Prelude to Peak Salvation

By happenstance and perhaps too optimistic a pre-interview bubble tea, my bladder was already quite full as the Amazon recruiter handed me a sheet of instructions for the drug test to be conducted down the hall. I was slightly disappointed upon reading the sheet to find the test only required saliva, unlike what I was led to believe from scores of movies featuring urination as the primary, and oft dramatic, means of testing for drugs. I had been — I wouldn’t say “eager,” but certainly “ready” — for some slightly-disapproving, mildly disinterested employee to insist on standing next to me to observe my aiming into a cup, lest I substitute Jude Law’s urine for my own in a desperate play to land this job. But it was not to be; they needed only saliva. This was only the first of many lessons I’d learn over the following weeks.

How had it come to this? I’d worked in the software industry for twenty three years: as a developer and manager at Microsoft for 12 years, a Director and London Site Lead at Facebook for 8, reporting directly to Facebook’s CTO complete with meetings with Mark Zuckerberg himself, cofounder of the London Oculus team, entrepreneur-in-residence with Madrona, the Seattle venture firm famous for investing early in Amazon, top-rated lecturer at University of Washington’s competitive computer science department, and recently founder and CEO of a Seattle global health software nonprofit called Audere. I’d written plenty of code and led multi-disciplinary teams large and small, watching movies like Hackers and The Social Network with the equal-parts mixture of amusement and incredulity that only an insider could muster. How had I gone from such a career to being prematurely, and as it turns out, mistakenly, prepared to pee in a cup at an Amazon warehouse in order to prove I hadn’t recently partaken?

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This is the story of my surviving Peak, the most grueling, most inhumane season at an Amazon warehouse — not just any warehouse, but Amazon’s flagship facility in Seattle, the best of the best — hired as what they consistently and euphemistically call a “fulfillment center associate.” Six weeks total, from Black Friday to Christmas — was just enough time to get a taste and not enough time to consider it a career move.

There have been so many exposés on the nightmarish conditions at Amazon warehouses. My initial horror upon reading these news articles gave way to skepticism as several of Mike Daisey’s follow-ups to his tell-all, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon,” were shown to be lies. Were the many articles about Amazon’s mistreatment of employees similarly hyperbolic? The broiling temperatures? People peeing in Gatorade bottles due to breaks too short, lines too long? I’m pretty sure reporters wouldn’t have made up the story about the employee who was left unconscious on the warehouse floor, soon to die at the hospital, as others were shooed back to work.

But could the environment at Amazon, the nation’s second largest employer, really be a dystopic hellscape, a sort of post-apocalyptic Beyond Thunderdome of employment? Or did exaggeration and confirmation bias lead to a meme of deplorable working conditions, generating numerous articles that white collar workers found just fantastical enough, just titillating enough, just Schadenfreude-y enough, to read from their air conditioned offices as they paged through their lunch-time New Yorker?

It was time for me to flip completely to the opposite side of the industry, the underbelly that made the entire Beast work. No more stock options, salaries, bonuses worth half a year’s pay; no more free lunches, free massages, Free Tibet stickers. It’s back to basics: $18.55 an hour, shifts dictated by my employer, mandatory overtime outside of my control, physical labor requiring “composite toe shoes” — shoes for which you receive a Zappos discount code from the Amazon Jobs Team, shoes that would — that is, must — be “laced, slip resistant, and waterproof.”

