Although Christmas has passed this year, there’s still plenty of stories circulating around about Amazon workcampers hired for the 2009 holiday season.

I found out about it from a post on Gizmodo on a couple of technomads, Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard, who took up the life the pre-retirement RVing. They started a site called NüRVers, a community of the new generation RVers. They worked at the Coffeyville, Kansas Amazon facility for a month before spending the holidays in St. Louis.

Amazon afforded the opportunity to workcampers to work at the Amazon facility during the holiday rush. The workcampers were hired for amazon by two temp agencies.

From the article:

Their first day inside, Chris was awed. “Walking inside reminded me of the scene from Indiana Jones when they abandon the Ark in that giant warehouse. It’s three stories high. It feels like an industrial library. Shelves going up and up and up.” Hundreds of employees scurried, some “orange-badges” or “green-badges” hired by two temporary employment services mixed with the sought-after blue-badges of full-time Amazon employees, guided to their next destination by computers that flashed lights when bins were full or guided workers through the maze with handheld computers. “Pickers are basically playing a human Pac-Man game. They’ve got a computer scanner that they carry around that tells them where to go. They find their little shelf. One slot might be a book. The next shelf over might be a toaster. Or an iPod. The next slot after that might be a pair of jeans.”

Amazon gave workcampers the work opportunity after the previous years fiascoes involving busing in workers from surrounding cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma whom worked ten to twelve hour shifts in addition to four hour commutes. Read on. »