Swale Canyon Showdown
Chapter 22 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance.
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“Why is this so hard?” laughed Stamper, half in frustration. She was 10 minutes into a phone call with Christopher that came directly after the verbal override they had just participated in. It wasn’t going well.
“Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but I’m not talking about this stuff at work or on the phone,” said Christopher. “It needs to be away from the prying eyes and ears of HD.”
“We’re not prying!” insisted Stamper. She didn’t like feeling defensive, but she identified pretty strongly with HD at this point. “We’re trying to help.”
They’d been going around and around on this one.
“I’m trying to help too—I’m trying to help you not be the fucking Gestapo! If you want to talk, it’s gotta be without any electronic devices, in an area where I’m sure there’s no connection. That’s the deal,” Christopher held firm.
“Or else what?,” Stamper refused to be bullied. “You’re going to keep being a pain in the ass, doing everything you can to turn people against us?” She didn’t like being backed against the wall.
“Look, Stamper, I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass,” said Christopher, then he reconsidered. “Okay, maybe a little! But I’m not trying to turn people against you. I just don’t think you see what you’re doing. And I’m telling you, if you want anything more from me about it, you’ll do it on my terms.”
Stamper sighed. She knew she could force his hand—demand that he appear with his manager in a performance review. As the head of HD, she had that power. Hell, she could probably work with Christopher’s manager to get him dismissed—he had enough taps and enough tap escalations for them to execute on a termination today. That was what Cascade would tell her to do, if she asked.
But deep down, she knew there was something to Christopher’s response to HD monitoring and she wanted to hear it. Dan had predicted it long ago, and even Keith—who wasn’t exactly the empathetic, sensing type—could see the problems it was creating for some people. And she still wanted it to work! Maybe, just maybe, if she acquiesced to Christopher’s demands, his input could help guide her to a workable solution. Christopher might be pissing her off, but she had to acknowledge that he was a smart, innovative guy—the kind of person she wanted to work with, the kind of colleague who should make Amazon a great place to work.
“Christopher,” she said, her voice softening. “I really want to hear where you’re coming from, so I’ll do it. Tell me the where and the when, and I’ll make it work.”
“Good!,” said Christopher. “I’m glad. I’m not your enemy Kate.”
“I know,” Stamper replied.
“But I can’t tell you the time and location over the phone ...”
“Oh shit, really?”
“Yeah, really. That’s how it is at this point! Keep your eyes out—I’ll get you the details.”
“How? What do you mean keep your eyes out?”
“I mean, I’m going to get you the details of our meetup, but I’m not telling you how. Trust me, you won’t be able to miss it.”
“Jesus, it sounds like something out of a spy novel!” Stamper laughed.
“Don’t I know it, or Sci-Fi,” barked Christopher, no humor in his voice. “It sucks. I’ll talk to you soon.” And he hung up.
Two days later, sitting at her desk, Stamper heard the distinctive sound of the window washers making their way along the building and toward her office. Clomp, squeeeeege, pause. Clomp, squeeeeege, pause.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the window washer guy shuffle over and approach her window. She gave him a friendly wave.
Clomp, squeeeeege, pause.
Long pause.
Noting the break in the window washer’s rhythm, Stamper looked over at him. He was holding up a hand-drawn note, scrawled on a piece of cardboard. It said: “Swale Canyon Trailhead. 10 AM. October 7.”
The window washer looked at her directly. He flashed her a questioning thumbs up. She nodded and returned the thumbs up, then scrawled the meetup location down on a sticky pad.
When she looked back up, he was still standing there, but he had flipped over this sign. It read: “Leave your phone at home.” She nodded to signal that she had read it. He folded the sign up, tucked it into his work belt, and went on with his work.
Clomp, squeeeeege, pause.
Then he was gone.
Where the hell is the Swale Canyon Trailhead, thought Stamper, turning to her computer ... before pulling up short. Better to look it up later, she thought.
Crap, she thought to herself. Now I’m starting to worry about being watched!
And that’s how it went for the next several days: when she least expected it—when she went to get a coffee, when she retrieved her bike from the basement bike storage, and, in a touch that could only have come from Christopher, when she went to the bathroom and pulled down on the toilet paper roll—she’d get messages stating the terms of the meetup.
She followed them all.
“Well,” thought Stamper as she pulled into the dusty parking lot, eying the ratty looking outhouse she’d been told to look out for, “this sure as hell is remote!”
