Mike Daisey's mad frolic through Amazon

Amazon.com's CEO reportedly took the unexpected caffeine baptism with good cheer. I wonder if he's likely to be equally sanguine about the upcoming debut of 21 Dog Years, a one-man play based upon Daisey's two years' employment at the company.

Bezos, Time's former Man of the Year, hasn't had a lot to celebrate of late. The company still can't make a profit, the stock keeps sinking and just last week, Amazon announced plans to fire 15 percent of its staff, or 1,300 employees. And now, one of the company's harshest critics, Ravi Suria of Lehman Brothers, is predicting a creditor squeeze and urging investors to avoid Amazon's convertible bonds.

Amazon says Suria was wrong before about the company and he's wrong now. Still, there remain questions in the financial markets about Amazon's staying power. Both Moody's and Standard and Poor's have attached the equivalent of low junk grades to the company's bonds.

Amazon in the winter of 2001 is a world away from Amazon in the winter of 1999. If working capital, as Suria contends, does continue to decline every quarter until Amazon can generate enough cash profits to cover interest payments, that would be a problem. In this Greenspammed economy, ain't no way that Brother Jeff is going to convince investors to pour more dough into what remains a money-losing business.

On the PR front, it hasn't been any cakewalk either. Amazon, which wants laid-off employees to sign a separation agreement, took a lot of heat for including a provision that would have prohibited former staffers from making derogatory remarks about the company (I imagine saying "Jeff Bezos is a goof" would qualify as a no-no.) After a predictable hammering in the press, Amazon subsequently backpedaled.

But back to Daisey, a man blessed with a touch of the bull goose loony. Now that his muzzle is off--a one-year agreement not to yap about the company just expired--the 28 year-old actor and playwright plans to take the stage and offer a birds-eye view life as an Amazonian. Judging from coming attractions, this should be rich.

Daisey and an accomplice recently managed to infiltrate Amazon's less-than-formidable security system for an afternoon's filmed frolic through the company's corridors and offices. The result, "Rear Entry: An Unauthorized Expedition Into Amazon.com", is a stone-cold hoot, though I'm not sure it thrilled the company brass--especially the part about the prehistoric cave bear supposedly bought by Bezos.

Then again, Daisey, sounding more like a recovering Moonie than an out-of-work dot-commie, wasn't betting on major yucks from the corporate higher ups anyway.

"It's a cult," says Daisey, reflecting on his former employer. "It's a friendly, affirmative, positive cult--but it's still a cult. You completely become one with the company.

"The cult is defined by a very set ideology which revolves around: Hey, it's still Day One, and so work hard," he added. "Jeff sets the pace and people talk about him like `Oh my God, Jeff was here, Jeff talked with us!' It was such a bizarre anthropological experience."

Daisey, who says he still loves Amazon, nonetheless remains of two minds about whether it was so healthy putting in consistent 60 to 70 hour weeks for the hope of hitting the jackpot if the stock took off for the moon.

"There's a dot-com cultural idea that instead of loving your work, here is a golden ticket," he said. "And so, for the next two or three years, we're going to tell you to do whatever we want to do--but after that, you're rich and you can go tell someone else whatever it is you want them to do."

And then there's the inevitable angst compounded by the reality principle.

"I have so many friends who now have houses they can't afford and who bought things they never should have ever bought--but again, it's part of the dot-com idea.

"Beyond Amazon," Daisey added, "all these people made so much money and they then lost it. Talk about a group that deserves to be made fun of. Hey, who came up with Pets.com? You wonder who was smoking crack that day? It's a rich field."