at 76 strictly better than what I’m currently doing? This has me wondering. Perhaps it’s a form of hazard pay. Sure, people have gotten very seriously injured in Amazon warehouses, but my understanding is rarely so. Perhaps gas station attendants are subject to higher risks, like being robbed at gunpoint. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 22% of all workplace homicides occur at gas stations. In fact, three-fourths of all gas station deaths are due to homicide. This is topped only by, and quite significantly by, the 41% of workplace homicides that happen in “food and beverage.” Four-fifths of liquor store employees who die on the job die from homicide. This statistic is bested only by convenience store employees, 94% of whom die by homicide if they die in the line of duty.

The closest I ever got to making that tradeoff of accepting higher risk for higher pay was in college, when I accepted a job at a garbage incineration facility in Lorton, VA. In the metropolitan DC area where I grew up, Lorton was most famous for, perhaps only famous for, its prison. This garbage incineration facility was right next to the prison, sharing the same, single long road in and out that had the largest speed bumps I’ve ever experienced, bumps which might better be called mounds, bumps so long and wide that all four tires of your car would crest them at the same time, bumps made large no doubt in recognition of the types of vehicles which most frequented that road: buses with steel grating over their windows and trucks full of garbage.

I arrived at 10 p.m. on a Friday night ready to begin my first shift. The job seemed a dream, paying $15 an hour, more than triple Maryland’s minimum wage at that time. Moreover, it was advertised to me as incredibly easy by Dave, a friend from college: you sat there in the incineration facility minding your own business, and once an hour, on the hour, you picked up a bucket, inserted it into the stream of post-incineration ash coming off a conveyor belt to fill the bucket with a sample of that ash, and set the bucket down at a pre-labeled spot on the floor representing that hour. Do that eight times during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. night shift, and you were done. You were free to do whatever else you wanted during the rest of the hour when not collecting ash samples as long as you remained seated at the designated spot. As if I wasn’t already sold, Dave dropped another bonus on me: the employer would buy you new clothes every week! “New clothes?” I asked, thinking this miracle employer was too good to be true. “Yeah, for the smell,” Dave offered by way of explanation. “No amount of washing gets it out. Actually, you’ll smell it in your pores as well. You don’t really notice it unless you get wet in the rain or you sweat.” At the time, this was nowhere near a deal-breaker for me. As a college student, anything triple minimum wage, much less a job where you’re basically paid to sit, sounded amazing.

On that first night, I had brought The Silmarillion, a veritable tome by J. R. R. Tolkien involving centuries of elves and enough family tree diagrams to do Ancestry.com proud, to occupy the fifty-nine minutes between each of my hourly duties. My soon-to-be boss greeted me in the lobby, which sat in a small alcove at the base of a huge industrial complex involving thick silver chimneys and interconnected pipes lit by the tangerine glow of sulfur lights. The air was musty with an unfamiliar, sickly sweet smell. “We’ll first need you to sign a few papers,” he said as he sat me down.

I quickly flipped through the first few sheets of standard boilerplate legalese: at-will employment, wages, blah blah blah. I slowed down on the last two pages, alerted by the prevalence of several all-caps paragraphs and a bloodbath of bold. Carcinogen this, cancer that, ingest/inhale, liability, acknowledge, release. I found the signature line and set the tip of the ballpoint pen slightly above it. Should I be concerned? But the job was so easy! Dave had attested to its ease; I had seen his new, free wardrobe. It even paid double my then-current day job as a junior programmer at the University of Maryland. Think of all the books I’d plow through! I paused there a moment longer, pen frozen, fingers taut. There was also the stress of social obligation, the fear of letting someone down. How could I tell my garbage-burning boss that I was quitting on my first day even before gathering my first bucket of carcinogenic ash? Was I looking a triple-minimum-wage, free-wardrobe-makeover gift horse in the mouth?

