My first call was prompted by an ad in the Seattle Weekly under the nondescript heading: CUSTOMER SERVICE TIER 1: LAME TITLE—COOL JOB. The rest of the ad mentioned good pay, flexible hours, and a “hip and quirky work environment.” I faxed them my SAT scores and my transcripts, which was odd for an office job—no one had ever cared about my academic background before. I was thrilled when they called me five minutes later.
When I needed a Real Job™, there, like my white knight, was Amazon.com.
What I didn’t know, and what Amazon wasn’t telling, was that they were fishing for a very particular kind of worker for their customer service department. After all, the net was everywhere, so location would no longer be a factor, and every website basically looked the same, give or take a few design widgets and Flash-animated dancing monkeys. So to win you would have to provide the world’s greatest shopping experience, and to get that you would need smart, intelligent, motivated people who wanted to perform the mind-numbing routine of telephone customer service.
Normally it would be a Herculean task to find bright, college-educated people willing to work in customer service farms for a starting salary equal to that at the local Taco Bell. But these were not normal times. By 1998, fairy tales of boundless riches and glorious stock options were percolating through the media like a morphine drip, and Seattle was awash in disaffected intellectuals. Easy meat.
To catch their prey Amazon was anxious to prove that it was no ordinary company. That’s why SAT scores were requested, GREs if you had them, please, your college and high school transcripts as well as a written examination made up of book report-style questions about literature and grammar tests. It created an air of exclusivity: you felt as though you’d beaten out hundreds for this rare and special chance to work for nine dollars an hour answering the phone.
My first meeting with the recruiter was a revelation. She was a polite and talkative lady with thick glasses and an over-bite. Her favorite maneuver was to breathe in through her mouth, flare her nostrils, and then blast the air back out her nose—a human air conditioner.
She had called me on the phone right away, she told me, because of my background.
“My background?”
“Your degree.”
“Oh. I’m sorry about that—” I began, preparing to launch into my standard corporate apology for not having a background in human resources or political science and why I was still employable, please, give me a chance, I won’t let you down.
“I think you are exactly what we are looking for.”
That stopped me dead. No one had ever said that. I thought for a moment about what this job was: customer service. Selling books over the Internet. Unless there was a hidden element of art criticism to the job I really couldn’t see how aesthetics applied.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes, we have placed a large number of Ph.D.s and M.A.s at Amazon. It’s a very literate group, very cutting-edge. Young. I think that with your background you’d fit right in.”
“Oh.”
“Amazon is about broadening horizons, interfacing with technology, and taking a can-do approach to corporate solutions.”
“I like technology … I like horizons.” Jesus, I was giving a terrible interview. I was normally very good in interviews, better at them than at actually doing work, but I still couldn’t believe this woman actually thought I was qualified to do something. No one should believe that. It was throwing me off.
“Great! You know, Amazon is a very diverse workplace.” She put particular emphasis on diverse, as though it were a proper noun. “A lot of people with noserings, purple hair and tattoos, things like that … you know?” She verbally nudged me with her elbow. “You know?”
“Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s part of why I’m … ah … interested.” They have purple hair?
“Excellent! You know,” she said conspiratorially, “Amazon is always telling us to find them the freaks. They want the freaks, you know, people who might not fit in elsewhere. So when I saw your résumé … ah … ” She lost track of her tact for a moment. “Ah … I thought you would really find a home here. People need a home to work in, you know?”
“Well, I agree with that.”
She nodded vigorously. I nodded as well. She nodded back at me. We both sat there, nodding at each other like a couple of windup toys working through our hiring script. I was nodding to say: Yes, please give me a job. Her nodding said: Yes, you are a freak. We nodded all the way to signing me up for an informational meeting about the company and the job.
Years later I found out that the staffing company had a bin for the Amazon applications separate from all other assignments. The receptionist saw that the bin was labeled F.P. and asked what it stood for. “Oh, that’s for Freak Parade,” she was told. “You know, the Amazonians.”
The informational session for prospective Amazon recruits was what really convinced me to join the company. It was held in a fantastic conference room at the top of one of Seattle’s skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the Olympic Mountains, the Space Needle, and Puget Sound sparkling and glinting below. It was a postcard. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids from those lofty heights, or if Amazon had gone to the trouble of having them digitally inserted.
And my God, those people! The four Amazonians who came to speak with us had the clearest, cleanest skin that I’d ever seen. Two men, two women—they said they worked in customer service, which they referred to as “CS.” Two of the four wore REI fleece vests, and all four had some slight variation of the same khaki Dockers pants. And that hygiene. These folks must have an amazing medical plan that includes plastic surgery or genetic reprogramming, I thought. I was encouraged in my quest to prevent tooth decay.
I would never see those people again in my entire time at Amazon. I assume they worked for a black-ops section that specialized in providing fake employees who are startlingly sharp, attractive, and painfully fit.
We settled back and they began to talk about Linux tools and server uptime, and I suddenly realized that these people were geeks. Serious computer geeks who looked and smelled great.
“Amazon’s back end database is compiled nightly … ”
“Yeah, we play hard and we work hard.”
“Website builds are served from a main template … ”
“Please wear whatever you are comfortable in and express yourself—Amazon is a free environment for your mind to play in. We work hard and we play hard.”
“You’ll be learning UNIX tools to work directly with the database, which is hard, but you know, you learn a lot and that’s part of why it’s great to work so hard.”
“You need to be prepared to give a hundred and ten percent here … but we play hard, too.”
There was a certain inescapable sameness to their responses. They seemed fixated on the words working, playing, and Jeff. Jeff came up constantly. I had no idea who Jeff was.
“Jeff’s great. He works hard and plays hard, and he’s around all the time.”
“Jeff’s got an unforgettable laugh. It’s really … wow, I mean, it is really him, you know? It is really Jeff.”
“Jeff built this company out of nothing, really just himself and a few guys in a garage and now … all of this.”
Ah, Jeff must be the founder.
I really wasn’t clued in to what was