Socioeconomic Bends

There are some surprising things you learn when you join a company like Facebook pre-IPO and meet a lot of people who had gotten fabulously wealthy. One such thing I had never heard of is private banking. If you have $250,000 in a Chase bank account, someone’s going to give you a call fairly soon afterwards to ask to have an in-person consultation with you. They’ll offer you coffee, shuttle you into a glass-partitioned room in the back of the bank, and explain that Chase has a private banking service where you get a different-looking debit card and more personalized treatment when you walk into a branch. Nothing too fancy, but it’s perhaps nice to have some small perks. What I didn’t know is that if you had, say, twenty times that amount, more than $5 million, someone from JP Morgan, the parent conglomerate that owns Chase, would give you a call and offer a completely different level of service.

Apparently most of the major financial institutions have this concept, like Wells Fargo (which requires $1M) and Goldman Sachs (which starts at $10M). The features of the various private banks might differ, but they all involve having your own personal banker or team of bankers who you can contact at any time. These folks have impeccable manners and will quickly attend to whatever banking needs you have. Almost all normal fees like wire fees are waived; you might even get a small perk like a free safe deposit box or tickets to a Mariners game. But much more than that, any problem you hit with any sort of money transaction is personally fixed by a team of people you can call or email at all hours. When I once explained to a private banker that the JP Morgan website can be a little disorienting at times, he was a little confused; he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t instead just contact my banking team and have them do whatever it is I wanted. I wasn’t successful explaining that I’m the same sort of guy who would also prefer to order his own pizza on a website because it’s self-directed and there are never communicational misunderstandings. The point is that these folks make banking an absolute breeze.

But they’ll do far more than normal banking transactions. When I expressed some concern a few years ago around inflation I was convinced was coming, my private banker gathered a team of three specialists — one investment advisor, one currency trader, and one economics specialist — to hop on a call with me for over an hour to answer my questions and to share their view of coming inflation and what I might do in order to protect my savings. Every month or two, JP Morgan invites its private bank clients to video calls featuring all sorts of nationally known politicians, economists, and investors (none of whom I’ll name here in case they don’t want it known, but you’ve definitely heard of these people). And prior to COVID, I was periodically invited to small gatherings in fancy Seattle hotels where JP Morgan would fly in experts from Wall Street to address some current topic in the investment world. These gatherings were informative, exclusive, and typically featured fancy meals. When I asked my private banker about the most over-the-top thing she’s had to do for a client, she explained that she once flew with a coworker to Vail, the Colorado ski resort, in order to get the witnessed signature of one of her clients who really didn’t want to have to leave the resort to, you know, find a notary.

This is the world of private banking, which I had no idea about until a good friend at Facebook explained it to me. While I didn’t have the savings to exactly qualify at the time, this friend of mine introduced me to his private banker, who agreed to take me on as a client, likely due to the apparent trajectory of earnings that I seemed to be on at the time. Little did she know that I’d soon quit Facebook and start a nonprofit, much less end up working at an Amazon warehouse earning a few bucks above minimum wage. I’ve luckily been grandfathered into the system, whatever they now think of my prospects.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Socioeconomic Bends.

It was a weird feeling, then, to be on my morning break in the warehouse, next to a set of loud conveyor belts which occasionally made beeps of various tones, and receive an email from JP Morgan inviting me to a private holiday party at the Space Needle. The party would include drinks and a fancy dinner, no doubt, but we would also have the entire Space Needle to ourselves. I even had to look up what the invitation meant when it said the party featured “hosted valet parking” — it turns out that instead of parking like a tourist in a garage and walking your way to the Space Needle, you could pull up to a private circular drive that puts you directly at the base of the Space Needle and leave your keys to a valet for free. Being as I nearly never pass up free food, I absolutely wanted to attend this event. Furthermore, I had not seen the Space Needle since it closed a few years ago to replace its spinning restaurant with, instead, a platform of glass on which you could stand and see Seattle down below. And the entry ticket alone, ignoring food and drink, would otherwise cost me over two hours of work, so attending on JP Morgan’s dime was definitely a priority. I RSVP’d to the invitation from the warehouse break room and went back to work.