I set the pen down. Unable to make eye contact, I mumbled something about not being comfortable with the bit about the cancer. Mr. Garbage, without skipping a beat and with an ever so slightly chipper tone, told me it was no problem at all and walked me amicably to the door, proof positive that the hesitation I experienced must not be mine alone, but that of many others. Enough others, in fact, to raise the wage of what surely must be one of the easiest jobs requiring not even a GED to more than triple the minimum wage. It was the last time I’d ever experience the gentle undulations of elephantine speed bumps leaving the region’s most infamous prison complex.

—

I’m almost done with my fourth week out of a total of six, assuming I’m not fired before then. By the time I’m done, I will have worked through Amazon’s entire peak season and experienced the warehouse job at its worst. And so far, I’ve got to say, it’s nowhere near as bad as all the media had me believe the job would be. I’ve certainly not had to pee on myself — though I will admit that one time, working alone loading a truck after drinking way too much juice, I had been tempted to do so purely as performance art for the sake of this podcast. But in truth, I could not stomach the embarrassment and gave up on the idea. It actually makes sense that the job isn’t terrible, if you think about it, because nearly a million people have chosen this job as their preferred choice in a job market that has millions more vacancies elsewhere, with some paying more while requiring only the same prerequisites (that is, no degree or prior work experience of any sort).

One thing that has, however, been concerning me is the continued pain in my finger and forearm muscles caused by all the lifting, which I first mentioned a few episodes back. I’ve learned to lift boxes differently to avoid exacerbating the problem. (Specifically, I now lift with all the fingers working together, like I’m wearing mittens; I also no longer “clamp” thin boxes and throw them around with just one hand.) But these adaptations have not addressed the core problem, which in fact seems to be getting worse. In the mornings, I’m still unable to straighten my fingers without pushing or tugging with the other hand firmly. When I release, they curl back slightly — not enough to raise questions from anyone, but definitely noticeable to me. I really noticed the problem when it hurt to use chopsticks while having pho from a local Vietnamese restaurant. Also, my hands continue to be numb for about the first thirty minutes of every morning. This hasn’t gone away despite me slowing down a bit at work out of concern for my long-term career, which I still expect to be some form of computer work, requiring especially the use of nimble fingers.

After all my griping about various work-shirkers I’ve seen in Ship Dock, you could, of course, ask a very reasonable question: why don’t I just join them? Why not just hammock it up, learn some Hindi through Bollywood movies on Netflix, and invent some fictitious stories of sweat and labor to round out this podcast series?

I’ll tell you why not. In the second episode of this podcast, “Landing the Job,” I briefly touched on my insatiable need for accomplishment, this unquenchable desire for people to view me as smart, accomplished, and hard-working. But I hadn’t perhaps conveyed the depth to which this need drives me, way beyond what most people would see as reasonable.

For most of my life until I was twenty, I thought I’d be a medical doctor. I studied incredibly hard for the MCATs, the standardized test required for all medical school applicants while in college, by reading multiple physics, chemistry, and biology books cover-to-cover at least three times each, in the end scoring 40 out of 45 on the test where the median Harvard Medical student scored 35. I graduated summa cum laude with a degree not only in Computer Science, but also in Neurophysiology, because, you know, degrees. I took twenty credits in one semester in order to make that happen. During that same semester, I remodeled my parents’ kitchen as a surprise while they were out of the country visiting Taiwan. I continued to work at the University of Maryland writing its first web-based course scheduling app, and at the same time enrolled myself in the local volunteer fire department because I wanted to be an EMT. It’d look great on my application to medical school.

I’ll skip the stories about all the misogyny in this particular fire department, except to titillatingly hint that there was a variety of crude seat-cushion sniffing, and instead just say that in order to be allowed to ride an ambulance as an EMT, you first had to be qualified as a firefighter. I actually loved all the learning: lighting purpose-built training buildings on fire, running into those fires with breathing apparatus on, spraying those fires sometimes at the base, and other times strategically bouncing the water off the ceiling in cases where the base wasn’t visible, folding hoses in a careful pattern in the bed of the fire engine so you could run off with them at the next fire without snagging, developing a real respect for how surprisingly strong of a kickback a 1.5″ hose, much less a 2″ hose, could give an unsuspecting operator, and learning that, at least in this particular cushion-sniffing fire station, “engines” didn’t have ladders. Fire trucks had ladders. There was also an understandable, though still disturbing, undercurrent of almost gleaming interest — a bit too keen of excitement — whenever a real fire was called in, as volunteers jockeyed to be included on the first outbound engine. This interest often explains why even small house fires or minor fender-benders can sometimes be attended by three engines and two ambulances. There’s only so much cushion sniffing and foosball playing you can do before you want to see some real action.

