Somehow I was expecting weirder, yet I am not at all disappointed.
Well if you want
weirder...
Not long after I originally started there, a young woman on nights was busted giving head, $10 a pop.
Right there on the production floor, she'd just sneak off into a gaylord or in a quiet spot and get to work. The WTF part of this, was she wasn't fired for blowing guys at work for cash, she was fired for TOT (time off task, i.e. that highly controversial business practice where they count seconds between each scan and write people up/fire them if they're taking too long). The literal prostitution happening on company property, on company time, wasn't the deal-breaker, it was the associate not being productive enough while giving blowjobs.
And, those of us who've been around a while count peak seasons (i.e. Christmas season) by "theme"...
2014 was the year of the convict labor. Our site didn't hit staffing goals (turns out an $11/hour starting wage and wage cap of $12.50/hour wasn't all that compelling, least of all when you've pissed off literally every single prospective employee in a hundred mile radius), so they got convict labor from the state to work night shift. Pretty ironic that for as selectively hypervigilant as Amazon is about theft, you'd come in at start of shift and see hundreds of convicts duck walking through security surrounded by armed guards.
2015 was the year of the sex toy theft ring. Employees just got it in their heads to steal sex toys like a ************. At one point that peak, our backlog for suspected theft research in sex toys alone was over a hundred thousand dollars' worth of inventory.
2016 was the year of the swingers. It was the last year our site used camper force for...reasons that will become obvious, I assume. Camper force is generally retired/semi-retired, younger folks that lack permanent housing, or other itenerant workers that live and work out of RV's; that year, instead of renting a campground, our site hosted camper force in our outer parking lot. Well as it turns out, camper force has a healthy number of...let's call them "alternate lifestyle" folks.
Or to put it another way, our site's parking lot was host to a 24/7 swinger party for the entire month of December.
2017 was the year of Code Schwifty. It's entirely possible it
was just something in the water as our site has never been diligent about maintaining water coolers, but we had a month-long plague of people shitting everywhere but in the toilet. Shitting in trash cans, shitting in totes and throwing them on the conveyance, shitting in shipping cases, shitting in gaylords, even just straight up shitting on the floor: someone, somewhere, at least once per shift would take a public shit. Just, shit everywhere; the highlight of the month was when someone took a big, healthy dump
in front of the bathroom.
It happened so often that year, my department changed our Skype for Business channel name to "Schwifty Watch" and we would call out when, and where, people were shitting
that day. We called it, as you probably guess, Code Schwifty. We had people from
other departments, up to and including regional and corporate salaried employees, joining our department's channel for a laugh.
But we were
all a little fucky in the head that year. Harvey and Irma knocked out most of Amazon's fulfillment network, and we were one of the last softlines facilities in operation east of the Mississippi. We'd been on mandatory overtime for five months
before December, and we'd
stay on mandatory overtime until March of 2018.