1IMPLAUSIBILITIES
I can tell people don’t believe me when I say my co-workers kept bottles of booze on their desks, or that they sometimes popped beta-blockers before meetings with Jeff Bezos, or that I found out about the Kindle and the drones and Whole Foods on the internet like everyone else. It’s hard to swallow that our laptops were sometimes repaired with duct tape, or that my psychiatrist credited Amazon employees for his second home in Hawaii, or that the mere existence of Amazon warehouses could slip my mind for years at a time, never mind what went on inside them or what it might be like to work in one. I learned of Amazon delivery trucks when I saw one broken down on my street. I learned that Amazon was firing people by algorithm by reading Bloomberg. “But you were right there,” I’ve heard, at which times I explain that there’s no such thing at Amazon, that it’d be like being right there in an ocean or a field of static. That often my only right there was whatever had to happen in the next thirty minutes to incite or narrowly avert catastrophe or catapult me into a future I both dreaded and desperately wanted. I can see from people’s faces that it’s not quite plausible, or that it’s plausible but they just don’t like it. “You were a good German,” a drunk man once said to me, pleased with himself because he thought he was the first. Most improbable of all is when I say parts of it were astounding and fun, that for twelve years Amazon supplied me with a high-grade lunacy I didn’t know I needed until I touched it and my ambition bloomed like neon ink in water. That doesn’t sound fun, the faces say, or that shouldn’t have been fun. To which my only possible response is, I’m not telling you what was right or good. I’m telling you what went down and how it felt.
2THE PULL
Title: Senior Manager, Books & Media Merchandising
Location: Seattle, WA
Date Posted: January 6, 2006
Do you want to change the world? Are you passionate about helping customers shop online? Do you have the stamina of a jacked-up mountain goat and boundaries fairly described as “porous”? Amazon.com is seeking a North American leader for its Books and Media Merchandising teams. In this role, you will own the merchandising, editorial, and email content for five Amazon storefronts, leading multiple editorial teams in a 24/7/365 demand-generation process. You will drive relentless, and we seriously fucking do mean relentless, improvement in merchandising content on Amazon and directly impact free cash flow. You will also build new internal content-management tools with Band-Aids and Scotch tape by working closely with understaffed technical leaders in a highly matrixed environment (that is, one in which you have absolutely no authority or leverage).
Amazon’s culture is exciting, fast paced, and dynamic. Like, highly dynamic. If you end up hating this job, no worries! It will be unrecognizable in six months anyway. We offer competitive pay and a benefits package that is not the worst. Employee amenities include a desk and laptop, plus the option to request sandpaper for your desk (you’ll see) and a coat hook from Facilities (please allow ten days for delivery).
Job Requirements:
5+ years experience leading content or editorial teamstrack record of delivering large, cross-functional, complex, customer-facing products under circumstances verging on psychoticintense fear of failureability to be dropped into any situation with a blowgun, tourniquet, and Excel 97, and figure shit out fastthick hide/peltAlso Highly Desired:
superior physical staminastay-at-home spouseacute impostor syndromeEEOC Statement:
Amazon.com technically counts as an Equal Opportunity Employer.
3HERMIONE IN BERLIN
I hate my clothes. Amazon’s interview instructions said to dress “nicely but comfortably—a suit and tie won’t impress anyone here.” But translating that into women’s wear is tricky, so I fall back on my superpower: overthinking. I’ve landed on the same skirt, wrap top, and low heels I probably would have chosen in the absence of guidance, but now it feels wrong; the skirt’s kick pleat is too frivolous, the top too open, the pumps too matronly. I wish I were fastened into a gray carapace of a suit instead of this nexus between churchy and trampy.
But it’s too late. I’ve already walked the five blocks from my hotel to Amazon’s downtown Seattle offices. I have circled the mass of elevator banks, found the right one, hit the button for the eighteenth floor, waited in vain for the door to close, disembarked, recircled, passed a large sculpture I didn’t notice before of headless people climbing a ladder, and sought help from security, who have to “badge me up” because it’s Presidents’ Day and the building is technically closed. I’ve made it to the eighteenth floor, past the lobby door I recognize as such only because a piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper reading “Amazon” is taped to it. I’ve checked in with reception and am now waiting on a sagging, dormy couch among ten or twelve men in suits and ties.