Attending would be trickier than I thought. The invite was for a Tuesday evening, and Tuesdays are a working day for me. With mandatory overtime, I’d need to leave directly from the warehouse and drive straight to the party, hoping that the eighteen miles to downtown Seattle weren’t too congested during rush hour. I could manage it if I brought a change of clothes with me, along with shoes that didn’t have composite toe boxes. I’d either work a slower pace in the final hours of the day to sweat a bit less, or I’d do one of those wet-paper-towel wipe-downs in the warehouse bathroom before changing into a buttoned shirt and slacks. Either way, I was going to make this work.

You’re probably familiar with the concept in diving called “the bends,” where if a diver rises too quickly, the nitrogen gas that dissolved into their tissues under the tremendous pressure of deep waters suddenly comes out of solution. You essentially boil from the inside as nitrogen gas bubbles emerge within all your bodily tissues. To avoid the bends, or decompression sickness, divers are taught to ascend slowly out of the deep to let the nitrogen gas out of their bodies at a controlled pace. Going directly from moving boxes in an Amazon warehouse for eleven hours to eating steak atop the Space Needle amongst multimillionaires in under an hour was bound to induce a disorienting form of socioeconomic bends. But there was no other way — it had to be done.

On the day of the event, I counted down the minutes until I could leave work. JP Morgan’s food had always been amazing in the past, and of late, I especially appreciated the value of free. And there’s a way in which one takes all the local tourist favorites of one’s city for granted, much as I took all the national monuments and museums for granted growing up in DC. This time would be different: I’d see the newly renovated Space Needle with fresh eyes by dint of having put two commas’ worth of money into a bank. When it came time to clock out, I rushed away from BFI4 towards the minivan where I had stored the requisite change of clothes and shoes.

[Sounds of me changing in car.] I’m not exactly expert at changing in cars, but since I drove the minivan, this isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Alright — and with that, I’ve got both the shirt and the slacks on. Now it’s just the more formal shoes left. That part’s the easy part. [Car recording fades.]

Instead of a man in jogging shorts, a reflective vest, and shoes designed for reducing the type of electrostatic discharge that could damage equipment in factories, I was now someone who wore a buttoned shirt, slacks, and dress shoes. My Clark Kent transformation in the van complete, I drove towards the highway that would bring me to downtown Seattle.

Prior to arriving at the Space Needle, an odd moment: passing the structure informally known as “Bezos’s Balls” in downtown Seattle next to the Amazon headquarters where all the white-collar employees work. These three conjoined glass structures, officially named the Seattle Spheres or Amazon Spheres, house a lush oasis of plants within the tripartite futuristic domes rising nine stories into the air. The blurb on its official website proudly announces that “The Spheres are a place where employees can think and work differently surrounded by plants.” You can Google this right now: that single sentence is shown in the top search result as summary of these spheres’ purpose. Wikipedia expounds: “Designed by NBBJ and landscape firm Site Workshop, its three glass domes are covered in pentagonal hexecontahedron panels and serve as an employee lounge and workspace.”

Uh, which employees? I’m pretty sure they don’t mean yours truly, nor anyone else in BFI4.

As I slowly drove past the glow emanating from the spheres amidst glistening buildings in the Seattle dusk, its light illuminating not only the surrounding sidewalks but also revealing the otherworldly verdure within, my jaw nearly slacked as my mind spun in wonderment. It felt like the moment when I was inducted into the world of private banking not just as a concept but as a reality that some people live. I was a bumpkin who volunteered as tribute from a District only to arrive incredulous, gobsmacked, at the Capital in Hunger Games. For me, a good day was getting a seat in BFI4’s break room where the building’s only natural light was available; and that seat would last eleven minutes during morning break if I decided not to pee, given two minutes’ walking time to and from my spur, or nine minutes if peeing seemed necessary. The Amazon Spheres, in contrast, are “home to more than 40,000 plants from the cloud forest regions of over 30 countries.” It was hard to imagine a world where, independent of what my watch read, I could “think and work differently surrounded by plants,” contemplating Amazon leadership principles like “Invent and Simplify,” “Learn and Be Curious,” “Think Big,” and of course, with my daily mandatory overtime as living proof, “Frugality.”

