I took a lot of heat for reporting a driver last week who poured a bottle of piss out in front of our house.

I had thought at the time Amazon was a company that would work to correct the metrics or training that caused this to happen.

Much of the feedback here was that Amazon is a company that cares nothing for its contracted agents and would fire this individual due to my action.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I had done, the pee, the fate of the driver and Jeff Bezos.

I took two actions:

1. I drafted an email to Jeff:

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> Jeff,

An Amazon delivery person poured a container of pee out in front of our house in Portland on Saturday.

I read an article that said you authored this tweet:

"You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?
If that were true, nobody would work for us."

In the first photo attached, you can see it is broad daylight, and they poured the pee directly out of the window.

In the second, you can see the white patches of pee foam that lingered well after they had been on their way.

I shared my story on Hacker News yesterday and people got really angry that I reported the driver.

To clarify, I do not want this person to get fired. I do want you to know that this did happen and I'm a longtime Amazon customer.

I would appreciate it if you would work with your team to make any necessary changes to your delivery logistics metrics or improve training to prevent this from happening again.

I am upset that Amazon has put me in a position where I look like a jerk for not wanting one of your people to pour pee out in front of our place.

Someone in that thread above called this Amazon gaslighting and given the tweet above and my personal experience it kind of feels like that.

I'd appreciate a note that this has been read and that my truth has been heard.

—-

I received the following reply:

> This is (). with Amazon Executive Customer Relations. Jeff Bezos received your email, and I'm responding on his behalf.

I’m sorry to hear about your poor delivery experience, and I appreciate you making us aware of it. At Amazon, we pride ourselves in being the world’s most customer-centric company.

I’m personally collaborating with the team to investigate this matter further and take the appropriate actions.

—-

The second thing I did was read up about Amazon drivers, pee bottles and the Amazon executive leadership.

What I found was a solid amount of articles describing the situations that are unfair to drivers and prevent them from being able to comfortably relieve themselves while working. In particular, women who must use SheWee style funnels in addition to bottles to keep up with men.

I looked for the performance metrics and found that drivers are expected to do 180+ stops per day to meet metrics.

I did not find investigative reporting that gave any detailed account of what that meant in real terms, such as estimates on the percentage of drivers that have metrics that are not realistically achievable.

In looking at the executive leadership, in particular Jeff Bezos, I found that a significant portion of leadership is turning over right now.

I am guessing that tweet came directly from Jeff and he did it out of anger. I presume he was angry because he is competing for his own personal goal around the amount of wealth he can “create” during his time at Amazon.

I decided his tweet represented an attitude that is not sustainable and that there had to be many in the company that know this. I presume many are waiting for Jeff to depart from day-to-day operations because he is running things way too hot and it’s burning everyone down to the guy who poured pee out in front of my house.

I think this apology is a good sign, though the company has much to prove that it will make changes to make the need to pee in a bottle a thing of the past. Given how common it is in drivery logistics, it appears Amazon will need to show a lot of leadership and create new defining standards of care for its employees and agents.

I would say my view toward Amazon has gone from largely positive to negative as a result of this experience. I’m interested now in how GoPuff or other companies with stronger worker protections can come in and take business away from Amazon.

There is a much bigger story to tell about economic inequality. I see this apology as an important artifact of this rising problem.

I’m hopeful for the driver. That they kept their job or chose to leave it and found something better.