Got up this morning, 6.30ish, showered and let the cats into the garden. Quite blustery beyond the glass. Checked out the fruit bowl. Had some tea and toast and for some odd and reflective reasons wrote this load of bollox.
"I once was a soldier in the Amazonian army of a man callled Jeff Bezos. Took the King's Shilling. A darker side, so some say. Shop local; £16 for four golden croissants. Power and exploitation. Same as it ever was.
The daylight free fulfilment centre was my territory. From 7am until 6pm I patrolled the aisles, upright and moving, handheld unit or stood at a workstation, it didn’t really matter. I was on the front line and it's always hot down there. A shorts and trainers weather system. You need to keep your wits about you.
The workforce was a shifting cast. Snowbirds and rookies. Students and the retired. Misfits, wrong-uns and travellers. And, of course, the permanents, the contracted staff. We were all paid the same, but they would remain when the rest of us moved out and on. When the season ended, when the shifts and the bulge of activity died down, they would be there. Planning a couple of weeks holiday perhaps, or hoping for a step up the ladder.
But some lines are not designed to be crossed. Moving up is rare.
Men, women, machines; sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. You don't get noticed unless you generate poor metrics. Poor looks like a 1% failure rate. Some college kid comes along with the numbers on their iPad. You nod and move on. You see people there who’ve clearly never worked anywhere time critical before. They don’t quite grasp it. They won’t last long. They don't come back.
What did I learn? Back then the fastest moving items were phone cases and chargers, sex toys, socks, and cheap children's toys with no real play value. These are the things that the customers want. That knowledge is enough to make you wish for some kind of selective Armageddon.
In a fast moving work space people adapt. It can be fun, in a relentless kind of way. If you can motivate yourself and want to be fit it's like being paid to go to the gymn. That's the main reason I was there. Getting myself back into some kind of age appropriate shape.
The workdays seem long but they pass quickly. I liked the busyness, though maybe not the business itself. Free coffee is not much of a perk when the breaks are short and rushed. Most of the stories you hear about toilets and timekeeping aren’t really true. Fashionable moans.
The ethos is simple enough: nobody really matters. Nobody is trusted. Don’t trouble anyone with your feelings or your ideas. Keep your observations to yourself. Only the process matters. Box shifting, pushing the tin, blanket stacking; that’s all it is.
Is there any future in it for the staff? Not much of one.
Could it mostly be done by AI and robots*?
In time. I’d say so. But there's a lot of new engineering needed and that just fries my brain.
Ethical practices are nice to have. The problem is that Amazon is very good at what is it’s core task. Logistics. Right thing, right time, right place.
That's all I have to offer."
*What if the AI code is just full of slop? "Slop" meaning - to cause liquid to flow over the edge of a container through not taking care or rough movement. How did we adopt "slop" as an AI description and why does AI turn sloppy so easily?
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