Little did I know at the time that I would receive this text message from Amazon a mere fifteen hours later: “Hello Valued Amazonians! All departments have called 11 hour and 30-minute shifts with a 5th day of Mandatory Extra Time for the week of Dec 12-18. This will be a 57 hour and 30 minute scheduled work week… Thank you, BFI4-HR.” That means my days in the warehouse will now start at 6:30 a.m. and end at 6:30 p.m., half an hour after the Spheres close. Looks like it’d have to be on a day off if I ever want to enter the Spheres, assuming I’d be allowed in at all. But for now, I have more pressing things.

[Recording from within the car.] Ok, I’m just now pulling up to the traffic circle in front of the Space Needle. It’s a very fancy traffic circle with a bunch of Christmas lights on. And here’s where valet parking is…

[Sound of car window rolling down]

“Hello!”

“Hi sir. I’m here for the JP Morgan event.”

“Ok, this is good right here.”

“Cool.”

“And can I go ahead and get a last name?”

“Yeah — Su. S-U.”

“Ok, go ahead and leave the window down, and if you don’t mind, leave the car running.”

“Sure thing.”

[Audio from car fades.]

I pass tourists taking selfies at the base of the Space Needle. It’s the next best alternative to seeing Seattle from the top, given that JP Morgan has reserved the entire Space Needle for its private event. I fight unsuccessfully against the tingle I feel in walking past the tourists and opening the door labeled “Closed for Private Event,” enjoying with no small sense of shame the privileged confidence of entering a formerly public space that you know has been reserved for you. Some rare few people must go through all of life with that same confidence, walking past the rabble surrounding them without a second glance, never once fearing someone would ask their credentials, much less, embarrassingly, escort them out from an area for which they weren’t meant. How quickly a change of clothes and hosted valet parking can transition a man from a warehouse worker mesmerized by Bezos’s Balls into a man guiltily enchanted by the idea of getting photos of the Seattle skyline that these tourists might now never get. You could never imagine from the bottom what you could see from the top. And shortly now, I’d ride a private elevator taking me 520 feet above Seattle in forty-three seconds while simultaneously giving me a clinical case of the socioeconomic bends. [13:20 Sounds of elevator] The nitrogen gas of shared human struggle forced into me for weeks by the pressure of eleven-hour shifts lifting six tons a day would boil out of solution everywhere in my psyche all at once with that rising elevator, damaging, if not in fact killing, what empathy I had left. [~13:55: Door opens to party sounds. The best effect is having this immediately follow the previous sentence pretty quickly.] Party time!

My guess is that most tourist experiences are better enjoyed in small, exclusive groups, especially ones featuring expansive views. I saunter a full circle around the glass-encased top walkway of the Space Needle, taking in the twinkling Seattle skyline, the thick parallel ribbons of bright red and white representing rush hour on I-5, and the sparkle of moonlight shimmering on a Puget Sound colored the most midnight of blues, interrupted only by the arrowhead wake of a commuter ferry leaving port. There’s plenty of time and no crowds. I offer and stop to take a picture of a couple; it’s important to them that the photo’s composition includes the Seattle Great Wheel, the lit-up Ferris wheel on Pier 57 that seems, like many others in recent years, to be inspired by the tourist magnet that is the London Eye. I assure them that it will, mildly tickled that, of course, even multimillionaires would want some of the same things everybody wants. “Here’s my spouse and me from the Space Needle … see the Seattle Ferris wheel?” A millionaire of the low-seven-digit variety is likely to follow this up, in the deftest of manner that hints without calling attention to the need to call attention, “This was at a holiday party JP Morgan threw for its clients.” A millionaire of the eight-digit variety, however, likely omits this context, for the same reason he drives the Audi to Trader Joe’s and not the McLaren.

