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So now you’re on your way to a training day at Amazon which you won’t be paid for taking part in. Of course you ought to be paid for taking part in the training day. There’s a quiet complaint to be heard inside you as you approach the company premises, but there’s no one there to listen to you, or anyone like you, complain that a training day ought to be paid, and then to say: Right! We forgot about that. We’ll change it right away.
Anything you could possibly want from this company, you’d have to tell the company’s customers and make them understand. You’d have to win the company’s customers over to your side to get paid for the training day, but just you try getting hold of them all.
You’d like to contradict him, incidentally, and say: I, who am also a customer of this company, would be glad to sit more comfortably here. And I think the company could afford to provide us with more comfortable seats without having to raise prices for the customer.
You don’t say that, though, because you’re me and that means you’re shy; you can’t get your mouth open. Robert steps aside and hands over to Sandy.
A picture of a bleeding hand comes up. This doesn’t look good, says Sandy, not turning round to the screen. This is an employee’s hand. He was working on the conveyor belt. When the belt stopped he put his hand inside the mechanism to adjust the slipped belt. The belt started moving again. There was a lot of screaming. This accident could have been avoided. Most accidents can be avoided.
Don’t step on the pallets.
Always wear cut-resistant gloves when using cutting blades.
Lift correctly.
Anyone who doesn’t lift correctly doesn’t just harm themselves. Sick days harm Amazon.
Sandy repeats: We’re not saying all this for our own amusement.
You trot after Norman as he leads you around the hall. Two forklift drivers accompany your group, disappearing between the shelves, popping up again at the end of an aisle, blocking the way, joking around with Norman, who sends them away: Haven’t you got anything better to do?
Not much up today, one of them says.
I’ve got plenty to do though, Norman says.
You watch your working time melt away, but you also register with interest that working time is allowed to simply melt away at Amazon, that there isn’t a light that goes on some place in the company to signal wasted working time to a supervisor and order immediate countermeasures. So this is what you make a mental note of: between the shelves, in the empty halls, beyond the lead desks, outside of the glass container they want to demolish soon, where the more important bosses and planners sit at their desks, working time is allowed to melt away; there are places where you can be slow.
rau Bertram starts crying. You notice how porous all fate is and you understand the leap into hoping. Hoping for the deus ex machina, hoping for a superhero or anyone, really—all that’s perfectly understandable here in the stairwell with your quietly weeping neighbor Frau Bertram, but five minutes later and three floors higher it’s already forgotten. The whole welfare thing, you think, perhaps a person could manage it somehow. It must be possible. A person could regard it as a profession they’re performing, something that’s not pleasant but at least doesn’t require forty hours’ attendance a week. So you’re considering becoming a welfare recipient and replacing the global corporation with the welfare office. You call out in my direction: I’m going to champion the activity of receiving welfare as a recognized profession. You act the militant but it’s nothing but circular motions in your underchallenged head, which has had nothing to do while your body was recovering. As a precaution, you lie down uncovered beneath the open window and shiver with cold, hoping to extend the length of your illness and get more time to think. But your body disappoints you, drives you beneath the covers after only ten minutes, preferring to warm up. You know the way to the welfare office from people’s stories, you know you can get there without changing trams.
Perhaps the thing that makes you happy is even the specific aspect of the strain, the concentration of all strain upon the body that you’re now heading back to. Right now—or not yet, or not any more—you aren’t ready to reject this form of effort outright, this effort that challenges only the body and leaves out the mind and its possibilities and especially the possibility of choice. You think you might be able to change something about the work or make something possible, and you think it wouldn’t need all that many changes, in theory. You wish you could organize the work in such a way that it wasn’t fatal. Yet this wish isn’t accompanied by specific ideas, and as soon as you have an idea to put into practice you see an army of head-shakers and brusher-offers before you, around you, and above all inside you, all of them saying: Nonsense, that won’t work. This army inside you is what you have to get past. Presumably you weren’t and aren’t—outside of this book—a person with armies standing at attention inside you, but that’s different now.