Originally published at: Amazon shows off "wellness cubicle" for overwhelmed staff to lock selves inside and scream | Boing Boing
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This kind of reminds me of Laughing Barrels. Learned about them recently
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Reminds me of the Futurama suicide booth. Maybe that’s the Foxconn equivalent.
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there’s something to this that follows William Gibson (and Cory, for that matter) in drawing future horror so close to the present that they press against once another and fiction is supplanted by reportage.
It also follows this concept of Cory’s. Coming soon to your workplace!
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Soon to be referred to as ‘canoodling booths’ once employees figure out a way to interfere with whatever monitoring will inevitably be in place
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Since it’s well reported how difficult it is for Amazon employees to find time for a bathroom break, I hate to think of the state of these cubicles after a few days.
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Don’t be knocking if the Practice Room is rocking!
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Depressed from being inside a windowless building for hours and hours at a time? Step into this even smaller windowless building… which just so happens to be inside the aforementioned windowless building.
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Wow, on the show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (where the main character is a programmer for a tech company) they had thes in their office as a comedy bit.
People think comedy is dying because of cancel culture, but really it’s because the real world is too absurd to even make fun of anymore.
Like that time Dave Chapelle did skit about a wife-swapping reality show, and then within a year there were TWO actual wife-swapping reality shows on the air.
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Otherwise known as a “Please fire me for not meeting my brutal quotas” chamber. Nobody’s got time to scream. Or pee. Or give birth. Back to work, you lazy drones!
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Yep, that’s what I was thinking too.
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Given that Amazon employees aren’t given enough time to deal with basic biological functions, it seems vanishingly unlikely they’ll be allowed time to “goof off” in a “wellness cubicle.” Which makes me think this wasn’t ever intended to actually be used, and anyone who did dare use one would be fired on the spot. So it’s just a truly bizarre PR exercise that backfired.
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That’s the vibe I get from it. Like they need a lowest-cost easy-to-expense item to qualify for a kickback from the insurance company they went with and something they can point to when employees sue over working conditions.
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So, did Amazon not know that this would be an opportunity for a billion people to make the same obvious urinal joke? Of course they did. They also have enough collective intelligence to know that no worker will ever use this, and that they’d derive no benefit from it if they did.
This isn’t aimed at the people who know what Amazon does to its workers. It’s aimed at the much larger number of people who might hear about what Amazon does to its workers the next time a shift supervisor locks 50 pickers in a warehouse and it catches on fire.
And how that will ring in the brains of people not really paying attention is “well there’s some good stuff and some bad stuff so I don’t really have to worry too much.”
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The fact that this had to go through numerous layers of executive review is all the evidence needed that the C-Suite are the most useless people in any organization.
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