So I began my work at Amazon today, was pretty good overall, one of the better jobs I'll have by the looks of it.
Started the day off right by not having an employee card, had to wait 2-3 hours for that to be printed off. Nothing makes you feel more like an employee than senior staff not knowing you exist or that you were supposed to be coming in at all.
Then they were giving out locker numbers, but I couldn't have one because I didn't have an employee card yet. But wait, it gets better.
Next they gave out these "swagbags" with a bluetooth speaker, a sticker set, a card, a tshirt and a lanyard. But they didn't have any tshirts in my size, so I got skipped over for that.
But it's all good, because then we got to sit through about an hours, to two hours worth of presentations, whilst we all get teased with the possibility of a free lunch so I was thinking about food over whatever was on the slides tbh.
I finally got my employee card, but it didn't work, so they printed off another, which didn't work, and another, which also didn't work. At which point they just gave up and told me they'll sort it out tomorrow.
My expectations are suitably low.
We actually got the free lunch, which considering the day so far, was pretty surprising.
We took a tour of the facility, which was honestly the highlight of the day, we were all given headsets and had an instructor talk to us through the headset, but the volume was very low and he cut out intermittently.
I mostly just paid attention to the infographs that we kept stopping at and watched the robots move around, I kinda wanna move into a position where I work with the robots, the robots are honestly pretty interesting.
In between the headset that I was given cutting out I heard some talk about moving totes and U-boats. I'm assuming I'm being taught some 1984 style amazonian newspeak.
To close the day out, we took a test on what the instructor had told us, somehow I passed easily, safety in the workplace is pretty common sense I suppose, I saw others repeating the test 3-5 times.
I wonder if I should be fearing for their lives or my own.
Then they told us about this cool benefit system where we can claim a bunch of amazon benefits and get discounts in all sorts of places and get a free share in amazon when we get home.
But when I got home, I found out that they hadn't set my account up yet.
What a great first day.