Part 4: A new job
During my time off from work over the holidays I got an e-mail from someone at Amazon.co.uk about a temporary position working with the books team. As a freelance journalist, Kevin had been contacted by them about the job initially, but it wasn’t something he was interested in so he gave them my contact details and they got in touch with me to set up an interview. One man’s trash turned out to be my next job…and I wasn’t complaining. I went in for the interview and it went well, and within a day or two they offered me the position, which would be paying quite a bit more than I was getting at Which?. I gave my notice at the end of the first week back in January and that was it. After 3 months there I was pretty accustomed to the place and had lots of good memories of people I’d worked with, and I was a tiny bit sad to go. It was a fun place to work with really friendly people and if it wasn’t for that job I would never have met Kevin, and who knows what I’d be doing today. Funny how things work out just when you think they never will.
I started work at Amazon the following week and had the luxury of taking an over ground train the entire way instead of cramming on to the Tube every morning and crossing my fingers that the trains would run on time. The job was in Slough, a town just outside of London to the west, which actually made it really convenient for me and took less time to get to than when I was working in central London. It wasn’t bad at all. Plus, I thought it was more than a little funny to work in Slough since it is the city made famous by the BBC show The Office. I don’t think Slough is as bad as they make it seem on the show, but it’s definitely not cosmopolitan by any stretch of the imagination. It does, however, have a half decent mall that provided me with central heating for about half of my walk to work from the train station, so I couldn’t complain too much. Let’s just say that in comparison to Acton it is a glittering example of city planning and high-fashion boutiques…namely H&M and New Look. I definitely liked the change going from Which? to Amazon. For one thing, I had a job title. No longer was I a generic “migrator” whose job was to cut and paste for hours on end—I was a Site Merchandiser. And forget about my anonymous “cmsmi6” ID at Which?…I had a real e-mail address with my name in it and everything…and a phone with my very own voicemail. It’s sad what excites me now. I had all this when I was interning at Siemens, but it was like rediscovering my own self worth all over again. The job itself was way more interesting, too. It was my job to take lists of hundreds of books and categorize them by subject and build Web pages for the Books site. I got to write little intro blurbs for each category page and also write marketing material for other sections of the site. It was actually pretty fun at times. It was nice to see something I’d done actually go live on the Internet for once. At Siemens everything I did was on the Intranet so I couldn’t ever show anyone what I’d been working on, and at Which? all the Web pages we had made weren’t released yet, so to see my stuff go live was probably more gratifying than it should have ordinarily been to me. Towards the end of January I was given a new book promotion to work on in preparation for Valentine’s Day—an erotica promotion. What an interesting few days those were. I was given a list of hundreds of titles, with such clever names as “Miss Behavior” and “Star Whores Trilogy”, and I had to come up with categories for these. It might have been easier if I’d been given a list of categories and was told just to put them into an existing group, but no…I had to come up with the groupings on my own. This entailed reading plot summaries (if you can really call them that) of each and every book and trying to figure out the different types of stories that erotica falls into. There were surprisingly fewer than I had originally imagined, and most fell into the “Domination and Submission” or “Spanking & Bondage” variety. You can probably imagine how much fun it was to then write engaging introductory sentences for these categories. It actually was quite a lot of fun, and more than a few people in the office came by to tell me they got a good laugh out of what I came up with. If I inspired even one person to purchase a smutty book for their partner this Valentine’s Day, then I’ve done my job.
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