Have you ever had a stranger take a picture of you in public then post it online?
It happened to me when I worked at Amazon.
I was work-walking between meetings, oblivious to how ridiculous work-walking looks to the outside world, when someone snapped a photo of me and posted it on Facebook.
“Working walking? Is this a new Amazon employee policy?” She captioned it.
And my first instinct wasn’t to reflect on my overwork, my first instinct was fear.
“What if my manager sees this and screams at me for making him look bad?” I panicked.
Seeing this picture again makes me so sad. The person in the photo might be passionate about their work, but they’re also driven by fear. Overwhelming fear. Fear of losing health coverage, fear of getting yelled at or fired. She’s slowly killing herself for people who would replace her in a week if she died.
To the world outside of Amazon, she’s not a hero saving the team— she’s an object of mockery.
It harkened back to an old performance review comment: “In working life, I
would say she almost put all her life into Amazon. You can find her working all the time.”
The feeling of being surveilled that came from being captured on camera would fuel later paranoia. People are watching you when you have no idea. Every move you make is being documented to be held against you later. Even trying to do the right thing by working hard leaves you subject to humiliation and ridicule.
They’re laughing. I’m killing myself, and they’re laughing.