Like a techno club without treble or dancing

They’ve closed the bus tunnel to make it into a mass transit system people won’t use. The Amazon building where I work is built on top of the bus tunnel, just south of the last stop in Chinatown. On some afternoons, a ponderous jackhammer or something shakes the entire building with its underground reverberations. Whatever earth-pounding tool they’re using, we feel its vibrations in our very bones. It is very distracting, but affords me the opportunity to say “pound me harder” in a quasi-appropriate context.

That was one bothersome thing that happened at the office today. I can’t mention the second thing because it probably violates my NDA. The third thing might as well (that thing was like 8 pages long and I had to sign it in pig’s blood), but I can’t imagine anyone caring enough to fire me. So here’s my first corporate secret dish: the desks at Amazon aren’t proper furniture at all, but wooden doors bolted to four-by-fours with steel hardware. They’re a symbol of the company’s frugality, because obviously they’re a lot cheaper than actual desks — there’s even an award called the “Door Desk Award” you can earn by proposing money-saving ideas. They all look more or less alike, and I had assumed from the first that all the desks were identical. But as I have been noticing gradually, the door desks vary wildly in proportion, and today I confirmed by measurement that mine is a true giant among its kind, four inches taller than its closest neighbor. I have this crippling fear of getting carpal tunnel and being useless, resorting to begging for change under an overpass or paying some child to type for me (“left curly brace, carriage return … I said LEFT curly, LEFT!”), and lately I’ve been blaming the height of my desk for any twinges in my wrists. The plan for tomorrow is to wait until a coworker goes to lunch and then quickly exchange desks with them, hoping they will be none the wiser. It seems easier than getting a saw past the security desk.