I’m afraid of heights, but out of social anxiety that drives a need to fill dead air, I’ve told a fellow passenger in the Elevator of Wealth that I’d benefit from exposure therapy, so I step hesitantly onto the rotating glass floor that warranted a $100M multi-year renovation of the Space Needle, hundreds of feet beneath which lie tiny Seattle tourists taking selfies upward. The Space Needle website proudly says the glass alone weighs thirty-seven tons, but this does the opposite of reassure for someone acrophobic. I count in my mind as Seattle spins slowly under me. The overachiever in me can’t even let this small thing go. I must not just stand on the glass, feel my pulse begin to thump my sternum — surely others can hear this? — and step back to safety. No, I must stand on there long enough to declare victory over my primal self with a clear conscience. I do so, but not a moment longer. It was time to return to the main party.

—

The party is held in a large room built midway up the Space Needle in 1982 expressly for receptions and fancy business meetings. It’s set up with dinner tables sprinkled throughout the center of the room and buffet tables lining the sides under windows showing a panoramic view of Seattle. As I enter, a woman offers to take my coat, and another offers a small crab cake hors d’oeuvre served on a little wooden plate. All around me are people in various stages of social banter. There’s the man who’s talking a bit too loudly about subjects he clearly wants others to overhear. There’s the woman addressing apologetic staff about something or other related to her champagne. One man subtly pulls his companion closer as another in their circle leans in perhaps a bit too intimately towards her. Every few minutes, one of the members in the largest circle of about eight people raises their voice to deliver a punchline. “And she says, ‘I meant Philadelphia!’” The group erupts in raucous laughter, the kind that nonchalantly knows others are watching, the kind that says, “We were prom kings and prom queens. It’s OK to look, but please don’t ask to join.” At least one other group inevitably takes a swing at outdoing the large circle in boisterous hilarity, but the attempt is halfhearted and ultimately risks appearing thirsty. I don’t find an obvious place, so I head for the bar and ask for a soda — without ice, because, you know, I want to maximize the valuable part.

There’s a pianist playing live, his music eventually to be overwhelmed by the din of upper-class conversation as the evening wears on. [Play some piano] But not before I approach him. [36:30-37:10: Pianist playing Charlie Brown theme]. There’s something heartwarming and grounding about recognizing music from a Charlie Brown Christmas special in this environment. But this moment proved evanescent. He transitioned to classical as the room filled with guests.

I often feel awkward in conversation, especially in starting them. I’d much rather spend a free night alone reading or doing some project rather than spend it with people. So when confronted with a room full of strangers without anything in common but, uncomfortably, money, I don’t have much to talk about and tend to work out new material with a series of high-risk openers. My first chance comes at the salmon and steak buffet table, where the South Asian man in front of me tentatively takes the third to last available piece. I jumped right in with a cold open: “Thanks for leaving two pieces.” I waited for the expected ensuing look of confusion. When it satisfyingly arrived, I committed hard to the premise. “Because, you know, this allows me to take the second to last piece without a moment’s moral dilemma” — here I paused to gesture towards the man behind me — “regarding what this gentleman would then eat.” The South Asian man, Sriram, thankfully chuckled.

The opener now landed, I proceeded to a bit that I had worked out in other venues prior. [1:09:15-1:09:45: It’s super rude for the Chinese] “You know, it’s super-rude for the Chinese — I’m ethnically Chinese — to take the last piece of anything from a communal plate. So I invented something I think will sell like hotcakes. The idea” — and here Sriram interrupted me in a move as gauche as speaking up in the middle of a magician’s trick, and stopped me from sharing the truly novel, and dare I say at the same time hilarious, idea of creating dim sum plates that each have one single artificial piece of whatever it is you would serve on the plate, such that no one ever has to feel bad about taking the last piece of anything, yet no real food is ever wasted — a truly bankable idea which, once again, Sriram interrupted, saying, “Chinese? My wife is Chinese!”

