There Are No Vans on Mountain Tops
Chapter 4 in a longer story about privacy and autonomy in the workplace
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I hadn’t talked to Christopher in weeks … or maybe it was months. It was when he was still fairly new to Amazon, just getting used to its intense culture. But remembering that weird conversation wasn’t what prompted me to look him up. It was a Google Photos reminder, of me and Christopher out on a hike a few years ago, and we looked so damned happy and carefree.
Was it his paranoia from our last talk that prompted my own? Because it wasn’t long after I permitted Google Photos to trigger one set of emotions that my thoughts clouded over with this creeping suspicion that maybe these emotions weren’t in my control. I’d gotten used to these photo reminders–from Google and Apple and Facebook–but what if Amazon was the place where I stored my photos, I wondered? Would it have surfaced a memory of Christopher? Or would it have placed my buddy, an Amazon employee, in a different category, and presented a memory of him only if it served their interests?
I guess I’d grown comfortable with the way these services surfaced stuff associated with a date or a person, hoping that it makes a customer smile and keep using their damned service. I generally accept that it’s all about the eyeballs, the customer retention, the opportunity for the upsell. But after that last conversation and then my hike with Keith, I had to at least entertain the idea that Amazon (and hell, all of the tech giants) might be after something a little more than simply our dollars.
Had Amazon captured our earlier interaction, the one where Christopher had revealed his dawning paranoia, and decided that they would try to prevent interactions between us? Would they have tagged me as a “bad influence” on their employee, based on what he had disclosed to me, and started to alter what they showed to me and to him? It was a stretch, sure, a paranoia-inflected shot in the dark. But was it wrong? Was it implausible?
Just the other night I decided I’d finally order a box grater that I had put on my Amazon wish list ages ago. Two hours later it arrived at my door. Was this just luck? Or had Amazon staged this grater at a nearby warehouse, just waiting for me to order it, so that they could deliver it faster than I could have driven to the store and bought it, delighting and amazing me, making me ever more committed to buying everything from them? This relentless focus on pleasing the customer made Amazon what it is. And if Amazon was willing to go this far to keep me as a customer, why would they not go equally as far to control their employees? After all, this is a company so focused on productivity that it drove some warehouse workers and drivers to carry pee bottles.
You see my problem: I see what these big tech companies can do in one area (pleasing customers) and I wonder, where else can they exercise this kind of power? And why? To what end?
It’s the kind of stuff that Christopher and I used to talk about all the time when we worked together, and I missed it. So I called him up … on a weekend, when I figured he wouldn’t be working.
“Dude, let’s go on a hike!”
“Oh my god Dan, I haven’t been on a hike in … well, I think the last time was with you! A couple of years ago. Are you sure you want to hike with me? I’m fat and out of shape.”
“Hell yes, don’t worry about it–I’m not exactly ripping up the trails these days either,” I sighed.
“Okay man, thanks. You pick the trail … you know that stuff way better than me,” replied Christopher.
“Great,” I said. “You pick the date and I’ll send you a pick-up point.”
We met in a parking lot near Eastgate and headed west for Silver Peak, one of the easier summits in the area. I thought it was a good compromise solution: it would get me on top of a mountain (I don’t like to hike to lakes) but it wouldn’t kick Christopher’s ass too bad.
As he got out of his Subaru, Christopher looked heavier, but not grossly so–he was probably 25 pounds overweight, so his face looked softer and his belly pressed against his t-shirt a little bit. Par for the course for a guy who worked too much. What I noticed though, was his hair. The last few years at Wizards, Christopher had really let it go, with a long beard and hair that flowed over his shoulders. But not today: his beard was neat and trim, and his hair was … well, not exactly short, but it didn’t touch his collar. It was as short as I’d seen his hair in years.
I couldn’t help asking:
“Holy cow, what’s with the short hair? Did you get sick of people mistaking you for Jesus?” A surprising amount of our conversation relied on us giving each other shit … but he didn’t react in kind.
“It was just time for a change,” he said flatly.
“Oh c’mon man, there’s got to be more to it than that,” I poked. “Did Valerie get sick of it?”
“No, she was bummed–she liked it!”
“Did you have to cut it off for work?” I kept on–but he brought me up short.
“Work had nothing to do with it. Let’s talk about that later, okay?” He was serious, so I stopped, and I told him instead about how I had learned of this peak from a book called East of the Mountains by David Guterson, and how John and Nick and I had climbed this and two nearby peaks–Tinkham and Abiel–in a single stretch one day. The drive went by quickly and before long we were bumping over the dusty Forest Service road and stopping at our trailhead. It was a great day for a hike; not a cloud in the sky.