I was willing to weather all this in order to further bolster my medical school application: all the training, and if I’m honest, all the hazing — they loved telling the story of duct-taping a new volunteer to a tree and blasting him with fire extinguishers; they didn’t seem too bothered to relay that if you’re sprayed from too close with certain types of extinguishers, your frozen skin would need serious hospitalization to address. What I couldn’t handle, however, was the final hazing ritual, where every new volunteer, prior to receiving their clearance to be a full firefighter (and thus opening the door of possibility to becoming an EMT), would need to suspend themselves from the top of a fully raised firetruck ladder as the team swayed the ladder to and fro, like a sick imitation of some vertiginous mechanical bull ride. I had been dreading this final ritual for weeks as the station’s instructors repeatedly mentioned it throughout our training with barely hidden glee because I’m afraid of heights. The thought of dangling myself at the top of a fully extended firetruck aerial ladder — the most common ones are one hundred feet high, or basically ten stories — was too hard to bear. And that’s even without operators at its base whose express intent was to sway the ladder enough to cause vomiting, or perhaps more mercifully, fainting.

When the dreaded morning finally came to don my fire gear and climb to the top of the aerial ladder in order to graduate, I gave up while still in bed. Twenty credits. Redoing the kitchen. Writing a web app for the university. Studying profusely for the MCATs. And on top of it all, this. It was entirely too much. I stepped back from the brink. I resigned myself to not becoming an EMT and dealing with any fallout in my applications to medical schools, curled up under the covers, and cried.

Two years later, when I changed my mind about medical school and thought I’d be an academic, this drive to excel and to achieve did not abate. Being a professor was an alternatively acceptable pursuit in the Chinese culture — the simple summary is that you should either be honored or be rich, ideally both. Professorship at least comes with honor. I was accepted into Stanford’s PhD program complete with a coveted National Science Foundation fellowship allowing me broad flexibility in pursuing my own research interests. To this day, I’m pretty sure I’m blacklisted from the NSF because I declined them to instead work at Microsoft; they sent a snippy letter which summarizes roughly to Shakespeare’s “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” At Microsoft, I’d continue the pursuit of recognition, working diligently well beyond expectations to be promoted eight years in a row. It just never ends.

It hasn’t even ended here. I’m secretly glad I had a chance to slip all this in, ostensibly as a psychological explanation to answer the question of why I couldn’t simply slow down in order to heal my fingers, because I want you to — I need you to — see me as smart, accomplished, and hard-working. The nameless you, a listener who I’ll likely never meet, another “W” on the scoreboard in my mind of people who might value me. Look at all I’ve done! How many people do you know who’d try so hard? Isn’t it understandable that I had to, just had to, in spite of the pain and possible consequences to my future career, work according to my internal sense of integrity and responsibility, the sense which I’ve now also slipped into conversation in hopes that you add it, along with all the other things I’ve mentioned, to your internal calculus of my worth?

—

So onwards I went, slowing down a bit to around 180 to 250 packages an hour instead of trying to beat my personal best of 388, but not enough to hurt the pride of my self-conception. It wasn’t just about my need to achieve, though. I tend to also care a bit too much about the success of all my employers, a trait which on the one hand makes me valuable as an employee because I’m often willing to go above and beyond, but on the other hand makes me easily exploitable when I buy into someone’s Kool-Aid.

When boxes back up on spurs to the point where blue lights start flashing, I’m told the rest of the warehouse gets backed up. It makes sense: if you stop pushing products out in trucks, then you need to stop taping them into boxes because there’d be no place to put those boxes. And if you aren’t packing, you shouldn’t be picking items from robot-driven shelves either, for the same reason. So when blue lights come on, I feel like something really bad is about to happen, and that I should do what I can to avert disaster. I dive in.