The eighty-three homemade flash cards I’ve been prepping with are in my bag and I’d like to pull them out for one last cram session, but the men are mostly flipping through old copies of Newsweek or typing on those little devices I think must be BlackBerrys. I should follow their lead. So I pick up a People from last year and stare at it, reminding myself that this is just an experiment, a rehearsal for some future job hunt, a lark. I’m lying to myself, of course. If I were a woman of larks or whims,1 I would never have made it through two phone screens and been flown here to sell myself in person. I’m a grinder, a hand raiser, a doer of extra-credit assignments. I’m the one who gets into the room with the men when there’s only one space for a woman. And I’ve crammed so hard for this lark that if it ends in rejection, I’ll be the one saying no. That’s how I like it. That’s how I need things to be.
I wonder how many of the men around me really want to work here. I’m far from sure I do, based on tech forum post headlines like MEAT GRINDER and RUINED MY MARRIAGE. All I really know is that I want out of the All Media Guide, the cozy but perpetually underachieving tech company where I’ve hit a ceiling—maybe glass, maybe just particleboard, at this point I don’t even care—after seven years. And after twelve years in a Michigan college town, my husband, John, and I are both ready for milder weather and bluer state politics. Beyond that? I don’t know. I applied for this job feeling underqualified, and Amazon called two hours later. I had a few phone conversations of increasing formality, and less than a week later I landed in Seattle, having told AMG I was out with a cold.
At 8:00 a.m. sharp, a man in his mid-thirties in jeans and an untucked button-down enters the lobby and heads directly for me. “Hi, you must be Kristi,” he says, Kristi being easy to spot because she’s the only woman in the room. For one wild second I want to deny that I’m her. If I’m not Kristi, I won’t have to spend the next seven hours being grilled. I won’t have to risk failure, or even worse, success, which would require me to stop floating along and make a real decision about my life.
But I’m thirty-five and can’t remember the last time I changed or learned in any big way. I’m bored with my job and my town, but also—especially—with myself.
Also, I’m not yet half the liar I’ll become. “Yes, I’m Kristi,” I say, heaving myself up from the saggy couch to shake his hand.
* * *
The man’s name is Chuck, and he shows me to a windowless conference room with stained carpet, mismatched chairs, and a foot-sized hole in one wall. “I know it’s not fancy,” he says of the almost aggressively ugly space. “We prefer to put our money into things that make a difference to customers.” We had already discussed the basics of the job during my phone screens. Now, after a brief recap, he dives right into the department I’d be running, Merchandising. “The work our merchandisers do is criminally manual, and their tool set is insanely outdated,” he says, eyes squinting in his shiny-cheeked, slightly rubbery face. “They’re clicking a button ten times when they should be clicking it once.” Also, apparently it’s hard to measure whether the content the merchandisers produce is leading customers to buy stuff. “So they’re largely flying blind,” he says. “It’s very hard to know if their hard work is having any real impact on the business.”
“In that case, how do their managers know if they’re doing a good job?” I ask.
“Volume, frankly,” Chuck says. “How much spaghetti they can throw at the wall.”
“So their jobs are hard, tedious, and exhausting, and they don’t have any meaningful way to know if they’re succeeding or not.”
“Exactly,” Chuck says, his eyes lighting up as though I’ve just made his day by telling him how much it sucks to be a merchandiser. What’s funny is that I think my eyes light up, too, at the prospect of real problems to solve. AMG makes its money by licensing entertainment metadata—like CD reviews and actor bios—to online retailers, Amazon included. I run the movies division, and while it’s fun work that keeps me up to my eyeballs in Oscar screeners, my core job hasn’t changed in years. I’ve been begging—he might say hassling—my boss for almost that long to give me something challenging or at least new to do, and he keeps saying, “I’m looking for something, be patient,” and I believe him, but I also know he’s never going to find it, which means I’m also never going to be at the table where AMG’s all-male C-suite is making the big decisions. My ability to have an impact on either AMG’s path or my own within the company is agonizingly limited. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that it’s enough to make decent money doing fun work with people I mostly like. But it isn’t. At AMG and in my liberal arts background, ambition is considered uncool and even a little embarrassing. I’m supposed to see work as a necessary evil. But I can’t help it. I like to work, and I want my work to leave a wake.
