adam @ 404

I missed the Menomena show at UW that I bought tickets for. Completely forgot. Work is officially ruining my life.

The NYTimes recently published an article about Fulfillment by Amazon, the team I work with 5 days a week. The program is basically a self-service 3rd party fulfillment solution that provides picking, packing and shipping of your orders. Overall, it was a good article with some minor glitches. It labeled FBA an Amazon Web Service. FBA has web services related to it, but its usually not considered to be just an Amazon Web Service like S3 or EC2, since there are many interfaces to it (one of which are web services).

If any of my adoring readers would like to know more about FBA or try it out, let me know. I can give you the lowdown and help you along. There are some seller forums for FBA now too.

For the first six months of work, I shared an office with another coworker. First Big Al, then Ott. Both good roomies, but I was excited to get a change of scenery and a personal cube. It’s not too often that someone likes moving into a cube, but I’ve got a view. If you know me, I’ve probably mentioned this to you. It excites me to no end because the view is amazing. I can stare at snowcapped mountains - how can you beat that?! Coincidentally Big Al and Ott are right next to me in their cubes.

work/amznview

Work has kept me pretty tied up for the last week. Whatever “downtime” I’ve had at home has mostly been taken up with trying to complete a project by Today, coincidentally Halloween. It’s mostly finished, so what other to do than celebrate by carving a pumpkin. Celebrate! No dressing up this year, but I could easily turn into a drunk at the stroke of midnight.

No time to lose, I carved this baby in under 20 minutes! Live in fear of my deft knife skillz. boo!

partyhard/hween06

Last weekend I flew out to Indianopolis for work. I went out a few days early and met up with my Coworker Eric who had finished up his work and was going to head back Sunday. Events included racing SCAA Spec cars, paintball, a great dinner and hitting some bars/clubs downtown Indy.

All in all, it was pretty fun, if not a little expensive. Indianapolis is good for one day of adventure, then its charm (if you want to call it that) seems to wear off, especially during the time you’re hung over. Favorite moments include taking an accidental extra lap and driving straight off the course, the staffer at paintball telling me to shoot the opposing team of 13 year-olds “all [I] want” since the owner’s son was on it, and asking the girls in the VIP if they were going to stay up there all night or come down and dance with me (of course they wanted to stay in the VIP).

After the weekend was over, Eric headed back to Seattle and I headed up to West Lafayette for the fall career fair at Purdue. It’s my first time doing anything like this, and was definitely a great experience and chance to really learn how to talk a lot. And I mean a lot. Software developers aren’t known for their social skills for good reason. We don’t get much practice in smoozing, but over the course of 2 days I easily talked to over 200 students about my work, and what each one was doing, along with talk to some faculty.

On monday I was put on a corporate panel to talk about the company a couple minutes before it started. Ingen, the recruiter, waved me up to the front of the lecture hall to tell me that they had unknowingly put us on the panel. I said a couple things about the company and answered a couple questions about what types of problems we work on (ie. distributed systems) and the work environment we have (lots of email lists, and a young culture of activity). Overall, I think I did a good job given my small prep time.

After the career fair was over, I headed back to Indy for the night and got out of there early next morning. As fun and intense as the few days were it was really nice to be back in Seattle. I’m not made out to be a traveling professional. Hopefully the next time I travel it will be for a holiday.

When I tell someone that I work at Amazon, some people will take the opportunity to give me some sort of feedback about their customer experience. I’m sure I’ll tire of the experience, but for now, I’ve totally been drinking the Kool-Aid and believe that we really are the most customer-centric company in the world. I mean, I can just pass the feedback along, right? Like when my Mom told me that she should be able to browse shoes by size… I passed it along. Easy enough.

Recently, A few people have told me that they can never find a way to contact customer service when they have problems with their order. Each time, I would usually squint a bit and say, “I’m pretty sure theres an easy way to call or email customer service.” I’ve never had to contact CS, and not being able to definitively answer the question bothered me (I’m on my second quart of Kool-Aid). So now I must find out…

Unless, I’m horribly mistaken, the steps to contact (or be contacted by) customer service is to go to your favorite Amazon website (mine’s www.amazon.com) with your favorite web browser, select/click on the ‘Help’ link on the menu at the top of the page, select/click a Help page link like ‘Shipping & Delivery’, then select the Contact Us By Email or By Phone buttons on the right-hand side menu and follow the directions on the subsequent page.

Now I’m assuming that once you follow through and submit your request, all will go well. But if you get the desire to email me telling me that it didn’t work… well, I just stopped drinking the Kool-Aid.