Even the concourse is crowded, and it has to be twenty feet wide. My gawking has started to disrupt traffic, and, embarrassed, I merge back into the confused herd of new hires. We’re walking in a long train from the on-site temp office, where we’ve just received lanyards and white ID badges with our names and photos, to… somewhere.

Less confused people with blue ID badges—the mark of the full-time “Amazonian”—flow around us. Most of the year, roughly two-thirds of the more than three thousand workers who keep SDF8 running twenty-four hours a day are “blue badges,” while a third are “white badges” like me—temps hired through Integrity Staffing Solutions.

But right now it’s “peak”—the crazy holiday season between Black Friday and Christmas when Amazon’s business increases exponentially and fulfillment centers hire massive numbers of seasonal workers through a few associated temp agencies like Integrity.* There’s maybe a couple hundred of us starting this cold morning.