The Swale Canyon Trailhead sat down in a web of dry, steep canyons that lay between the Columbia River to the south and the rising forests leading up to Mount Adams to the north and west. It followed an old rail bed that had once connected the towns of Lyle and Goldendale, back when there was a reason to connect them. But that reason was long gone, and the stretch of the trail that Christopher picked quickly left any semblance of civilization and entered a narrow, steep, and scrubby canyon that stubbornly resisted the incursion of any cell phone signal. They were more likely to run into rattlesnakes, ticks, or poison oak than people.
Stamper had been standing looking at the signs at the trailhead for several minutes when she heard the crunching of feet on gravel behind her, and she turned around to see Christopher approaching on foot. He had easily put on 30 pounds since she had seen him last and his hair and beard had grown long and kind of scraggly. But he still had that mischievous gleam in his eye that she remembered from the first day she met him, when he had come in to Wizards a 24-year-old kid. He just had an energy about him that few people could resist—her included.
“Geez, Stamper, it’s so good to see you,” he smiled as he stepped up and wrapped her in a big hug. “I’m going to give you a lot of shit, but I still like you a lot!” That was Christopher: positive, direct, and straight to the point.
“And I’m going to give you shit back,” laughed Stamper, truly glad to see him. “It doesn’t look like you’re missing any meals!”
“I’m married and we love to cook, what can I say?,” he laughed. “And I’ve got two kids! Can you fucking believe it?” And in that way—rushing, ribbing each other—they caught up, quickly bridging the gap of years that separated them.
As the words slowed, Stamper looked around and said, “Hey wait, where’s your car? How did you get here?”
“It’s ... nearby,” Christopher said. “I got here earlier so I could see you drive up and watch you before I approached.”
Stamper tilted her head, furrowed her brow, and squinted at him. “Seriously?” She wasn’t sure if he was giving her shit or not.
“Hell yes!” he replied. “Do you know how many times I thought I’ve gotten outside the range of Amazon’s monitoring only to hear a ping from my phone? I wanted to make damn sure you didn’t have anyone else following you, or you didn’t try to make a phone call.”
“Christopher!” she said with as much gravity as she could, “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming, I used a paper map, and I left my phone at home—just like all your little messages told me! I haven’t been this off the grid in years.”
“Oh shit, hold on,” he said, suddenly remembering something. Christopher pulled a mirror on a stalk from his pack, then got down on his knees and held the mirror under her car, moving around it from all sides. Satisfied there were no trackers, he stood up and gestured to her to hold her arms out to her sides.
“Oh c’mon, you’re gonna frisk me?” She asked.
He held his finger upright to his lips: “Shh.” And then he quickly checked her clothes for any presence of a wire, a bug, an AirTag. He didn’t really know what he was doing, only that he wanted to be damned sure he wasn’t being monitored.
“Okay,” he offered a conciliatory smile. “Let’s walk!” And he started off past the metal gate and down the path, with Stamper shaking her head and following him.
“You’re taking this pretty seriously,” she chided him.
“Hold on,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Not yet what?” She asked.
“Not until we get into the canyon,” he replied, hastening his pace, forcing her to keep up.
Before long, they rounded the bend into a steep rocky canyon, walking along an old trail bed that had clearly been blasted into existence.
“Okay,” he said, stopping and setting his pack down so that he could grab a water bottle for both of them. “I’m pretty sure we’re safe to talk here.”
“Goddammit Christopher,” Stamper replied, exasperated, “we were safe to talk in my office! I just think you’re making ...”
“No!,” said Christopher, “you don’t get to tell me I’m making too much of it. I’ve heard that, from my wife and from Dan, and I’ve even tried to believe it myself. I am not a paranoid person—but I’ve hit my limit.”
“Christopher, you know me: I just want to make it easier for you, for everybody, to get their work done.”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard that at the beginning and I bought it. I even liked it,” said Christopher.
“I know, it’s great isn’t it? I mean, we stripped away all that required stuff that people had to sit through, and all the stupid, repetitive annual training ...”
“You don’t have to give me the pitch! It all sounds good ... until you try to live inside it. Until you sit there and you’re trying to do your work and along comes this freaking tap, asking me if I really want to send that email or some bullshit.”
“But it keeps you from doing stuff you shouldn’t do and don’t even want to do!,” Stamper interjected. She’d seen the reports about how much they’d curbed negative communication over the past months. Their count on instances of words on their banned list showed huge improvements ...