And here, two thousand miles from home, is my chance.
“Your job would be to run the merch organization day to day but also to overhaul the role. Beat the drum for better tools. Figure out which tasks grow the business and which don’t, and kill the latter ones. Decide whether we even have the right people,” Chuck says. “Your plate would be very full, but you would have a high level of executive support and visibility.”
“That’s great,” I say. “Visibility matters to me.” Still, when he asks what questions I have for him, I feel both compelled and emboldened by his own pleasant directness to address an elephant in the room, or on the web. “Reading about Amazon online, I get the impression it can be a somewhat intense place to work,” I say. “Can you give me your perspective? Because if I come to work here, I don’t want to sort of, you know, get divorced or become an alcoholic or what have you.”
To his credit, Chuck looks only slightly taken aback. “Well, it can certainly be fast paced,” he says. “But I have two little boys and I go home to them every evening.” I’m so relieved to see him take the question in stride that I fail to notice he hasn’t quite answered it.
* * *
An affable beanpole named Andy takes Chuck’s place in the conference room at 9:00 a.m. and explains that he is the general manager for the DVD store. “Though what I’d actually like to talk about today is how you’d think through selling houseplants online,” he says.
I spent hours of prep time scouring the Amazon media stores for examples of what I like about them and what I think should change. But I didn’t anticipate being asked about selling a whole new thing. “Do you mean how to sell them online, or whether to do it at all?” I ask, to clarify but also to buy a beat of time.
“The latter,” he says.
“Well, I know nothing at all about packing or shipping plants,” I say. “But my first thought is that they’re delicate and it’s probably hard to protect them in transit, especially when you factor in different climate zones and delays where they might dry out or get too much sun exposure or whatnot.”
“Absolutely, but let’s assume that’s all taken care of,” he says. “What concerns or opportunities come to mind from a shopping perspective?”
“Customers can’t smell or touch them,” I say. “Of course you can help customers along with descriptors—‘these leaves are soft and papery; these are robust and shiny.’ I mean, Sephora’s been selling perfume online that way for years, though maybe most people are just replenishing perfumes they already own. But plants are cheaper and less personal than fragrance, so maybe customers would be more willing to take a chance. Or, wow, this would probably be insanely hard and expensive, but what if you could order a swatch?”
Andy laughs. “Like a rug swatch, but a leaf?”
“Yeah, exactly,” I say. “Who knows if that’s even doable, but it would probably make customers more likely to be happy with whatever they eventually buy.”
It turns out I could talk about selling plants all day. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me: My entire career has involved entering fields I don’t know the first thing about, getting someone to hire me anyway, and learning on the job. In my master’s program, they turned us loose to teach undergraduate creative writing with just two hours of training focused mostly on how to fill out the Scantron grade sheet. From there, I talked my way into a series of adjunct gigs at community and for-profit colleges teaching expository writing and public speaking, skills I possessed but had not the faintest clue how to explain to others. Next, in need of the living wage and health care that sixty hours a week of adjuncting didn’t provide, I spent a couple of years as a research coordinator at a lab devoted to ending genetic diseases in purebred dogs, a job for which my main qualification was thinking all dogs should live forever. As for my AMG job, sure, I bring an above-average level of pop-culture fandom to it, but not nearly as much as the guys who work for me, and I lacked database experience entirely at the start. Here is how I got every single one of those jobs: I sat across a desk from a man old enough to be my father and I enveloped us both in a force field of earnest competence, the kind I’d been practicing since kindergarten with my hand permanently raised in class, the kind that says I will die before I let you down, and at some point in each of those interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down. I brought my inner Hillary Clinton to work and through sheer effort and practice learned to explain semicolons and to identify the specific golden retrievers whose DNA could help to solve genetic puzzles and to write SQL queries. So I can certainly be Impressive for Andy, talking his ear off about plant smells, textures, interactive garden planners, and return policies. I’m barely getting started when the next interviewer, a daddish man named George, arrives to take Andy’s place.
