This is the first in a series of stories about my experiences at Amazon.com, where I worked from November 1996 through July 2000.
In October 1996, I was looking for a job. I’d finished an unsatisfying six month temp job at Microsoft in September and had been getting by on occasional short term temp assignments. I gave my resume to the manager of every bookstore within a thirty minute bus ride of my neighborhood. Each of them told me that they only hired people with previous bookstore experience. I didn’t have the charisma to talk any of them into a formal interview.
There were a couple of jobs for book warehouses advertised in the Stranger’s classifieds. Reasoning that experience in another area of the book industry might qualify me for a bookstore interview in six months or a year, I called one of the numbers. One ad was for a New Age book distributor. (They went out of business a year later). The other ad was for an internet bookseller. Hiring was being handled by a temp agency that I’d worked for in the past. I called and scheduled a time for an interview and written test for the next day.
To pass an interview at a temp agency an interviewee only has to demonstrate to the interviewer that he is lucid. I passed the interview with flying colors. The written test was a simple math quiz. Within half an hour, they’d scheduled me for an interview at the warehouse the next day.
It was Halloween. I wore my interview clothes. I arrived at the Second and Lander warehouse as close to fifteen minutes early as the bus schedule allowed.
My interviewer was Beth, and if I remember correctly, she had a purple streak in her hair. This interview was more comprehensive than the temp agency interview.
Other Amazon interviewees of the day report having been asked Microsoft-style “How Many gas stations are there in Texas?” brain teaser questions (and I may have asked some of those same questions in panel interviews a couple of years later). The closest Beth’s interview got to this line of questioning was when she asked, “What drives you?”
I asked for clarification, “‘What drives me’ in which part of my life?”
“This is sort of a Zen question,” she explained.
“I see… It doesn’t matter what I answer. It matters how I answer.”
I was hired and scheduled to begin working the next Tuesday — Election Day. I was given the address of the new warehouse — they were moving their entire inventory over the weekend — but failed to write down the company’s name. I forgot it immediately.
On Tuesday morning, I rode the 174 bus from downtown, past the Kingdome and into industrial Sodo. I looked over the other passengers and tried to identify one who might be a coworker, settling on a hippy-ish girl with close-cropped hair. She got off at my stop and I followed her for the one block to the warehouse. Another new hire followed me. The building had no sign showing the company’s name. I walked in through the door marked “Employees Only” and was careful to memorize the company’s name the first time it was mentioned.
Here’s an oddity that I haven’t seen in awhile. A copy of this 1978 poetry book passed through my hands at the Amazon warehouse years ago. I couldn’t let it go without first photocopying the cover and taping it to the side of my computer monitor. The photocopy went with me as I moved into other roles at Amazon, always hanging over my desk or hanging outside my cubicle, sometimes raising eyebrows. I’m told that after I left in 2000, my friend Mari found my photocopy and hung it at her desk for a time.
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