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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.
girl you just have to let it wash off you
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.
lol
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. [...]
there's a good q here about how to distinguish between righteous anger and unwarranted anger
“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.
relax
2013: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is published, and I skim it in an afternoon. “She wrote this whole book, when she could have just bought a Molotov cocktail for every woman in America,” I tell John. “I’ll never understand that choice.”
mildly funny
I can tell I’ve almost got him. “I just want to reiterate that the vlookup thing threw me,” he says. “That’s basic, basic stuff.” It’s tempting to confess that I also don’t know how to do a vlookup, but this probably isn’t the moment.
lol
[i like the delayed nature of this confession to the reader]
“It’s easy,” Ron says with a sweep of his hand. “Just change the world.”
I look up from my steno pad. “Sorry, what?”
“Change the world,” he repeats, “and when I go into that roomful of executives to make the case for you, it will be an easy sell.”
The faces of men in this org who’ve recently been promoted past me drift through my mind. Most of them seem more than competent, but I’m not aware of anything world changing they’ve done. There are only so many chances to invent the Kindle, after all. “Do you have thoughts about what that might look like in my role?” I ask. “Like … how will we know I’ve done it?” We’ve already become the largest translation publisher on the planet. We’re managing translations through proprietary software that as far as we know is the first of its kind. We are in the planning stages of expanding into eight other language pairings. If all of this is too small, then I need help knowing what big enough looks like.
rigged game sorry
Around this time, I also notice that my yoga practice no longer buffers my work worries, that even in the middle of savasana or a pose that requires all my focus, part of me is thinking about whether I’ll have a job next month. Clearly this is yoga’s fault. I need a more difficult practice, one where I could die if I’m not paying attention. Suddenly it seems obvious that my longtime neighborhood studio is geared toward sad and lazy people who don’t want to work hard. I embark on a sort of Hostility Tour of other studios around town, looking for one that can instill the fear of God in me, wiping out my fear of unemployment.
Wouldn’t you know it? It turns out every single yoga studio in the Greater Seattle area is for cowardly pussies. “My body is going to devolve with this level of lowest-common-denominator instruction,” I tell John, who wisely does not argue. I wonder if running, something I’ve avoided since eighth grade, might provide the level of distracting agony I require, and, boy, am I right. At first I pursue the sublime misery three times a week. But if three is good, five can only be better. Soon my right shin starts kind of squeaking, but I ignore it.
lol
“Who gives a fuck? If you don’t have to put up with working at Amazon, do you really need to make Amazon money?”
That’s the million-dollar question. “My husband was horrified by what this bag cost,” Sally told me last week about the Marc Jacobs hobo she pulled the trigger on after weeks of contemplation. “But when you work at Amazon, you have to give yourself a present now and then.” Every Amazon woman I know has an equally high-achieving spouse, and also every one of us is outearning that spouse by a lot, just because of the batshit stock. John has never shown the slightest macho insecurity over it. Neither have most of the husbands; they’re evolved and smart enough to just feel lucky. But what’s too hard to explain to them is that we don’t feel overpaid. Amazon could be depositing a million dollars a month into my checking account and I would think, Yes, this seems about right, given the fear and the chaos and the ugly surroundings and the endlessly escalating demands and the way no one ever says thanks.