This rare and pleasant surprise dismissed my mild annoyance at having been stopped in the middle of a successfully battleground-tested bit. “Oh?” I responded. “My wife is from Goa.” Sriram instantly recognized that state in India, and his demeanor quickly matched my own at having found another coupling between an East Asian and a South Asian. We differed in that he had met far more instances where the man is East Asian and the woman is South Asian, whereas I had met far more of the opposite. But we both agreed that these configurations of couples, once quite rare, were now becoming more popular, especially in the tech-heavy Pacific Northwest. I’ll elide the rest of the conversation, which you can fill in by imagination using sentences like “What do you do at JP Morgan,” conversation-starting investment buzzwords like “Bitcoin,” and a rather failed attempt at eliciting surprise by mentioning that I know a real-life “Tommy Boy,” a son of India’s largest brake manufacturer, who had to get an MBA in order to one day take over his father’s business. In general, telling a twenty-something a story that depends foundationally on having seen a 1995 David Spade and Chris Farley movie is a formula for surefire bombing.

Sometimes my sense of isolation is reinforced by noticing my environment. In a room of seventy guests, every last person was white except for me and one South Asian family of three. In fact, JP Morgan had brought in more racially diverse employees like Sriram than existed among all its invited guests. I tried to smile at and engage the South Asian family, but no dice. There are two types of minorities: ones who seek refuge by identifying with each other, and ones who feel stereotype threat and avoid the only other minorities in the room. At the extreme, imagine growing up in a small town where you and someone of the opposite sex were the only two Asian people, and everyone else was white. That’d be awkward, right? Everyone would expect the two of you to date, which puts tremendous pressure on any conversation you might have with that other person — so much pressure, in fact, that you might spend all of high school avoiding ever talking to them, so as not to give the wrong impression — either to her, lest she think you’re only interested in her because of the rather limited supply of dateable Asians; nor to onlookers, lest they assume the two of you would naturally get together because you’re too closed-minded or segregationist to consider dating people outside your race. I find this polar dynamic to hold true in most situations. The next time you’re in a group as part of an overwhelming majority, look to the minorities to see if you can spot this dynamic. I bet you’ll find they either gravitate quickly toward each other or they spend the entire evening deliberately avoiding each other.

Partly due to my sense of isolation and partly due to the fact that I had spent eleven hours lifting boxes, I focused my attention primarily on food. The salmon and steak were both cooked to perfection. The salmon was tender and had retained all its moisture; the steak cut easily and was a gradient of all the right colors. Since the word “melts” is used way too often in culinary parlance, you’ll have to substitute some other word to describe the sensation of eating the salmon and steak. On the dessert table was a rainbow assortment of macarons. I took one of each color and arranged them on my white plate to make my own little artist’s palette. I was later delighted to find the red one tasted like Fruity Pebbles, which suggests the macarons might have been from Macadons, a Seattle macaron shop that features a red Fruity Pebbles. If so, let’s just say that in Amazon associate wage terms, I personally ate an hour’s worth of macarons.

I sat alone as everyone else mingled, but by my own choice. The surface explanation was that I’m an introvert who finds social situations with strangers uncomfortable. I suspect the deeper reason was that the whole evening had me ruminating about something that happened just earlier that day in the warehouse. For the first time since starting work at Amazon, the internal computer system had gone down, bringing all work to a stop. While most associates in Ship Dock gathered around the team meeting area and played music, with some even dancing, I sat a distance away between two pallets of goods rising above me on either side and savored a moment of quiet. Shawn, a veteran of Ship Dock who had corrected me patiently several times when observing me make mistakes, did a double-take as he walked past and spotted me between the pallets. “Philip — why you sittin’ here alone? Were you bullied in school or somethin’?”