“You know who should keep me from doing stuff I shouldn’t do? I should! My conscience. My character! But when you and fucking Huddy are all in my business, reading every word I write, listening to every word I say, you make me feel like I’m in a cage!”
“You’re not in a cage! And we don’t keep you from writing anything Christopher, we just keep you from sending it,” explained Stamper.
“Oh, I know—I’ve had my work held up mid-stream, several times, and not just because I told someone not to be a pain in the ass, but also for a bunch of stupid crap, like I’m not ‘earning trust’ or I’m not ‘thinking big.’ It’s like your system has one image for how an employee should think and act, and if I don’t fit the image, I get whacked into shape.”
“Nobody is whacking you Christopher! I think you’re just exaggerating the hell out of this because you don’t like to be corrected.”
“Oh yeah, I don’t like to be corrected. I’m pretty damned smart and I make good decisions—that’s why they hired me for fuck’s sake! That’s why they hired everyone here–but when you start second-guessing everything a reasonably smart and confident person thinks or writes, they start to feel like they’re inside some kind of nightmare.”
“God darn it, why do you guys always have to go to these dark places about this stuff? You’re watching too much Sci-Fi.”
“Oh give me a break ...” Christopher blurted, but Stamper shushed him.
“Hold on,” she said, “let me finish. I’m not trying to smother anyone! I want to REMOVE the obstacles to you doing the best possible work. I want you to be MORE productive, MORE satisfied with your work. I want to use our system to predict the obstacles you’ll encounter and remove them! Human Dynamics is for you! We’re creating the future of work.”
They had been walking further and further into the canyon, so engrossed in their conversation that they barely noticed the passing scenery—the rushing river off to their left, the way the walls of the canyon narrowed and widened.
Suddenly, Christopher stopped, and put his hands on his hips, and shook his head side to side.
“God,” he exhaled. “I wondered if you were this far gone! Do you even hear yourself?”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘this far gone?’” she demanded.
“I mean this deep into the power trip,” he jabbed. “You’ve figured out a way to deploy technology to make everyone dance like a fucking puppet ... wait, it’s more techy than that. You’ve created a digital avatar of me and you’re intent on electro-shocking me in the direction of your view of perfection! And then you shake your head and wonder why the puppets don’t like to have their strings pulled! Don’t you even wonder what it’s like to be on the other side of this machine you’ve created?”
“Oh Christopher, for god’s sake, quit thinking you’re so precious. You’re so committed to being the golden boy that you just can’t take a little correction. I’ve seen your Pulse Reports, you know: you click on phishing stuff all the same; you’re insensitive to anyone who doesn’t agree with you; and you’re all over the map on applying the LPs. If anyone needs what we’re doing, it’s you!”
“So, it’s just me huh? I’m the problem?”
“I’ve never heard anyone else say this crap before.”
“So, you’ve never heard anyone say that proactively telling people what to read and what to say and what to think is creepy? C’mon Kate!”
“What I’ve heard is a few people who don’t want to change or who don’t want to do just a little work or a little self-examination complain when their problems are pointed out to them! You’re the first person who has ever said directly to me, ‘I don’t like this.’”
“I think you’ve got your head in the sand,” Christopher charged.
“And I think you’re a baby!” returned Stamper.
They glared at each other.
Then Christopher sighed, deeply. Stamper was smart and stubborn and fierce, just as he remembered her. That’s why he liked her so much. But so was he! How did they work their way out of this?
“Kate, we’re stuck,” said Christopher.
She looked around—she had been paying so little attention to their surroundings that she thought they might be stuck on the trail. But they weren’t: the trail kept weaving through the arid canyon. Then she realized what Christopher meant and she laughed.
“God, aren’t we?” she cried. “I don’t want to be!”
“How do we keep from butting heads on this?”
“You can just agree that the system I’ve designed is awesome and quit resisting!,” she smiled.
“Or you could just admit that what you’re doing is creepy and scale back all the surveillance?” he parried. They both laughed.
For a while, they just walked, listening to the babble of the river rippling by. Finally, she said: “Funny, I always thought we were kind of after the same things. How are we so far apart on this?”
“I know! We’re both pretty dug in,” he agreed. “But Stamper, you’ve got to see this isn’t working! You’ve seen those reports. It’s not just me who’s pissed. I think you’re sitting on a powder keg of resentment that’s building up.”
“Powder keg? I doubt that,” sighed Stamper, “but I know we need to make some changes. There’s got to be a middle ground.” And she knew just who she needed to bring into the conversation: Keith. If anybody was “middle ground,” it was Keith Conn.
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