“No, Kristi, it’s not, and you are right to look surprised because it’s fucking insane that every price on this website is set manually by a buyer. So I’m hired to fix it, give buyers their time back to do something more productive. But guess what: every time I turn around I discover some new team of buyers asking, ‘Who is this guy and why the fuck is he here?’ I explain my charter and they freak because they didn’t get to have input into the requirements, because I didn’t know their team fucking existed and vice versa. So they escalate to their director, he throws a fit, and I’m back gathering requirements again while the engineers threaten to abandon the project if I keep making them wait. This is normal to some extent, Kristi. To some extent this is just what a product manager does. But it goes beyond normal at Amazon, because people are like mushrooms here.”

There are so many men here, men from Sloan and the University of Michigan and McKinsey and Deloitte. They’re transitioning to barefoot running. They bought Vibrams last month, and a sous vide machine. They like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and in college they once saw Modest Mouse five times in a year. They have three kids and a wife with an expired law license because it just made more sense for her to be the stay-at-home parent. They work standing up. They’ve slowly come around on Belgian ales, and Tim Ferriss’s book really made them think. They wish they had more time to read. They like their steak rare and their hot sauce vicious. When they interrupt you at your desk, they’re sorry for the drive-by. When something goes wrong, they’re working on a path to green. They don’t just agree; they violently agree. They’re blocking and tackling and focused on the inputs and not getting distracted by orthogonal matters. Going paleo has been huge for them, and tequila is allowed. Can they just play devil’s advocate for a second? Can they just pressure test your idea? Can they just push back on that a little? These last three are them saying you are wrong. Sometimes they say it in an Amazon way and sometimes in a man way, though already the difference is getting pretty hard to discern.

“I know,” Marnie says. “But he’s done it to everyone. Last year at CES, he took us out to Delmonico’s, and I asked the waiter for a vegetable plate because I just wasn’t in the mood for a steak. After dinner Chuck accused me of ‘sending a signal’ that he wasn’t inclusive of vegetarians. But then it was done, and he’s never mentioned it again.”

“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”

It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.3 When the day comes, the twenty-odd managers in Chuck’s org gather in a conference room that reeks of onions from some pizza a previous group left behind. It’s windowless except for a panel by the door that HR has covered with blank paper. Handwritten signs reading DO NOT ENTER!!!!!! ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW IN PROGRESS are posted on both doors. By 6:00 p.m., we’re an hour over the scheduled end time and are only halfway through the alphabet. The doughnuts Chuck’s assistant brought have been sitting untouched in the middle of the table—doughnuts don’t really sync with onion fumes—but now people are starting to pick at them, sensing dinner could be a long way off. I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.

“Does Jeff Bezos want you to write a blog?” my mother calls from the living room.

“I deeply doubt it, Mom,” I call back.

“Well, he’ll be begging when he finds out what a beautiful writer you are.”

“Would you do me a huge favor?” I whisper to John. “Would you murder me?” I pour two mugs of decaf and bring them out to my parents. “I don’t really need or want Jeff Bezos to beg me to write a blog,” I say.

“He might even be one of the smartest people in America,” says my dad.

It would be cruel for me to tell my mother how strangled I feel when she talks like this, how much I don’t want the immediate pressure to dazzle Jeff Bezos. Can’t it be enough for now that I didn’t accidentally spill something on him or freeze up? I know she’s trying to be supportive, but in the moment it’s just one thing too many, like when I started exceeding a 4.0 grade point average and suddenly that became the new standard I was expected to meet. My chest and throat feel tight with the knowledge that it isn’t fair.

