During the course of his article, Cameron does nothing but whine and complain about the working conditions, long hours, horrible bosses and overall greed of his employer. He refers to the job experience there as "relentless misery" and quotes the fake $1 trillion market cap of the company as weak justification as why it should do more for the workers (or expect less of them at the very least). The hard work of the working class job led this marshmallow man to "illness and depression". As he's doing his work he's thinking, " The rhythm of this work is relentless. Every stage of the process has been optimized, cutting no slack, sparing zero downtime. In menial work, it is often in the interstices between tasks where little acts of rebellion can be seized." No, really. This metrosexual looking liberal fool is trying to figure out how to rebel against the system as he's doing the job that he asked for, he signed up for and that Amazon is paying him and hundreds of thousands of actually hard working Americans to do. And you still want to know what's wrong with America? The problem is marshmallow man Cameron and those who think like him.
When I got out of high school I got married to my high school sweetie the next day and the day after I joined the USAF. I went through boot camp with men yelling in my face and degrading me in every way required in order to take a punk high school grad and turn him into someone with respect for proper authority and the will to do whatever hard work was needed in order to achieve honest goals. After staying in the service for nearly 6 years making really really poor wages (base pay out of boot camp as an airman basic was $420/per month back in 1978), I decided I had grown up enough to do better for myself and my family. So I thanked the USAF very much for having given me a backbone and willpower to overcome fear and adversity and I went off looking for work in the civilian sector. My first job was in construction/heavy equipment where you went to work in the heat and humidity during the summer and cold and rain in the winter. The conditions sucked but complaints were always made with laughter. For example, asking your buddy if it was fucking cold enough for him yet and why did his presence seem to suck the life out of the sun? In other words, not real complaining, just sayin'. Still, the hard work put food on the table for me, my wife and daughter and I never missed a rent payment. I was grateful for that job but always looking for the next move up.
Two years later I had the opportunity to join the IBM manufacturing team in Boca Raton Florida. I worked a full shift each day doing NOTHING except screwing together IBM PC1 PCXT and PCAT units. The process was fairly automated. Kits of parts would come past your work station where you sat with a screw feeder gun in hand. When your station was open you would grab the next kit off the conveyor and begin the assembly process. When done you would slide the assembled unit, still in its kit tray, back onto the conveyor and then someone down the line would test it. Any defects found would count against you. A scratch in the paint that you let go though was a big deal. This was IBM and these computers were $3000 each back in 1980!!! That was real money back then. Crooked UL label?? They would pull the machine from the line and set it aside and then call you up in front of everyone to fix it.
The company had build quotas that you had to meet or they would fire you for cause. They also had quality standards - too many defects per unit time and you would be given a pink slip. In order to make quota you could not be up walking around and chatting. Your ass had to be in that seat working steadily the whole time to barely make quota. Sometimes the clutch on air powered screw feeders would not slip which it was supposed to and your wrist would take a huge beating. Still you had to shake it off and move forward.
But I never complained about that job. Instead, I made a deal with one of the other young guys on my shift - swing shift since the facility operated 24/7 - to race with each other. In other words, instead of complaining about the conditions we made it a daily challenge match. The company did not know we were doing this but neither did it care as long as minimum quotas were met and quality standards were kept. Over the course of the next month we individually worked on our techniques sitting right across from the other guy. We treated it like an F1 pit stop. Yank that kit off the line as soon as it barely cleared the guard. Yank too hard and the parts would go flying all over and you might even send the computer case crashing to the ground where it would certainly get scratched and dented making it scrap. LASER scan the unit into your station and then quickly position the screw feeder and shove it into the first 10 holes bzzt-bzzt-bzzt on the back of the unit in rapid fire. It sounded like F1 tires being changed (but faster). You could hear the other guy's gun and get a pretty good idea of whether you were on a faster pace than him. Next, rapidly rotate the kit tray 90 degrees, apply some decals, punch in a few more screws, connect the drive cables, etc. Slam the cover on and blast away with the screw gun to lock it down. Then throw the unit back onto the belt and snag the next kit as quickly as possible.
Before long we had gotten so good at it that managers would stop by just to watch us go. Not only were we slamming these together, they were showing up with minimal defects and testing good on the so called burn in "Mobot" (an IBM designed automated testing rack). Both of us would routinely finish within 1 machine of each other, him winning probably 60% of the time no matter how hard I worked to change that. But he would never win by more than one machine nor would I. It was fully optimized even though our microprocesses were different. After only a couple months of this agreement to race, our daily "numbers" were always 180% of quota and other line employees were complaining that we should slow down because they were fearful of management raising quota for everyone. We just laughed in their faces and said if we weren't racing and competing then we'd be bored to tears. Fortunately, management did not try to raise the quotas on the cud chewing masses just because two young healthy men were smoking the numbers every day for sport.
Instead, within a year we were both promoted out of manufacturing. I landed a job as a lab tech in one of IBM's test labs in that massive Yamato Rd. facility in Boca. It was the start of my technical career.
Whereas Cameron went to play at college for 4 years and came out as a tender fuck with no knowledge and no ambition, my time outside of college taught me early on to buckle down and knuckle under - and then find a way to enjoy it and grow in the process. Complaining doesn't change a thing. It just makes you even more useless than you were before. Every situation is an opportunity to learn and grow. Just don't expect someone else to hold your hand through the process. They are too busy trying to figure life out for themselves.
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