I also enjoy the hard work. It’s worse, in my opinion, to be on a slow spur where boxes only come down the chute every few minutes. I’d much rather have eleven hours fly by than be asked to stand staring at a metal chute the whole time. But the thing that exasperates me most, which happens to me many times every day at Amazon, is when other associates see that I’m working furiously in a super-busy spur trying to clear boxes that are coming down the chute way too quickly, even spilling onto the floor. Blue warning lights are flashing left and right. These associates will then approach to take a look at the chute, and then four out of five of them will, instead of picking up their scanner and diving headfirst into the avalanche, avoid all eye contact as they wander away. They nearly always have the same body language as someone who’s just broken a crystal swan in a gift shop and spotted the owner nearby — lots of looking upward to the left and to the right, inspecting the neat patterns made by the steel girders holding up the warehouse roof.

And then there’s the related cousin of this phenomenon, which happens perhaps three days out of every week: Angelo rushes to my spur, yells “Peter,” and asks me to help another spur that’s blue-lighting. I’ve been correcting him multiple times a day for weeks now; perhaps I should just admit to myself I probably look like a Peter. His call for rescue is the fulfillment center equivalent of the supermarket “Cleanup on aisle six. Cleanup on aisle six.” I begin helping the poor associate whose lane is clearly going bonkers with boxes. But after anywhere from thirty seconds to perhaps two minutes — the length of time is strongly correlated to how quickly or slowly Angelo disappears around a corner to fight another fire — the associate I’m helping will develop a strong interest in, nearly an obsession about, the beautiful pattern of our building’s girders. They often leave as soon as I get my bearings and start scanning, like some backwards form of tag where I was dumb enough to run to the person who was It and get tagged.

The mantra in Ship Dock is clearly not “Lean in.” It’s “Find the sinecure.” It suffers from adverse selection: it attracts people who’ve figured out it’s one of the best places to be unaccountable. But I have such a deep psychological problem with joining them. I know that to do so would make sense. Equal work for equal pay. My sense of duty is driving me to work much more than the average associate, so I, too, should begin thoughtfully considering the beauty of various parts of BFI4’s architecture instead of bailing boxes all the time and being asked, once done, to then bail another spur out of its troubles. Especially since my hands aren’t getting better.

But remember, it’s not just about my psychology. Amazon could hire more people during Peak so that no one has to work overtime. They could enforce performance quotas so I’m not the one bailing out every spur. But they do neither. It’s too generous to Amazon, and too simplistic a tale, to simply say that an overachiever hurt his precious little hands because he pushed himself to do a good job.

One day as I enter the building, I see a newly set up desk for HR right as I walk under the tired balloon arch originally set up to celebrate Peak, but which now stands alone, bereft of the energizing music and the rows of leads with their clappers that had started it all. From great fanfare and jubilation, to a pair of tired managers barely rattling their clappers, to no music, no leads, and no clappers, to finally a desk whose only purpose was to address employee complaints: the entryway of BFI4 played out in miniature the collective associate psychology of Peak. It was my turn to admit defeat.

I approach the HR desk and explain the predicament with my hands. The HR rep expresses a brief moment of sympathy and then transitions quickly to action steps: fill out these forms, visit a doctor, get an official diagnosis, then send this email, wait seven days, and let’s follow up after. Later that morning, I’d receive an email from a third party contracted by Amazon to process all work injury claims; I’m no legal scholar, but my guess is that doing so enables a form of plausible deniability or clearer protection from allegations of self-interested bias when adjudicating cases. My handler, Rachelle, outlines the various forms that need to be filled out and signatures that need to be obtained. Upon hearing that the leaders of BFI4 would likely need seven days in order to decide whether to grant me a medical accommodation to perform a different job while my hands heal, I decide I’d have to complete my portion of the process as quickly as possible.

