That time I worked for Amazon.com -- in a haunted insane asylum

Date:
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:02:48 GMT

Description:
... on a desk made out of an old door... in a concrete room with a drain in the floor.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

At the turn of the century the year 2000 I worked as an engineer for Amazon.com.

for a very, very short period of time.

I had recently come off of a contract job at Microsoft, working on Windows Media Player for Mac OS (classic) and Solaris . This new gig at Amazon sounded like it could be fun definitely a bit of a change from working on Mac software.

The building I would be working in was known as Pacific Tower at the time,
it was the headquarters of Amazon.

This is Pacific Tower.

I shared an office with 3 other people on one of the upper floors the
windows incredibly, weirdly narrow. As in, not wide enough to fit your head through. Deep concrete window sills.

The walls, likewise, were bare concrete. No sheetrock, no paint. The floor bare concrete as well with a slight, gradual slope towards the center of the room where a drain was located.

Sound weird and creepy? It was.

Turns out, that office was part of the mental ward. Where they stuck the crazy people. Were not talking people who were a little zany here this room was for the mega insane.

Windows so small you couldnt jump out of them.

Wall and floors made of bare concrete for reasons pertaining to nature and drainage. (Yuck.)

Ten minutes of working in that room was enough to fully creep a person out.
A full day in there? Was well an experience. Not a pleasant or joyful one. Whatever the opposite of Feng Shui is, this room had it in spades.

I had a friend that worked at Amazon at the same time (in a different part of the same building). He checked out my office one day. As he put it, This is the room where they kill puppies. He was joking. I think.

To make the whole atmosphere even weirder the furniture was cobbled together out of construction garbage. Literally.

You see, Amazon has this tradition of building all desks out of doors. Heres Jeff Bezos at one such desk:

What they would do is take a cheap, wooden door (the cheapest they could
find) and slap some wooden 4x4s on them (again using the cheapest wood available). Ta-da! Desk!

Non-adjustable. Rickety. Wobbly. Not-level. Splinters. Ergonomics, be damned.

Heres another shot of these desks just to prove Im not joking. Door Desk
image courtesy of this Amazon employee on Twitter .

Also, my chair was a slightly broken reclining, roller chair.

I say slightly broken because the bar you pulled in order to adjust the back of the chair was broken fully off resulting in the back of the chair
flopping all the way back if I leaned on it in the slightest. And one of the roller wheels was broken off and fixed with a massive wad of duck tape.

Not one exaggeration or joke in there. Someone must have really hated that chair.

Ok. So. Imagine it.

Sitting on my disturbingly broken chair, at my wobbly, splintery door table while sitting in a concrete walled room, with a concrete drainage floor (in case someone needs to relieve themselves) and the window purposefully thin to make it harder to kill myself .

As for the rest of the building?

Yeah. Lots of stories of it being haunted. Because just look at it .

In one story, a nurse died while on the job. Supposedly she still roams the halls of two of the floors. And, according to reports, she wears really strong perfume.

People also got regularly trapped in the service elevator. According to several stories, people would be suck in there for hours with the sound of people laughing at the trapped passengers.

Personally? I cant vouch for the haunted stuff. (Though the building regularly makes lists of the most haunted buildings in Seattle.)

But creepy? Spooky? Oh, yeah. And then some .

To make matters somehow, magically even more uncomfortable and off-putting

My manager arranged our desks such that he could stare directly at my eyes while I worked.

And, oh boy, did he ever commit himself to that task! Every time I looked up from my big old CRT monitor (remember, this was back in 2000) there he was. Looking at me. Right in my eyes.

Blinking oh-so-rarely.

While in a mental ward. At a haunted military hospital from the 1930s. At
my not quite a table sitting on my broken chair.

I tried to stick it out for a few weeks. Figured, things gotta improve
right?

Well they didnt.

Which led to my Office Space moment. Seriously.

One morning, while eating breakfast, I had an epiphany. A calm moment of clarity.

This job sucks, I thought to myself. I dont like it. I dont think Im going to go anymore.

And thats exactly what I did. 22 years ago (give or take). Working for Amazon.

I just stopped going.

Didnt call in. Didnt quit. Didnt answer their calls. Didnt respond to
their emails.

Just didnt go .

It was amazing. Everything that the movie Office Space told me it could be.

In case you were curious: No. I didnt cash any paychecks that came after that. I didnt want anything from Amazon I just really didnt want to be anywhere near that building ever again. Also, based on my experience at that point, it was safe to assume even the paychecks were haunted.

It took Amazon about 3 1/2 weeks to finally terminate my employment. Which was a heck of a lot longer than I thought it would take them.

Never went back to pick up the mug I left on my door. Not worth the risk of possession. Left hand side. Near the top. This is the room where they kill puppies.

For anyone curious, I was hired to work on Obidos . Which was the old Amazon back-end. It was built from the carcasses of dead, decomposing programming languages plus the hopes and dreams of broken programmers held together
with spit and bubblegum. On the old Amazon.com (from back during the turn of the century) you would find the word obidos in darn near every URL.

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Link to news story: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/that-time-i-worked-for-amazoncom


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