On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

After lunch, we learn how to navigate the mod. The first thing you’ll do every morning, Michelle says, is grab a scanner gun. She holds up her own. It looks just as it’d been described to me—like a cordless, handheld scanner in a grocery store, but with more buttons and a square LCD screen. Michelle scans the blue badge hanging from a lanyard around her neck—BEEP—then demonstrates how to push a long sequence of buttons in order to request work. She tells us not to worry if we don’t remember it all at first—the sequence is printed on a laminated card in our orientation packets that we can hang off our lanyards. Michelle’s scanner now reads SCAN A NEW TOTE—tote, we learn, is the Amazonian term for one of those omnipresent yellow bins—above an intimidating-looking alphanumeric code: P-3 A198 D221 This string is the coordinates of the one item among millions we’re about to go find, Michelle says. It may look crazy at first, but it’s easy if you pretend you’re finding someone’s apartment. That letter A tells you you’ll be in East Mod—that’s like a state. P-3 means you’ll be on the third floor of the mod—the floors are like different cities. The two three-digit numbers give the apartment building’s address—221 198th Street. The D means you take the apartment building’s elevator up to the fourth floor—you open the fourth drawer from the bottom. Then the item’s barcode is like the apartment number.