This trail starts off nice and easy, crossing an old clear cut and then gradually ascending along the Pacific Crest Trail through this beautiful second growth forest. It’s a good thing it’s easy too, because Christopher kept checking his goddamned phone and then he’d lose a step and I’d have to wait … I know, I know, I’m impatient and it wouldn’t have been a problem if he was winded or asked me to slow up, but there was something about constantly checking his phone while we were out in the woods digging beauty that was really rubbing me the wrong way. We made fitful conversation, which was odd for me and Christopher; we were usually talking a mile a minute.
And then, not long after we spotted the little tumbledown pile of stones that marked the turnoff to the scramble route up Silver Peak and started the hard work of going straight up hill, Christopher put his phone in his pack and said, “FUCK!!!! Finally.”
“What?! What are you talking about?”
“God damn, I’ve been checking my phone all this time because I wanted to see if we were finally out of cell phone range! My boss knows I’m taking the day off, but he told me he might have a question and I know that the only way to get away from that is to get out of cell range.”
“Jeez, can’t you just tell him you’re out in the mountains?”
“Oh, I can tell him all I want, but he can check … “
“What do you mean, he can check?”
“Wait, let me turn my phone all the way off so I can be sure …” So reached into his pack, turned his phone off, and buried it at the bottom of his pack. “Okay, this is the best I can do to escape the all-seeing eye of Amazon.”
“Are you fucking with me?,” I asked him.
“What do you mean?” I could see he was honestly confused.
“Are you seriously telling me that you are being monitored via your phone on your day off?”
“Oh, hell yes–don’t be naïve! I had to install this app to allow company email onto my phone, and I’m pretty sure it lets Amazon track every damned thing I do on my phone. Honestly, I’m not completely positive it doesn’t work when the phone is off, that’s why I buried it in the bottom of my pack–I figured that would muffle any sounds.”
“So why didn’t you just leave it in the car?”
“Because I can’t! We’re asked to keep the phone ‘on our person’ at all times, to better help Amazon manage the ‘largest and most diverse workforce’ in history. I mean, I get it, they give us a lot of freedom to work anywhere, anytime, so this is kind of the tradeoff.”
“That seems like a pretty big tradeoff,” I observed. “You just spent our full car drive and the first 40 minutes of our hike acting like a blow-up doll because you’re afraid to say anything remotely ‘suspicious’ when your cell phone is on, FFS! You call that a ‘tradeoff’? I call it selling your soul.”
“Look, Dan, I get to work whenever and wherever I want, and I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to allow them to keep an eye on me. I mean, they’ve invested a lot in me …”
“You know you can speak freely now, right?” I interrupted, sarcastically. Where was the Christopher who saw through the corporate bullshit, who wanted to speak his own mind? I can’t believe we were at the point of having a fight over this … and I said that. Well, what I said was: “You don’t have to defend them Christopher–they can’t fucking hear you! I don’t see the guy in the van parked over there in the woods listening to you!”
He looked around–honest to god he did–as if to be sure that there was no one else nearby, no one watching us. And then he spilled:
“Hey man, I’m sorry–I don’t mean to be so weird. It’s just–I don’t know–I’m trying to find the balance, to find a place where I’m being a, you know, a ‘good employee,’ following the leadership principles, and then being, uh, who I am, you know, just the guy you know. I just seem to find so few places left where I can just let it all hang out.”
That set me back, it really did. One, because he was my friend and I could see that he was really struggling–there was real pain in what he said. But two, because Christopher was probably one of the few people I knew who was just totally skeptical about “corporate speak” and was always eager to keep his own independent voice, and here he was admitting that he’d been trimming his sails, guarding his words, hiding, in order to fit in. I could see how much that hurt. And seeing that helped me be a little more sympathetic.
“Damn, Christopher, I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds really hard.”
“It’s hard, Dan!,” he exclaimed. “Cause I ‘need’ the job–I mean, they pay really well, and once my stock options vest, it gets even better. And there’s so much opportunity here! We’re going to be the biggest employer in the world!”
“But Christopher,” I interrupted, “you’re SO employable. You could get a job anywhere.”
“But Dan, I don’t think it’s going to be better anywhere else, at least not anywhere else where the pay is this good. I mean, where am I going to go that’s not going to want to mold me into some kind of corporation-shaped robot? You go talk to people who work at the other places, it’s all the same …”
“You sound kind of defeated, man, that’s rough,” I sympathized. “What do you want to do?”
He hung his head for a minute, then he looked up, looked around, and smiled. “I’ll tell you what I want to do–I want to get to the top of this mountain and stop thinking about work for once! Let’s go.”
And up we went, through the talus and rubble, keeping our eye out for the cairns that marked the way and just digging the beauty of the mountains. We were both huffing and puffing–it was steep!--but Christopher was out in front and he was having a ball.
“Do you hear that?” I called up to him.
“Hear what? All I hear is the wind.”
“There’s a pinging sound,” I called … and when he stopped, we could both hear it. It was coming from his backpack.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
"corporation-shaped robot." Hahahaha!