Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com

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She stood for a minute until everyone else noticed her, and when she had the attention of everyone she said in a clear voice: “You’re all laughing now, but you’ll be crying later.” Then she walked back inside the house without another word.

Later that night I stared at the ceiling with Jean-Michele curled beside me, and for the first time I knew with certainty that these days weren’t going to last. I had no idea what Babcia had meant with her factually accurate, yet depressingly Polish pronouncement. Her melodrama had struck a nerve. Mystical Nazi-escaping grandmothers are not to be trifled with.

The lazy indulgences would have to go. I wasn’t playing “find yourself” as my parents had, or fighting a war, or even learning tai chi. I needed to pull my own weight, get things moving, and acquire some direction. So I would find a job. Not more temping, a Real Job™. In the morning, first thing.

I did nothing the next day. Or the next. Rinse, repeat. Every night in bed I would tally the reasons I had to work, think of how we could not afford to live like this, watching the bank account dip and dry up. Rinse, repeat. You can lead a horse to water but that doesn’t mean he’ll go to the office. Rinse, repeat.

My perversity saved me—more specifically my obsession with tooth decay. There was little wrong with my teeth, but I reasoned it was only a matter of time. One of my foremost neuroses is the condition of my teeth. They have tiny cavities, and I’m always afraid that these tiny cavities will become Huge Cavities, which will in turn offer easy access to a Tooth Infection, which will expand into a Gum Infection and then a Jaw Infection, which will finally climb up into my head and become a Brain Infection. Then my brain will swell up inside my skull and I will die, a condition I saw once on St. Elsewhere.

I knew that this was both true and possible because my mother, bless her black heart, had sent me a newspaper article on the phenomenon, which I read and then attached to the fridge with magnets. Once it’s on the fridge it is more real than real: it is fact.

This meant that it was time to get real health insurance, and real health insurance meant getting a Real Job™. Jean-Michele liked the idea. She thought employment would make me more attractive—not only to Babcia but to her. It was like a wake-up call from God. Faced with the prospect of losing my girlfriend and dying like a toothless bear of some third world-style gum infection, I was now on a serious job hunt.

My first call was prompted by an ad in the Seattle Weekly under the nondescript heading: CUSTOMER SERVICE TIER 1: LAME TITLE—COOL JOB. The rest of the ad mentioned good pay, flexible hours, and a “hip and quirky work environment.” I faxed them my SAT scores and my transcripts, which was odd for an office job—no one had ever cared about my academic background before. I was thrilled when they called me five minutes later.

When I needed a Real Job™, there, like my white knight, was Amazon.com.