That night, I go straight from BFI4 to two different urgent care centers to try to get an official diagnosis of what’s going on with my hands. The first center is too busy to take another patient, so I drive to Overlake Urgent Care on the Eastside of Seattle and arrive just before 8 p.m. I’m worried about how much I’d need to pay in order to get seen, but I have no other option. My regular doctor currently schedules appointments around two months out; furthermore, I work during all the hours that a normal clinic is open, so it has to be urgent care. But the last time I went to urgent care, when Chloe had fractured a finger catching a football, it required paying $150 out of pocket. That’s essentially how much I make in an entire day at Amazon.

Imagine my relief when the receptionist explained that, no, she wouldn’t need to take payment, and that when it’s a work injury, either a company that’s large enough self-insures (for example, Amazon might pay the urgent care center directly), or Washington State’s Labor & Industries department, L&I, would cover the bill. This was welcome news because I had been mentally preparing myself for the disappointing, and in a way almost funny, possibility that I’d need to surrender my day’s earnings in order to pay for getting diagnosed with an injury I received while performing that same said work.

The doctor was quite familiar with all the paperwork required: two pages for the L&I department, six pages for Amazon’s own files. She needed less than two minutes with me, asking directed questions about my condition (“Are your fingers numb, or are your entire hands numb?,” “How long has this been going on?,” “Have you tried icing and elevating your hands?”) before determining it was tendinitis, an inflammation of the tendons that power the fingers. I had in fact been icing my hands on some evenings, and even tried elevating them. But things had continued getting worse. She explained that the reason my hands are numb, and not just the fingers, is because the tendons that connect the fingers to muscles in the forearm run together alongside a bundle of nerves through the carpal tunnel, a passageway of bone and ligaments in the palm region near the wrist. When those tendons swell, they pinch the nerves of the hand, making the entire hand numb.

She filled out the requisite forms with her recommendation: no lifting for two weeks of packages over ten pounds. She had me drink a cup of steroid syrup in the office to reduce the swelling and issued a prescription for anti-inflammatory medication. Since my work hours encompassed the normal operating hours of most pharmacies, I headed directly from urgent care to pick up my prescription from a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. I then headed home to fill out, sign, scan, and send all the required documentation, knowing I’d need to do so quickly if Amazon was going to take seven days to respond. When all was said and done, I finished at 10:30 at night, having spent the entire day either working or dealing with medical fallout from that work.

—

Aisha, the Ship Dock manager the next morning, was quite understanding when I showed her the letter from my doctor and explained that Amazon’s HR team wouldn’t decide on my accommodation for a week. I was worried what I would do in the meantime, since my hands were still numb in the morning and my fingers unable to be straightened without significant pressure. Things seemed to actually be getting worse. Aisha walked me to the job-assignment board and explained to Angelo, who was busy assigning jobs to everyone, that I should be put on lighter work. Angelo placed me in the induction lines for the next few days, where most packages were quite light. Even pushing the carts underneath the auto-sorting conveyors fed by the different induction stations was easy compared with lifting boxes all day. Pushing carts used a different set of muscles and didn’t require much grasping.

I began to enjoy the variety of work available in this part of Ship Dock, the part they called “flats” due to all the flat bubble-wrap envelopes that comprised the bulk of packages handled there. I sometimes inducted, a mesmerizing job that required an amount of mental focus I found nowhere else in Ship Dock, taking as little as three seconds to process each package, reading its label, orienting it just so on the fast conveyor, and grabbing the next package with my free hand. When in the zone, I processed more than 1,800 packages an hour; a good shift of inducting would have me process around 16,000 packages. But they were light, and it was fun.

I would sometimes be assigned to raking, which, though still seemingly pointless, became easier as I understood more tricks to the job. And sometimes, I’d be lucky enough to be assigned to the job they called “bottoms” in the flats area, which is where you prevent the carts under each of the automatic sorting conveyors from overflowing with packages. You spend the entire day walking amongst the rows of carts looking for one that was about to overflow. You then quickly pause the chute feeding that cart, roll the cart out from under it, put a new empty cart in its place, and restart the chute to minimize the time where packages spin idly around the loop of the overhead conveyor. Once that’s done, you print and affix the right labels for the full cart, according to its destination, and roll it to one of a handful of staging areas spread across Ship Dock to await waterspiders who’d later load the cart onto the right truck.