I laughed this off, as he clearly meant for it to be a joke, but his uncanny off-the-cuff perceptiveness shook me. I had been bullied in school, never felt safe, and certainly never felt I fit in. Was my righteous internal monologue about not wanting to participate in vacuous conversations simply a ruse of sour grapes to fool even myself? All the empowering Kelly Clarkson refrains playing in my head that it doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone? What if the little Philip, the one who lived constantly in fear of physical violence, the one pummeled unprovoked in a gym bathroom while the entire class laughed outside — the one who always felt awkward, always felt excluded — never really went away? What if, instead, time passed deep in the cave of that hurt, eventually resentful mind, and that little Philip began consoling himself, mumbling like Gollum about the sweet revenge he’d one day have, rubbing the shiny ring of his achievements, his millions, his precious, precious accomplishments?

Why must the observations made privately to this microphone in the safety of this sound-insulated room all be biting? Do they really have to be prom kings and prom queens? Did the man dropping Philadelphia as his punchline really mean to be loud, or was the excitement of the moment, or perhaps even his own social discomfort, conceivably driving a delivery volume that had no actual basis in self-aggrandizement? Did the lady really dress down the wait staff regarding her champagne, or did the clearing up of some misunderstanding unnerve her? Would perhaps the easier explanation of the evening — certainly the most charitable one — be that I sat alone not because I was excluded, but because I excluded myself? That familiar patterns from childhood didn’t just bend the reed, but in my case broke it, such that I electively perpetuate traumas long after their causes had ended, like the man who continued to walk hunchedly out of a perverse comfort in habit long after a heavy burden had been removed from his back?

Or simpler yet — was the entire previous psychological explication a cover for a baser motive? I feel awkward, so I’ll throw rocks at all of you later when you can’t defend yourselves. I’m vaguely uncomfortable with my wealth, so I’ll criticize all of you so I can feel more at ease. Look, you’re all white! And the three of you who aren’t are simply trying to be by shunning me! Look at me! I’m with the people! I just came from an Amazon warehouse and stared agog at Bezos’s Balls, for heaven’s sake! I’ll never forget the Districts! You with your Capital hairdos, your fancy crudité (really, there was a crudité platter, and I had to look up how to even pronounce that), your trophy spouses, your erudite jokes — you are why the pitchforks are coming. Not me … no, sir, I came hungry after working mandatory overtime, and I’ll have another free Pepsi and a slice of steak, thank you very much. I’ll tell you where to shove your Philadelphia.

The truth is that not a single person said an unkind word to me. The only people who talked to me the whole night were JP Morgan staff, who are in a way paid to do so, but they nevertheless were universally friendly. And it’s not the responsibility of the other guests to make me feel comfortable or to actively include me like it was some sort of stretch break during a multilevel marketing conference where every connection, especially the lonely ones, was a possible lead to be reeled in and back-slapped. The truth is, had you dropped me into that room without context that evening, I would never have said these people looked like smug multimillionaires conspiring to grind the lifeblood out of commoners for profit. Because they weren’t. They were a room full of people making small talk, trying to look like, or perhaps living a reality where the fabulous food was a tiny take-it-or-leave-it sideshow compared to the many interesting people they were meeting. Well, them and one Chinese guy who kept going from one buffet offering to another, returning to his solo table from whence he tried to make keen observations he hoped would one day amuse his seven podcast subscribers.

—

But are they all cherubs, and me the devil in disguise? Nice as they seemed, there was the time I attended a JP Morgan expert panel hosted at a ritzy hotel downtown, which, amongst other things, discussed how to “exploit opportunities in the ‘Distressed’ market.” “Exploit” here was not, I’m pretty sure, meant to have a negative connotation, and should instead be read to mean “capitalize on.” “Opportunities” has its plain meaning. But the market that was “Distressed,” capital D, I was to learn, was the property market, and “distressed” a euphemism for “I can’t make rent.” It turns out if you metaphorically zig when they bankruptedly zag, you stand to make a lot of money. Say it’s 2008 and a whole lot of people are about to get evicted in the Great Recession. If you had lots of cash on hand — what the panel called “good liquidity” — you could have become an even wealthier man. Well, there was one woman in attendance — a Chinese one at that, twice exceptional if you will — but I’ll use broad strokes here. The point is, if you had known then what I learned in the panel years later, and had the willingness — nay, the market-efficiency-enhancing initiative — to act “in the distressed market,” you could have earned two-comma windfalls. Lots of questions for the panelists ensued.

