Casey0714
kiwifarms.net
Aug 11, 2019

    #804

Alright, I got one for y'all. A few years back, I found myself working in one of Amazon's sweatshops. Y'all probably already know about how they run their people like robots chasing the rates on the scanners and the whole 15mile a day average walk through the Pick mods but one place in particular that doesn't get as much attention is the Shipdock department. Now, for those of you needing a mental picture, the shipdock is basically a long wall with a bunch of slots where 18wheelers back up and park their trailers against the building so retractable conveyor belt can feed into the things and feed the boxes to whoever has to load the things in one of those ovens/freezers depending on the time of year. Anyways, the person working in there is basically playing Tetris all day, stacking boxes and trying to fit as many as possible in there before it's time for the truck to leave and get replaced by the next one. Well, like everything else, Amazon regulated the hell out of it. The longest box in that particular warehouse was about 24" long and so that's how far the face of the wall being built was supposed to be from the face of the previous wall. Now, for those who were good at it, you can take the smallest boxes and use them as a unit of measurement to build the equivalent of the larger boxes and just go back and forth like a typewriter no problem. Well, smart people aren't really the focus of Amazon's hiring pool.

Anyways, the point is that the folks being put into the trailers can't build a solid wall to save their life. So what do they do? They make a "false wall" by making the face of the one they're building an extra bit of distance further than they're supposed to from the previous one and whenever they can't find a good spot to put whatever box came down the line, they just chuck the thing over the wall and let it fall in between them. Of course, this can damage whatever's in the box and all of that but for this story, let's focus on what's going on in the trailer. You see, when we're stacking these boxes, they're supposed to set like bricks in a pattern where the weight is being nicely distributed out as more and more boxes pile up. Well, in that false wall, not only are they not stacking but you get boxes setting at an angle digging edges and corners into the boxes below as the weight adds on. This causes the false wall to expand over time and makes it difficult to catch those responsible because they build the regular walls up faster to hide it.

The end result is another employee walking in and starting to build a wall and all of a sudden, the one in front of them comes avalanching down on top of them with everything from steak knives to sex toys to lifting weights flying through the cardboard as soon as enough boxes in the false wall buckled and leaned against the one ahead of it. Now, I pointed out the safety issues, trying to save them the lawsuits like a good drone but ya see, training people to do something that requires thought is difficult. Especially when we couldn't some folks to get out of their PJs before coming to work. If they get fired, they just get rehired in a couple months anyways after drawing unemployment. So you might be wondering, what did they do to address this issue?

They made the false wall part of the standard process and told them to put all the small boxes back there, disciplining anyone who tried to make a wall the correct way because it made it too difficult for those doing the new process. If you're ever going to buy something online, buy about 20lbs of candy to go with it just to keep it relatively intact for shipping or it's likely to get chucked like a football.
 
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recovered jan 2021