This is what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse

[0:00]I'm a relatively young guy, when I started working at Amazon, that is something that has helped me. I was 20 when I started working at Amazon and I'm 24 now. But even being young and in shape, I still had to make sure I would take care of myself when I was working 3 12-hour shifts. By the end of the week, my body would be just worn down and worn out. When I started working there in the first month, I lost like 10 pounds, and I had to start eating before work, during my first break, second break, third break, and after work, to keep my current weight. I guess from all of the energy I was expending, from doing that task for so long, and there have been times where I've like felt the strain, I've felt the stress, my knees would hurt, or my legs would hurt, or my back would hurt. After having a promotion and some of the wage changes Amazon has made, I now make 23 an hour. I have not always made that money. Uh, so it helps taking some of the stress I used to have off, being able to pay bills more easily and not just being paycheque to paycheque. So I work in the robotics department. It's big Roomba looking things. They're like 300 lb Roomba's. The robots will carry things to you. It allows people to work faster. So those robots are dangerous. Everything that they carry can weigh 800 lb, 1,000 lb. So if one were to hit you, it would be like getting hit with a car. My job is to make sure people don't get hurt and people know how to to like do basic troubleshooting with them. At Amazon, we have a fun metric called TOT. Every single piece of work you do, every individual task, there's always a scan. You're scanning an item that's being sold, you're scanning a a package that you just made. You're scanning an inventory location. There's always scans. The computer system knows every single scan you've made. It knows when you make your first scan of the day, so when you begin working, it knows when you make your last scan before you go on break. Leadership may say your break time is from your last scan when you leave to your first scan when you come back. If the scanning stops, if you don't have an excuse that is a good enough excuse, you know, I had to go pray, I had to go to the bathroom, I went on to take my break. If you don't have an excuse like that, uh, you start to accumulate time off task, which is time you were not directly working at least as can be recorded by the computer system. You are allocated a specific amount of time for those tasks. If you need to go to the bathroom, you get 8 minutes including your walk time to go to the bathroom, before that TOT clock starts ticking. If you have a bad day, that can lead to a write-up.

[2:56]The biggest thing that has kept me there is the people I work with. After a point of time, um, I was working a three-day, 12-hours each day week. The combination of that, the four-day weekend and the relatively flexible time off system, allowed me to do other things that I wanted to do. There have been a lot of times when I worked at Amazon where I've wanted to quit. People have had days where you just need to go to a bathroom stall and maybe you need to cry for a bit. You know, you need to hide in the corner somewhere, like where there's not other people and just like cool down and relax. Many people have had moments like that, I've had moments like that.