That time I worked for Amazon.com -- in a haunted insane asylum
... on a desk made out of an old door... in a concrete room with a drain in the floor.
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. We’re not talking people who were “a little zany” here… this room was for the “mega insane”.
Windows so small you couldn’t 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. Here’s 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 4x4’s on them (again… using the cheapest wood available). Ta-da! Desk!
Non-adjustable. Rickety. Wobbly. Not-level. Splinters. Ergonomics, be damned.
Here’s another shot of these desks just to prove I’m not joking.
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 can’t 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 didn’t.
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 don’t like it. I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.”
And… that’s exactly what I did. 22 years ago (give or take). Working for Amazon.
I just… stopped going.
Didn’t call in. Didn’t quit. Didn’t answer their calls. Didn’t respond to their emails.
Just… didn’t go.
It was amazing. Everything that the movie Office Space told me it could be.
In case you were curious: No. I didn’t cash any paychecks that came after that. I didn’t want anything from Amazon… I just really didn’t 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.
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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Great story