On the other hand, I did attend. And I did not leave my steak behind in disgust — yes, steak again, delicious again — as the true meaning of the panel’s topic revealed itself. No, I ate everything and I stayed through. I learned. I’ve not acted on it, but I learned how I might. I was present in the room where it happened. I’m every bit as complicit.

But really, must it be complicity? Or would the more charitable line, the less cynical line, be that most in the room weren’t Scrooges rubbing their hands eagerly, salivating at the next possible opportunity to exploit the aforementioned markets? That most in the room were as worried about their unknown futures as any of us, every bit as financially insecure, inconceivable as that might be to those with less? Perhaps that even the words themselves — “distressed market” — added a layer of indirection and impersonalization which made it easy to see it all as a game of numbers, a sort of scoreboard where you just might have discovered a loophole to victory?

I find myself completely torn about where I belong in our complex world where the lines of economic strata and social strata flow, sometimes with, but sometimes past, each other. I’m a multimillionaire, just like everyone else here; we could together treat the staff as nameless and complain when the canapés don’t have a gluten-free option, right? But I represent one of only two non-white client families, when even that other family won’t talk to me, so am I instead alone, and is this why no one other than paid JP Morgan staff ever approached me?

I’m reminded of this internal conflict most starkly when recalling a conversation I had with George, the Filipino associate who considerately warned me not to work any harder than average associates lest Amazon abuse my initiative. To attract enough workers, people who joined just prior to Peak would get a $3,000 bonus once they completed six months at Amazon. George knew this, and said to me quite earnestly, “You’re so lucky. $3,000.” He said this several times that day. “You’re so lucky.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t planning to stay to collect it, that in honesty it wasn’t an amount which, prior to this job, I would have considered motivating. I had stayed an extra three months at Facebook in order to collect stocks worth $660,000. Upon leaving Facebook, I further gave up unvested stock worth $400,000 every six months.

It wasn’t just the ridiculous chasm in bonus sizes that had me hold my tongue. It was also that, for the first time, I felt truly lucky to have walked away from the $400,000 bonus I would have gotten every six months. You see, at the time I had viewed it as an insult. My career at Facebook began strong and further grew with my leading of the London engineering office, Facebook’s largest office outside the US. That’s what was awarded with stock worth over $600,000 every three months. But several years after that, when I stopped managing large teams and became an individual contributor again, the company had grown many multiples in employees, and I was no longer valued in the same way I was while the company was small because I am a generalist. Small companies need individual contributors who are generalists; large companies need individual contributors who are specialists. And because Facebook valued me less, they cut my stock to less than a third of what it was at its peak. This, at the time, felt like betrayal. But when speaking with George, I suddenly felt ashamed and humbled. No matter which way you cut it, the opportunity and freedom to walk away from $400,000 is a profound privilege. George had helped me see this. I was — I am — so lucky.

In fact, by the end of my time at Amazon, I would come to understand that I landed in the luckiest of all positions. By applying at the perfect time of year, I was eligible for a $3,000 bonus that, if I understand correctly, was quite rare in Amazon’s hiring history. Unlike most people who are hired as contractors during Peak — referred to as white-badges — I was hired directly as an employee, a blue-badge, with all its attached benefits like healthcare, tuition assistance, a 401(k), and various other perks. Many white-badges are rightfully concerned that they won’t be converted to blue-badges at the end of Peak and will instead be let go. I, on the other hand, got randomly assigned through the great Wheel of Fortune to be a blue-badge from the start, but I neither need the benefits nor intend to keep the job after Peak. I wanted to get the day shift, and specifically the shift they call Donut (M/T/Th/F, which avoids weekends). I’ve since learned that the donut day shift is the most coveted shift, one that many associates spend months applying for internal transfers to. It’s still unclear to me why Amazon would offer the most coveted positions in the warehouse — Ship Dock, day shift, donut, blue-badge — randomly to new people applying from the internet on a whim rather than to give its existing associates right of first refusal. Regardless, I have been tremendously lucky, and am humbled by a personal, hands-on understanding of the more difficult conditions under which most Amazon associates work.