“Hey, do you need a restroom break?” George asks before sitting down. I do, and I wait for him to give me directions. Instead, he walks me there himself. Gold records and movie posters hang on the walls, and the infamous “door desks” made of raw wood and two-by-fours are everywhere, including a few in the hallways. “Interns,” George says, gesturing at one hallway occupant. “We’re out of space.”
“Can you give me directions back?” I ask when we arrive at the women’s restroom. The floor seems to be laid out in some kind of triangle/spiral hybrid and I’m thoroughly disoriented.
“Oh, I’ll wait here for you,” he says. “We’re not allowed to leave you alone.” I was probably six years old the last time someone monitored me while I peed, but okay. Under the yellow sink lights, I already look a little shiny and frizzy, and with five hours left to go.
On our way back to the interview room, George tells me he manages the DVD Merchandising team. If I come to Amazon, I’ll be his boss. So I’m not surprised that his area of focus seems to be my management style. Like a lot of people, I rose to management by excelling as an individual at tasks that have fuck all to do with running a team. For my first several years running AMG’s movies division, “benevolent but chaotic” was the closest thing I had to a style, and I was lucky that my team was easy to manage, composed as it was of pop-culture geeks, mostly young men, who would have done their jobs for free. In their off-hours, they played in bands or made stop-motion animation or staged performance pieces. Not one of them wanted my job, which meant we weren’t in competition. They were only too happy to have me be the boring one who did the weekly reporting and said things to them like “Stew, you really do have to take down your poster of the pope with devil eyes while the Barnes & Noble reps are here. Just hide it and you can put it back up when they leave.” My boss, Jake, called us “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” and maybe the woman-corralling-misfit-dudes element would have bothered me more if they hadn’t been so much fun.
Jake let me fumble along managing them on instinct for a couple of years before sending me to a one-day course held in the banquet room of a local Holiday Inn. My classmates came from all over southeastern Michigan: offices, retail stores, a paint crew, an auto body shop. Two men dominated the room with questions about how to deal with employees who showed up drunk or started fistfights. So yeah, my sense of how to manage people is somewhat … intuitive. Is there a popular management-style vocabulary George expects me to know? Maybe I’m supposed to say “I’d call myself a Penguin manager, George,” or “I tend to be a Panda.” But rather than toss out random animal names, I opt to say I believe in empowering my people and playing to their strengths and whatever other no-duh basics I’ve managed to absorb over the years, and that seems good enough for him. “Really what we need is major change. How we get there is secondary,” he says.
“What would be the most important change for you when this role is filled?” I ask.
“Well, there’d be someone to protect the team. Push back on some of the demands Marnie’s team puts on us so we can get our heads above water.” He keeps using names as if I’m just supposed to know who these people are, and I’m a little concerned that his first requirement in a boss is someone to say no to work. George manages his own team; shouldn’t he already know how to negotiate and prioritize? But rather than argue or ask for clarification, I instinctively know to just keep him talking.
“It sounds like merchandising is a pretty tough job,” I lob at him.
“It wasn’t always,” he says. “Before co-op became king, the site used to have a voice. We were able to talk directly to customers about DVDs we thought they should know about. Then co-op blinded everyone with dollar signs, and personalization on top of it, and that’s all before the migration from Enumclaw to Urubu. They keep saying Urubu is going to solve all these problems, but frankly I don’t see a direct benefit to merch, seems like we’re being sold a bill of goods.” George’s rate of speech has been climbing steadily. He pauses for a breath. “We’re in pods now and that’s supposed to be good for efficiency, it’s too soon to say, but once again, it’s all about meeting co-op’s needs, not the merchandisers’. So yeah, what we need is an advocate, someone who can push back hard and hold the line.”
“Huh,” I say, nodding. “Interesting.” My notepad reads:
Copyright © 2023 by Kristi Coulter
Copyright © 1996 SM Publishing UK Limited