By the end of my time at Amazon, I’d decide this was my favorite job. It was high action. It involved a variety of movements throughout the day. My watch would typically tell me I had reached 10,000 steps well before lunch, closing out the typical workday around 28,000. And it allowed for collaboration between coworkers during the most intense times of the day. I’m most thankful that my tendinitis put me in a position to do this particular job — I just didn’t realize at the time that I’d rarely get to do it again because things were about to change.

Whereas Aisha quickly assigned me to lighter work in the Ship Dock, getting Amazon to respond officially with a medical accommodation was another matter. After a week has passed since the day I scurried all over the place after work in order to complete all the requirements of applying for an accommodation, I write back to Rachelle. “It’s been over a week,” I say. “Is there any news?” She’s quiet for a few hours, which is unusual given her responses on the day I first reported the issue were all surprisingly fast, typically within ten minutes of any question I asked. I later surmise she was probably busy chasing down the leaders in BFI4 whose job it had been to make a determination on my case. That afternoon, I get an official resolution from the BFI4 leadership team: they’ve agreed to give me a medical accommodation for the duration of the doctor’s original recommendation of two weeks.

Here’s what’s interesting about the accommodation they offered. They had asked me what I’d prefer to do, what I thought would help address the problem I was having. I suggested some work involving lifting individual products instead of boxes full of products, like the work being done by Pickers. In the best-case scenario, it’d also give me a chance to work more closely with robots. But they instead proposed something called “TDS Asset Tagging.” Not only that — the tagging would be for two and a half hours a day only, and would be on a completely different shift from my current one. They wanted me to work Sunday through Wednesday, 12:30 to 3:00. I was asked to sign a form that either accepted their proposed accommodation with all its implications, or alternatively asserted that I was, never mind, actually fine after all, and that I would go back to the job I was originally performing in Ship Dock when this all happened. Those were the two choices.

The choice was easy for me. I wanted to give my hands a chance to recover, and I also wanted to learn as many different jobs in the warehouse as I could. But think about it for a moment: this choice would not have been easy for most employees. Working only two and a half hours a day might sound like a sweet gig to those who don’t need the money, but accepting this deal is equivalent to giving up $176 every day during a time when eleven hours, including overtime, were otherwise being offered. As if that weren’t enough, the “deal,” if you can even call it that, required, without explanation, that I instead work a completely different set of days in the week. Imagine if I needed childcare, or if my children’s school schedule conflicted with the new shift.

If I were a cynic, it’d be natural to instead think of this whole setup as a scam. First, you’re run around town filling out all sorts of paperwork, and then told to wait seven or more days until a decision is made. When that decision is made, you’re given the choice to either give up $176 per day that you’re on accommodation, working an entirely different schedule, or sign papers saying that you’re actually fine to return to your normal job. If you were truly in the situation that most of Amazon’s 950,000 workers find themselves in — that is, needing the job because the money is real, because the time works for you, because your family’s health insurance depends on it — is this even a choice? If Amazon had instead responded quickly to my original request, agreeing to this deal would have meant forsaking $1,762 of income over the two-week period of the accommodation. That’s more than a month’s rent for most people working these jobs. It’s a Hobson’s Choice — not really a choice at all. It feels more like a gambit to get you to sign papers that say you’re actually just fine.

(I’d be remiss to not mention, in the spirit of highlighting just how ridiculous the world is, a completely different case of workplace injuries that happened at Microsoft. The Microsoft Outlook team used to have a foosball table. One member of the team was quite into all the foosball, using moves he had invented special names for, snapping his wrists incredibly quickly to score some astounding goals. He one day went out on worker’s comp because, you know, foosball wrist injury. There are so many levels you can take this story at; I leave all the fascinating parallels and comparisons to the listener.)

I, on the other hand, was fortunate enough not to need the money and to have a wife who could flex her schedule in order to allow me to work a completely different set of days. So I accepted, signed, and returned the offer. Much paperwork and several open threads with HR then ensued for reasons too frustrating and too Catch-22 to recite here, but suffice it to say that when all the dust settled, I was finally allowed to start my medical accommodation job, “TDS Asset Tagging,” on the last day the accommodation was valid. Nearly all two weeks had passed in bureaucracy. After that one day, I would need to return to my original job in the Ship Dock.

