Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

I’m a grinder, a hand raiser, a doer of extra-credit assignments. I’m the one who gets into the room with the men when there’s only one space for a woman. And I’ve crammed so hard for this lark that if it ends in rejection, I’ll be the one saying no. That’s how I like it. That’s how I need things to be.

To his credit, Chuck looks only slightly taken aback. “Well, it can certainly be fast paced,” he says. “But I have two little boys and I go home to them every evening.” I’m so relieved to see him take the question in stride that I fail to notice he hasn’t quite answered it.

I love playing a board game called What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls, in which you draw cards qualifying or disqualifying you for six possible outcomes: model, actress, nurse, teacher, stewardess, and ballerina. (“You are overweight” is the worst card to draw, because it alone eliminates two-thirds of the options.)

The jeans, the mountains, the shipyards, the clouds of lavender and rosemary in every garden, all seem impossibly exotic.

7:30 a.m.: The beginning of the process of backing the Jetta out of the driveway. The house is on a busy street and it’s as if all the other drivers took a blood oath that I can go fuck myself. When I finally do seize a gap, I drive the five miles to work via side streets. I-5 would be faster, but I need the extra minutes and the enforced pauses at traffic lights to gear up for the maelstrom.

Just a month ago I pulled into the parking lot of the sketchiest McDonald’s in history to call John in tears. “I keep making turns and it’s still there! I can’t get away from it. I can’t get away from the Space Needle.” “Breathe,” John said. “We will get you away from the Space Needle.”

“Look, this place is intense,” JFW says toward the end. “It’s important to find a sustainable balance. Maybe that means a few times a year you leave at five thirty on a Friday to hang out with your family. That’s great! You absolutely should take those opportunities.” We all smile and nod, but the energy in the room collapses, and from Chuck’s face I can tell that “leave at five thirty on a Friday a few times a year” isn’t quite the pep talk he wanted for us (or needed to hear himself, maybe).

But also, I don’t really know how to disagree. My family had two settings: Everything Is Fine, and Screaming Fights with Lasting Damage. There was no tradition of lively debate around the dinner table.

8:30 a.m.: I go straight to the printer room to make copies for the 4:00 p.m. meeting, not just to get it done early, but because printing now will discourage me from the kinds of frantic last-minute edits that tend to make a document worse. The copier is out of order, so I go up a floor to find one copier out of order and the other in use. Both copiers on the floor above that are free, but of course the one I choose jams in seconds. I try the lid, the door, the lever, before grabbing the originals back and sliding on over to the other machine, which is weirdly operational. “Shoot,” mutters the man who arrives just afterward, staring at the jammed machine. “Not working?” I ask sympathetically, glancing at him over my shoulder.

“You know I hate escalating this to you,” Maeve says now. “You know I consider escalation a sign of failure.” I’m crazy about Maeve, a triathlete with a poker face and a fighting spirit. Even when she’s proclaiming herself a failure in that way so many Amazon women do, there’s a solidity underneath that tells me I don’t have to worry about her, that she knows her value.

Instead I say, “It’s just that you’re looking for the Purple Panda. Everyone is. You want great creatives who also have MBAs and world-class quantitative skills, and you want to hire them to do mostly low-level grunt work. These people do not exist.”

Maybe expecting myself to work here and look presentable and light my own home is just too much, and it takes professional sister-wives to make the center hold.

All the money is starting to seem normal and not like winning a prize every day, and I am angry but I think it’s ingratitude. John gripes that it’s distracting to have cleaners in the house and I read it as him saying I should be doing the cleaning myself, and my office is noisy and crowded all day long and John works in an empty house for all but the six hours a month our cleaners visit, so I am angry but I think it’s lack of focus. Whole Foods has just four lanes open at rush hour, and the lines back up into the aisles, and I am angry but I think it’s failure to be in the moment. We’re losing the engineers again and I don’t even really know why, and I am angry but I think it’s stupidity. I used to like sex but now after a day at Amazon it feels like under-stimulating activity, like a word search or a local newscast I once saw in Vermont, and I don’t know how to talk about it so am resigned to having boring sex for the rest of my life, which people say is normal anyway after forty, and I am angry but I think it’s hormones.

All the books for women say not to smile or nod too much, so when I feel like smiling or nodding, I have to stop and think through the ramifications for my career, so I am angry but I think it’s denial. One night John asks what I think about a local ballot referendum, and instead of just telling him, I find myself composing a paragraph free from ambiguity or feeling words or rhetorical gaps he could nail me on, and I realize I do it all the time now, translate myself into Amazon-speak even when I’m the only one listening, and I am angry and sad and maybe scared, but I think it’s just assimilation. Because I know that Amazon is the god to be pleased, and Amazon is men, and thus all men are Amazon, I am angry but I think it’s just my brain, my inferior alien brain.

Some corporate employees will take matters into their own hands and start communicating directly with warehouse staff about resistance and revolt. But here in 2011, I think, This is indefensible, and then I get off the shuttle and get sucked back into my own productivity and anxiety vortex and the warehouses vanish from my mind for another few years.