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There was also, however, a deeper personal reason for my seemingly-sudden interest in going from comfy, some might even perhaps say glamorous, high-paying jobs to the most entry-level of positions requiring only a GED and the ability to pass one drug test. Few would after all have guessed that I’d go from being valedictorian of Maryland’s largest high school 27 years ago, voted Most Likely to Succeed, to being Amazon warehouse worker 111-526-799, successful only in securing mandatory overtime via an offer which, if refused even once, would result in guaranteed termination. The truth is that the past eight months of what some would call retirement — I don’t strictly have to work if I continue to live within reasonable means — or what others in the tech industry call, and here I cringe at the privileged portmanteau, “funemployment,” have been nothing like what I had expected. Skiing on weekdays, running errands never during rush hour, playing video games, pursuing various hobbies as my whims and interests dictated — all the things which people who aspire to retire young might look upon with envy in their imagination — had proven unfulfilling over time. I had become unmoored, set adrift in a sea of theoretical possibility only to drown in unbounded optionality. Novelty and excitement had turned into a spiraling vortex of depression as I begun to wake up sometimes at noon, sometimes 2pm, and on rare occasion even getting out of bed at 6pm, curtains drawn, always dark, hoping only that the day would mercifully end. This was compounded by an increasing anxiety as I got older that I was perhaps becoming not just unemployed, but unemployable. The first person I ever fired was in his mid forties; I was at the time 24 years old. I remember thinking back then that middle-aged tech employees seemed slow, often dropping fools-gold nuggets of what they considered “insights” but what we young Gen X’ers viewed as “curious artifacts of bygone tech eras.” I was now that man. My entire management chain at Facebook, from me all the way to Mark Zuckerberg himself, was always younger than me, re-org after re-org — and that had started 11 years ago, when I was only 34. Now I was 45: completely fire-able, confused by SnapChat and TikTok UI to the point where I’m nervous to click or swipe on anything at all, lest I accidentally announce some peccadillo to the whole world like the aunt on Facebook who’s always commenting on your posts as if it was direct messaging betwixt the two of you. “Ennui” implies the privileged boredom of one who tires of excitements which others can only dream of — Regina in Mean Girls exasperatedly commanding Gretchen to “stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.” This was not at all ennui. This was malaise trending towards self-destruction. I had gone the way of old birds who, unsure what to any longer do, begin pulling out their own tail feathers, regretting the pain but perversely relieved that at least something was happening. I needed a hard reset. I needed to labor with my hands in a job that did not ask me to daily drum up intrinsic motivation born of an aspirational drive towards self-actualization, but instead commanded me to do mindless and oft painful tasks as requested or be fired. And for this I needed Amazon.

Although I was ready to embrace the “real” Amazon employee experience as much as possible, I knew there would always be at least one chasm between my experiences and that of so many other employees: I’m not forced to raise a family with this wage. I acknowledged up front that this key difference is simply unbridgeable, but I was ready to learn what I could despite it. Ready to be an anonymous drone in a hive of nameless workers rather than a leader of hives treated with, if not deference, at least a bit too hearty of chortles in response to dropping even mediocre jokes. Ready to know the truth. It was time to apply.

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Thus begins Peak Salvation, this podcast miniseries about the adventures and foibles of a white collar worker joining one of the most inhumane blue collar jobs by recent reputation. But Peak Salvation is about much more than that. It’s about the coming robot revolution and how we might all be put out of work. It’s about the ever-expanding demands of efficiency in the grind of capitalism. It’s about our collective vision of the future — what do we really want for humanity, and are we on path to get there? And ultimately, it’s the story of how a tech millionaire was saved from spiraling depression by brutish, hourly work paying barely above minimum wage alongside nearly one million other workers at Amazon — workers who, overwhelmingly, have few other options.

Subscribe to follow my misadventures over the coming weeks as I take you through the surprising details of joining and working at Amazon, far beyond the sensational exposés you’ve likely read in the news, and deep into the reality of living through Amazon’s brutal holiday surge. In coming episodes I’ll share all about the work itself so that you understand what it’s like to survive Peak 2021 — but more importantly, I’ll discuss the broader implications of our changing society and the impact our decisions have on our collective future. In the coming year, Amazon is forecasted to become America’s largest employer, so being an Amazon warehouse associate will soon become America’s most commonly-held job. We should all have a concrete sense of what that means not just for our fellow Americans, but for the future of the world.