Typical Day
Maya Helpyu drags herself out of bed at 3:30AM after hitting the snooze on her alarm four times. Dang, she was supposed to get up a 3:00AM, now she's running a half hour behind. She won't have time for a shower, which would've at least woken her up.
Instead, she quickly throws on some jeans and a t-shirt, grabs the keys to her beat up Kia, and grabs a giant coffee from the 7-11 down the street.
It's creepy being the only one in there, but who else would be up at this hour? Aside from the guy behind the register, of course...but he looks half asleep anyway.
At 4:00AM, she zips down the freeway to Amazon's fulfillment center and customer service headquarters in Herndon, VA. She shows her key card to the guard who opens the gates to the non-descript campus of white, unmarked buildings, and heads for the fifth building on her left. The company doesn't mark the buildings specifically so people don't know where customer service is located. A smart choice, thinks Maya.
Maya has finished her giant coffee in the car and fills up with another cup inside the building before she sits at her cubicle. There's a Starbucks in the lobby of every building that is open 24/7 and serves free coffee to all employees. This is Maya's favorite perk of the job. In fact, this is really the only perk of the job, other than the 20% employee discount that Maya gets for working in this office.
The other buildings hold books and goods that Amazon sells. This building houses the people who answer the phones.
Maya puts on her headset, logs into her computer with her secure digital key passcode (that changes every five seconds), and makes herself comfortable for the next eight hours.
"Hello, this is Amazon, how may I help you?" asks Maya immediately.
The voice on the other end of the line is small and frail.
"Yes, is this Google?"
"No, this is Amazon. Did you need help with something?"
"Yes, I put tea kettle into Google and I found the one I want. Can you get it for me? It's blue. I like blue, it's my favorite color."
"Oh no, it's starting already," thinks Maya.
"Yes, of course I can help you find it. Amazon has many tea kettles for sale. Let me just see if I can find the one you're looking at."
Maya types blue tea kettle into the Amazon search field and comes up with thirty-seven different kinds of tea kettles. Uh-oh, this could take a while.
"What kind of kettle was it? Was it a whistling tea kettle?"
"Oh, I don't know. It should be whistling, come to think of it. Last month I left a kettle on and it boiled down to nothing while I went out for a walk and my son had to call the fire department."
"Your son, is he there? Maybe he can help you order this tea kettle."
"Oh no, my son is too busy for that. He's a doctor." The old woman on the other end pauses. "Can't you help me find it? Isn't that what you're supposed to do...what you're paid to do?"
"Yes, of course. I didn't mean to imply I wouldn't help you, I just thought maybe your son could help you faster if he was actually there with you. "Maya looks at the time. Each customer interaction is only supposed to take a maximum of eight minutes. Of course, the company knew there would be exceptions, like this one, which is going to take way more than eight minutes to solve.
Maya continued, "Ma'am, can you read me the price of the tea kettle? I can search for it that way."
"I don't know. Don't you know the price of your own merchandise? What kind of shop is this? I told my son I don't trust ordering these things online, but he swore this online shopping was the best way to get things and he gave me his credit card to get it. He's such a good son. Always looking out after me. Do you need the number of the card yet?"
"No, not yet. Let's find you the right kettle first," Maya says. "What shade of blue is it, is it bright blue or light blue or bluish green?"
"I don't know," says the woman. "I don't have my glasses on."
This exchange goes on for forty-seven more minutes, after which, Maya finally finds the tea kettle the woman wants and orders it for her. The woman thanks her very much for her time and asks how old she is. When she tells her she's twenty-one and a college graduate, the woman offers to fix Maya up with her son, the doctor.
"Thank you very much for the kind offer, but I have a boyfriend," says Maya, wishing it were true.
When she hangs up, she sighs. Whew. One hour down, eight more to go. She hopes she can improve her customer help ratio drastically over the next hour or so. She'd better or she'll have the boss breathing down her neck for being slow.
Maya pops away from her station to grab a donut with pink icing and sprinkles from the box in the break room. One thing about the break room, there's always plenty of free sugary items to eat—another perk of the job. If only it also came with a gym membership to burn off the extra calories. The job is mostly sitting, and those donuts are so hard to resist.
When she gets back to her chair, she gets another call. This someone wants to return a book called The Marquis De Sade Today. The man on the other end of the phone tells Maya he loves her voice and chats her up, asking her to dinner. "No thank you, I'm married," says Maya, fearing saying she had a boyfriend wouldn't be strong enough to get rid of this one.
"Happily?" asks the man.
"Very," Maya answers, as she types in the requisite things to return creepy man's book.
For the next seven hours, Maya fields eighteen calls from people who have no idea how to order anything online and need to be walked through the whole process; fifteen straightforward returns, eighteen angry calls where the person curses or yells at Maya (which she ignores), and a couple of nice, normal people who just needed a little extra help or had a quick question.
At the end of the day (which is a little after 1:00PM in the afternoon for her), Maya logs off of her computer and says goodbye to the workers sitting in the cubicles on either side of her (the first time she's spoken a word to them all day).
Maya heads home, getting stuck in lunch traffic and at around 2:30PM, re-enters her home and collapses on the couch. She closes her eyes and takes a nap until 4:00PM, when she fixes herself a healthy, early dinner and settles in at the TV to watch Dr. Phil solve people's problems and answer their questions. "I could do that," she thinks. She contemplates going into psychology.
Maya goes to bed early at 8:00PM. Soon she is fast asleep, drool soaking her pillow.