Rush Limbaugh calls the law student and contraception activist Sandra Fluke a slut who has to take lots and lots of birth control pills because everyone knows the pill is something you pop each time you fuck, sort of like taking Lactaid before an ice-cream social. I had no idea at eighteen that my basic bodily autonomy would still be in jeopardy at forty-two. No one tells you it will never, ever stop.

2013: In a Payscale report ranking top tech companies on various attributes, Amazon falls near the bottom for median tenure (one year), pay, job satisfaction, and percentage of female employees (26 percent). But for “high work stress,” we’re outranked only by Tesla and SpaceX. So there’s that.

2013: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is published, and I skim it in an afternoon. “She wrote this whole book, when she could have just bought a Molotov cocktail for every woman in America,” I tell John. “I’ll never understand that choice.”

Around this time, I also notice that my yoga practice no longer buffers my work worries, that even in the middle of savasana or a pose that requires all my focus, part of me is thinking about whether I’ll have a job next month. Clearly this is yoga’s fault. I need a more difficult practice, one where I could die if I’m not paying attention.

But the others don’t seem to suspect I’ve declared myself a dead woman walking, even though I’ve pared down my office to what will fit in one tote bag. No more tchotchkes. No more three extra pairs of shoes. Certainly no more gifts of wine from authors. Just a lacquer in-box, a pair of headphones, a coffee mug, and the wooden musical merry-go-round someone gave my mother the day I was born. I could be out of here on fifteen seconds’ notice, and knowing is enough to keep me here for now.

“Well, thanks,” I mumble, and flee in the slightly shamed hermit-crab shape my body will still assume a decade later when I think about how it started and how it ended and the dignity I will never get back.

I know he’s wealthy to a degree I can’t even conceptualize. I know his company runs on fear and superhuman expectations. I know he’s the architect of practices that have harmed a lot of people and that he has done almost nothing with his unfathomable wealth to mitigate that harm. And yet I’ve been here too long to see him as the planet-owning villain or ominous cartoon character the world at large does. He’s just the guy who runs this company and has made some decisions I support and an increasingly large number that I don’t.

At the same time, a new feeling has started to play around the edges. It’s a giddy feeling, which is strange because it involves me not getting what I want, but it’s undeniable, and this is what it says: If you can never outrun your gender here, then you’re off the hook for trying. If you’re fucked, maybe you’re also free.

2016: Amazon begins construction on three giant geodesic domes, which Jeff really should have known the entire company would immediately begin calling Jeff’s Balls. Jeff’s Balls are meant to be a humid environment for rare native plants, plus an equally humid “casual meeting space,” plus home for a local bakery that sells five-dollar doughnuts.

Separately, I have recently acquired one hundred pencils stamped “Smash the Patriarchy,” and I leave at least one behind in every conference room2 I visit as The Required Woman.

“Imagine you have to explain something in writing that you barely understand yourself to millions of customers,” says potential boss Josh, clutching both sides of our café table in gleeful anxiety. “It’s new to the entire planet, so you can’t even google it. And it’s top secret, so even if there were experts to interview, you couldn’t talk to them.” He’s grinning his face off. “How would you go about doing that?”

“Oh, wow,” the PM says. “I had no idea it would take that long.” We have had versions of this conversation many times; my theory is that he gets a factory reset in his sleep each night.

And the thing is, I’m not going to try to be nearly superhuman. Not anymore. Until I got sober, I thought sobriety was something you could berate yourself into, but it doesn’t work that way. To stay sober, I have to allow myself to be just a person who does her best. And it doesn’t really matter that my best is still a pretty fucking lofty standard; by Amazon standards I will always be failing just a little bit.

The problem is that there is no right way to be a woman. In their eyes you will always be a bit too female or not quite female enough, and trying to walk the tightrope will kill you. The silver lining: if you can’t outrun your gender, you might as well live as you please. It may be the freedom of the truly fucked, but I suggest you take it.

“They’re not mean people,” I say. “They’re just doing what the organism wants. If the organism wanted employees to be sane and healthy, the people would do things differently.” I shrug. Lately I find myself pulling out to what Brian called the five-thousand-foot view, where Amazon’s patterns look as clear and neutral as an ant farm.

Of course when it finally happens, it’s anti-cinematic, not a feature, barely a GIF: a bare desk, an hourglass spinning endlessly, and then silence.

I’ve been warned by friends who’ve left to expect bad dreams and random cortisol spikes as long as a year out.

I also think about what to say in the exit interview. I know not everyone gets invited to do one in person, that a lot of employees just get a form to fill out. But I’m in the ninety-eighth fucking percentile. I’ve worked across five different organizations and had a hand in hiring many hundreds of people. Plus I’m a woman in leadership, that population Amazon keeps saying it’s trying to grow. Of course I’ll get a real exit interview, right? I do not. I get a link to a form, with instructions to submit it within two days of my departure. I know I could pitch a fit, demand an in-person meeting. But I also know I won’t.

Finally, in panic-induced thoughtlessness, I hit the Back button. “This form must be resubmitted to be refreshed.” I hit Refresh and nothing happens. I hit Cancel and the page hangs for another second and then it’s blank and everything I had to say to Amazon is gone.