This entire experience oscillated between tragedy and farce throughout, depending on whether I was at any one moment thinking about Real People for whom this is their Real Job or whether I was considering the bountiful resultant podcast fodder, what Tanya and I came to call “podder.” I’m all for good podder, but not at the real cost that I’m sure this entire system comes at.

For my one day on medical accommodation, I was put on what Amazon calls Light Duty, abbreviated LD in various documentation. “TDS Asset Tagging” is the most common form of light duty, and you can read plenty on the internet from various associates to whom it’s been assigned. It’s generally considered either a sweet gig most people shirk (more on that shortly), or a mind-numbing job seemingly designed to make you rue the day you first spoke up about an injury.

I reported to duty a few minutes before my scheduled shift, this time deliberately wearing Merrells, my favorite slip-on shoes — not a shoelace in sight, with toes so unprotected by the soft suede moccasins they might as well have been dangling free — just to see what would happen. I had heard light duty was done on computers, and I wanted to see if they’d be upset that I hadn’t worn the Zappos composite-toed shoes I had so faithfully worn throughout the rest of my tenure from the moment I finally got them. I wanted to hear their reasoning for requiring the other pair. Perhaps something about the weight of the computer mice I might accidentally drop on my foot? Or the danger of another injured associate rolling his Aeron’s large casters over my might-as-well-have-been-naked feet?

But who am I kidding? There were neither Aeron chairs nor any other iconic furniture from Silicon Valley startup lore. My learning associate instead led me to the shiftiest of secluded areas in the warehouse, a four-story-high cavern the size of half a football field crowded with various tall piles of detritus, seemingly untouched for months judging by the thickness of dust blanketing each, and led me to eight small plastic desks facing the wall, each sporting the type of HP computer you’ve likely helped a grandmother with or sold recently on eBay as a collectible. The computers sat at the bottom left corner of a forty-foot-high wall on which hung a three-story American flag. The size of the desks and computers might well have been eight new states petitioning for admission into our Union when compared alongside the fifty stars on this gargantuan flag.

Several thoughts flashed before me as we first walked into this cavern and the flag presented itself in all its majesty. How have I not seen something of this size until now, near the end of my time at Amazon? Should I salute, or at least do something in order to show my respect? (For cynics in the room, I should be clear I’m in no way being sarcastic here. I genuinely felt so moved by the grandeur of this symbol, hanging ignored within a building that basically represents the heart of American employment, flying only over the few who make it through the gauntlet of applying for and receiving a medical accommodation, what amounts to the runts of the litter.) Why was it left here, and what does it all mean? Did it at one point welcome every associate into the building, reminding them that they were an essential part of the Idea of America: new arrivals and long-standing citizens alike, industriously performing hard work underwritten by an unending font of commerce? Or was it always here, the place where no one visits, so that we would not see it, or perhaps more fittingly, so that it could not see us: our toils and struggles, for what? No longer “Ask not what your country can do for you,” no longer a battle against Evil with a capital E, a battle for the very soul of humanity and the right of self-determination, but instead Prime Now, the feature that delivers goods to your door within one to two hours, perfect for those times when one-day shipping is simply twenty-three hours too long.

Peter Thiel famously said at Yale, “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” Does this flag, whose size and splendor make me feel deservedly, rightfully small in its shadow, ask a similar question of us? Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going? Is this what we’re called to, the pinnacle achievement of our generation? The timely distribution of commercial goods you didn’t even know you wanted before that ad was served to you across a billion different sites because different people, perhaps the elite-college-educated software developers at Google, might even this very moment be laboring overtime, in their own clickety-click, tappety-tap ways under a different towering instance of this same great Symbol, to make you want these things, even need these things — right now, quickly — things heavy enough to break toes when dropped, numerous enough to inflame tendons when lifted thousands of times a day?