People leave, of course, though we don’t say “leave”; we say they “promoted themselves to customer.” Lashanna leaves to have children. Jacie comes back after her first kid but leaves before her second. Matt leaves to become an Anglican minister. Todd leaves to breed irises. Liza leaves to sail around the world. Kelly leaves for an NGO. Eino, thirty-six, says in his goodbye email that he’s leaving to regain his health. Holly leaves to get some sleep. Amy leaves for Microsoft. Dennis leaves for Microsoft. Hiroshi leaves for Microsoft. Google, LinkedIn, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter, Expedia, Tableau. Tim wins big on Jeopardy! and leaves to open a bookstore. Victor leaves for more reading time. Nina goes on medical leave for stress and never returns. Lance leaves to sober up. Noah goes home to Denmark. Anna leaves and starts a firm that helps vendors understand Amazon. Jack leaves and starts one that helps people interview at Amazon. Pat leaves to work on Zune and a year later he boomerangs back. That’s what we call the people who return: boomerangs. Brent leaves for Apple and better work-life balance and boomerangs back when Apple’s work-life balance turns out to be even worse. Anton boomerangs from start-up land. Ira boomerangs from retirement in the South of France. Nathan and Prakash and Eric all boomerang back from Nordstrom corporate, which they call “retirement,” better dressed than we remember them. Pete spends one day at a new company and boomerangs back. I never thought I’d come back, the boomerangs say, grinning and wild-eyed, and when we ask what brought them back, they always say, “The people. I missed the people,” and I know what they mean; I missed some of them even if we hadn’t worked together in ages, missed their camaraderie, their under-eye circles, their gallows jokes, the way they kept showing up for me and I kept showing up for them because no one of us could make it alone, though it’s arguable whether we could make it together, either. As for me, I keep staying, past the point where I’d owe back my signing bonus, past my first seven door desks and four bosses and five reorgs, three U.S. presidents, two unfounded rumors of stock splits, the nonupling of the employee population. Sometimes I take it year by year, sometimes stock vest by stock vest. At one point my staying is a week-to-week thing. I keep a go bag under my desk for the few possessions I can’t see leaving behind. But I don’t use the bag. I stay.

1:20 p.m.: From the shuttle, I see a man on Jackson Street grab his crotch at a passing woman and wonder for the hundredth time how it is that not one of the crying merchandisers has ever talked to me about sexual harassment. Surely it’s happening somewhere in a company this size, right? Journalists have begun reporting on Silicon Valley’s libertine culture, with the coed hot tubs and parties with paid models in attendance. By comparison, Amazon is like a meeting of the Presbyterian budgeting committee. “I had two office affairs at Expedia just because I was bored and had free time,” an Amazon friend once said, trying to explain our weirdly asexual culture. “Here I literally forget that men have parts, and they must pick up on that vibe.”

Because Mitch gets to throw toddler fits while I’m not allowed to show emotion at all, I am angry but I think it’s shame. Every morning I feel a little sick when I get on the elevator, as though I ate just a bite of something rotten, so I am angry but I think it’s IBS. I have to put my worst employee in the bottom 10 percent to make the curve, even though she’s still pretty good, so I am angry but I think it’s softness. My best employee is a quivering wreck and my praise goes right through her, her eyes darting in mistrust until I’m half convinced I am lying to her, and I am angry but I think it’s lack of compassion. I’m about to join the demographic known as “over forty,” and I am angry but I think it’s body dysmorphia. All the money is starting to seem normal and not like winning a prize every day, and I am angry but I think it’s ingratitude. John gripes that it’s distracting to have cleaners in the house and I read it as him saying I should be doing the cleaning myself, and my office is noisy and crowded all day long and John works in an empty house for all but the six hours a month our cleaners visit, so I am angry but I think it’s lack of focus. Whole Foods has just four lanes open at rush hour, and the lines back up into the aisles, and I am angry but I think it’s failure to be in the moment. We’re losing the engineers again and I don’t even really know why, and I am angry but I think it’s stupidity. [...]

“He’s giving a talk at the Apple store in Ginza next week,” I say. It’s starting to bug me how much John downplays his career. “I’m a coder,” he says when someone asks what he does for a living, as if he were a junior web dev instead of the founder of a rapidly growing start-up. Maybe I’m being sucked into power-couple fantasies, or maybe there’s just something about his refusal to cop to being successful that makes me feel alone in this new life. Maybe it’s the innate male confidence that eats at me. He doesn’t need to puff himself up, because no one’s invested in tearing him down. Whatever the reason, I wish he’d knock it off.