At the moment, though — feeling sorry for myself at a tourist attraction reserved exclusively for multimillionaires —I felt mopey and excluded, caught awkwardly between many worlds, a man without a country. I didn’t have the street cred to hang with associates — really hang with them — for what do you suppose would happen should they discover my real past, my current circumstance? At BFI4, the management had recently announced a holiday prize in which four lucky associates would each win $25 if they but colored in a black-and-white Star Wars scene during their break and were randomly chosen from amongst nearly three thousand others. My coworkers were happily participating, eager for the slim chance to win an extra twenty-five bucks. There was no number of anecdotes I could tell them about my Subway sandwich-making days that would convince them I was their peer. And what of this crowd, with their jocular confidence, with their “well mets,” their lustrous coiffures, their veritable Pat Benatar-load of We Belongs? Has making money changed my position any in their eyes? What of me trying out tales of my recent employment as conversation starters, tales perhaps even from just earlier that same day? You know as well as I how that’d go.

At the end of a long evening, with an overfull belly, I fall back towards the one domain I’m comfortable with, my one skill that seems universally welcome and disarming. I’m the non-threatening, somewhat awkward, then unexpectedly humorous, Asian man, the same one you’ve seen over and over in movies, the deferential one who’s take-it-or-leave-it but never a problem. The one who’s just about to start one last awkward conversation before the credits roll. I go to the coatrack that is now bereft of the woman who had first populated it. Another eager leaver and I would need to find our own coats.

[Sounds of small talk at the party. A man looking for his jacket, with me mentioning my red one.]

Clever bit. I had the only red coat. He had a classier black one, like every other attendee. You know, it’s funny! The Asian man opened his mouth, dropping two surprises at once like a BOGO sale on stereotypes: my English won’t require more concentration from you to understand, and hey, I’m not part of the staff after all. You can sometimes see non-Asians relax when these unexpected mercies transpire. He adapted quickly, and laughed politely instead of confronting me with an amateur comedian’s nightmare: “Is this a bit? Are you doing a bit?”

I can complain all I want, but the fact remains that I was invited to an exclusive event for multimillionaires because, despite all my discomfort in admitting it, despite all my attempts to mention reasons you should downplay my social status so that you’d have more empathy for me, I am a multimillionaire, and an intelligent, charismatic one, at that. By all rights, I should probably instead be doing my best Madonna impression, with the world my Argentina. Or am I Britney and the world Justin Timberlake, my deluge of piteous words falling on deaf ears?

I grabbed my coat and descended the elevator that took me from society’s stratosphere back to sea level. It was now mere hours before I had to clock in.

[Sounds of thanks exchanged with valet.]

I tipped him $20, more than an hour of my work tomorrow for less than ninety seconds of his. Three reasons. One: stereotype threat. The last thing I want is for the valet to assume a stingy tip from me was because I’m Chinese. I’d have to way overcompensate. Two: guilt and solidarity. I can’t come directly from overstuffing my face with free steak to stiff this guy. And three: virtue signaling. I knew I’d do a podcast on this entire disorienting night. And now I’ve let drop the fact that I tipped a working-class man twenty bucks. See? I’m not the bad guy!

Right?

Coming next week: The involuntary curling of my fingers and numbing of my hands reach a crisis point, and I also begin to bleed from places unexpected as the job turns serious. You won’t want to miss just how odd an injury can be.