I sat at the leftmost computer with its little monitor and crufty mouse after the learning ambassador logged me in and taught me the basics about TDS Asset Tagging. She emphasized using pointed eye contact, but in a way that exemplified the very meaning of plausible deniability, that there were no quotas for this task. This comports with various Reddit threads alleging that associates regularly walk away from light duty for hours at a time. During my entire shift, not a single associate, much less a manager, walked by the area where I worked as our nation’s flag watched expressionlessly from above.

But I had no intention of shirking this duty. You’re talking to a man, after all, who twice sweated until he bled — from the inexplicably frictioned bosom of his butt cheeks, of all places — in blind pursuit of his need for approval. I dived wholeheartedly into the task at hand, especially comfortable with, and excited by, the opportunity to work once again with something familiar: computers.

TDS Asset Tagging turns out to be a series of what machine learning experts call “labelling” tasks, where you provide the data that AI algorithms need as input by highlighting with rectangles key areas of an image that you want the algorithm to learn to recognize. It was all done using SageMaker, a popular image-labelling platform used by many companies training fancy machine learning algorithms. In my case, two types of tasks occupied my entire shift, both involving sales receipts from stores like Safeway, Walmart, and Michael’s. The first task was one where the computer would highlight an item on the receipt and ask me to pick amongst its guesses as to what brand the item was. For instance, it might highlight “MP Toasted Rice” on a Target receipt and present as one of its guesses that the brand was “Market Pantry” — in this case, being a Target shopper myself, I made an educated guess and confirmed the computer was right. Other cases would be far less certain. It’d highlight the single word “celery” on a Safeway receipt and ask you whether it was “O Organics,” which I knew was a house brand of Safeway’s. But without more context, you really couldn’t be sure, so you would choose “Not sure” and move on. You were given five minutes to answer each single question associated with a receipt. A timer at the top of the web page reminded you how much time you had left, but for a task as simple as this, you were never at risk of running out of time. The overachiever in me tried to process each receipt in just a few seconds. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you’ve got to understand this is such a core part of my personality.

Once I finished all those receipts, a different task was presented. This one was far more involved, requiring that I highlight all the semantically meaningful items on a receipt, separating it first row by row, then specifying the quantity, name, price, and identification code of each purchased item. These receipts could be as short as a single item — most commonly a McDonald’s receipt featuring one Happy Meal, the various causes of which, as a parent, I completely understand — or as long as your typical Costco receipt. Worse yet, many of the photos featured severely distorted receipts which took careful highlighting in order to align the right names and prices, or even discern whether something was a quantity or a price. This task was given a much more generous thirty minutes per receipt, which, even at its admittedly greater difficulty level, was far too much time.

It’s as if the whole thing — five minutes to determine a brand, thirty minutes to read a receipt — was to be understood by both parties, Amazon the employer and Jimbo the injured associate, as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge pantomime, a frank admission that the work was simply busywork to fulfill some sort of legal obligation or provide some semblance of propriety. Do you really need me to come in for just two and a half hours when the rest of the building is working eleven hours a day? To tag what could amount to just five receipts? I know for a fact, because I employed fleets of such people while CEO of Audere, that labelers from various countries can perform basic labeling tasks for pennies per image, complicated labeling tasks for perhaps fractions of a dollar. Amazon couldn’t possibly need me for this job. And they know as well as I do that the surest way to destroy a machine learning algorithm is to poison it with bad data. What better way to get bad data than to ask people you’ve explicitly told you aren’t tracking, people who never really wanted this job in the first place, to click a bunch around some web pages? The whole thing felt farcical. By the time they got around to putting me on medical accommodation, I had already mostly healed from nearly two weeks of prescription anti-inflammatory medication. I finished out my shift and was glad, after all the delays and hullabaloo, that it’d be my only day on medical accommodation.

Thank goodness for Washington State L&I covering costs. Thank goodness for laws requiring the tracking of workplace injuries. But man, what a travesty. To think that this is the real experience that people live through in jobs like this. The whole of it all seems engineered to force you back into the job that first injured you. Can’t we do better?

Coming next week: I unexpectedly meet someone at the warehouse who also joined Amazon to address depression, who also reaped the same benefits. And a recommendation for tech workers to seriously consider sabbaticals at Amazon.