Best Prime Day Ever

I started planning for Prime Day 2029 the day after Prime Day 2028. While the rest of you were sleeping off the effects of too much Bezos Estates PrimeWine, I was already up, charting out the year, making budgets, sketching float elements, and doing everything in my power to ensure that I would stand out at our local Prime Day Loyalty Parade. I set my Amazon Assistant to alert me whenever prices fell on supplies I knew I would need. I cleared out my garage so that I’d have plenty of space to work. My plan was big, and bold. I was ready to make history.

By the 1st of the year, things were looking good. All summer and fall, I’d been eating nothing but Amazon Basics NutroBlocks, and walking everywhere instead of taking transit drones. I wore my Amazon-issued work smock instead of buying any new clothes, and pulled extra shifts at my job on the maintenance team at the local fully automated Prime Stop’n’Shop. I saved almost everything I earned, and I quickly had enough PrimePoints to begin purchasing my float materials: the structural rebar and wheat paste, the peach-colored paint, the motor and the chassis. 

By March, me and my friends had finished the float’s framework, and we were starting to flesh it out. It was looking incredible. A nice bonus during that time: Amazon was expanding its governance services into the former European Union, so we were all getting extra stimulant packs with our groceries to work harder and faster than ever before. My Tier4 PrimeExclusive grocery delivery usually contains 5, one for each week day, but by the beginning of April they were including as many as 11 or 12. With this many stimulant packs, all of us could work way longer than usual, so our progress on the float really took off. We were making sure to keep enough PrimePoints back that we could splurge on Prime Day, and get the Bezos-Preferred Party Platter Tier2 from Whole Foods, as well as several gallons of PrimeWine. We had it all worked out beautifully. The float was looking fantastic, and friends and family were getting excited to see what we’d created.

Then last night happened.

It was three days to go before the parade. I was up late, putting some final touches on the float after the rest of my friends had gone to bed, when I realized how cold it was in the garage. I decided that I’d spend a few PrimePoints to run the heat in the garage, just for a moment or two, and just so I could keep working a little later. I was almost done with the nose, and I was in my flow state. “Alexa, who is Alpha and Omega,” I said. “Speak,” boomed the voice from ambient speakers. “Allocate three prime points to heat the garage, if it pleases you.” The garage got a little warmer. I snorted another stimulant pack, and I happily went about finishing the nose.

Or at least I thought I did. I think I might’ve overdone it with that last stimulant pack. One moment, I was layering fabric strips over the nose’s framework, and the next, I was waking up on the bed of the float. My vision swam. I hacked up a lung and my eyes burned. Smoke had filled the garage.

Our float was on fire! The smell of the paste and fabric was awful. I batted at the flames, and used my Amazon Home Basics fire extinguisher, but it was no good. I ran out of the garage, coughing and dizzy. Fire suppression drones, alerted by my use of the fire extinguisher, flew in and doused the whole thing in flame retardant.

 While the neighbors came out to stare, I looked at my Prime account, and figured out what had happened: instead of spending 3 of my PrimePoints, Alexa, who is Alpha and Omega, heard ’30.’ The report from the fire drones confirmed it. The wall heaters in my garage, which were ancient and only partially integrated with Amazon’s Home Control Systems, couldn’t handle 30 points worth of heat. The heating elements had gotten white-hot, and the garage was full of loose fabric and combustible glue. I was lucky it was just the float that had burned.

Well, I was about ready to start sobbing. This would be bad enough if it were just me involved, but Alexa could see from my my buddies’ geotags that they had been hanging out at my garage a lot. She deducted PrimePoints from all of us to cover the cost of the fire suppression drones, and those puppies aren’t cheap. I watched as all those hard-earned points vanished, and thought about all those months of eating NutroBlocks and the blisters I’d gotten on my feet from avoiding the transit drones.

I started getting messages right away. Unsurprisingly, the fellas were pretty angry with me. This was all my idea, after all, saving all our PrimePoints for the whole year, betting it all on the greatest Prime Day Loyalty Parade ever. They showed up at my garage, waving their phones, showing me the hit their points had taken, moaning because we’d never be able to finish the float now.

“Fellas,” I said. “Things look pretty bad, but let’s think back to the early days of Amazon. When Godking Bezos was first cultivating the empire on which no star ever sets, do you think it was all smooth sailing? When he was first preaching his doctrine of efficiency, did he give up when one little retailer pushed back? When he’d signed up every last American for PrimeExclusive Food Delivery, and that ol’ rinky-dink federal government tried to take what he’d built away, did Godking Bezos say sure, here, have it back? No! He rallied his troops to defeat those evil government forces, and we have to rally to finish this parade float. It’ll be a tough go, but we’ve got to do it!”

Well, it was a pretty good speech. The fellas looked around at each other a little sheepishly, because they’d been ready to quit, but I wasn’t going to hold it against them. We all agreed to take on some extra PrimeDebt, because if we won first prize in the parade, all that was going to get cleared out real quick. We put our thumbprints on our phones to confirm that we really did want to take on more PrimeDebt, and that was that. Supply Drones brought us more of everything, and we were back in business. We worked through that night, and the next night, and well into the next one after that. Just a few hours before the parade, we finished. We were pretty well destroyed by all the stimulant packs we’d done, so we ordered up all the Bezos Estates PrimeWine and Party Platters we could afford and conked out for a quick nap.

The day came, and it was glorious. The sun was shining, and we drove our float down to join the crowds in the streets. People stopped and stared. They oohed and ahhhed, because we were the only Head of Bezos entry in the parade. Head of Bezos was a really popular entry in the loyalty parades until  2023, when Godking Bezos made it clear that he didn’t like them. He said you should only do it if you could really make it look like him, and a couple people had their Prime Accounts revoked the next year for failing to adequately represent him, which basically means you’re out on the streets. But those floats sucked! I knew that one that really looked like him was a shoe-in for the prizes at the end of the parade, and that’s why I’d spent so long making it perfect. You were absolutely set for the next year if you won a prize in the parade.

We rolled onto the main thoroughfare and put out float on AutoPilot. We opened up our bottles of PrimeWine and started ripping into our Party Platters. After a year of not drinking much at all, it made my head swim. The fellas were getting pretty punchy, too. I begged us all to take it easy, but it was our day of victory! I wasn’t that stern. The crowd was going wild, loving that someone had been bold enough to try for a Head of Bezos. I can’t speak for my buddies, but I felt about 20 feet tall.

 We’d traveled the better part of a mile when I started noticing the Observation Drones. They kept buzzing down, taking in our float from all angles, snapping pictures. I was excited – that meant someone at PrimeCentral for our region had deployed them! We were going to get the recognition we deserved. Me and the fellas started mugging for the drones, doing bad-boy poses with our bottles of PrimeWine. A couple people from the crowd jumped up on our float to make out with us. For that brief and shining moment, we were the kings of the Prime Day Loyalty Parade.

We only made it a few more blocks before uniformed PrimeKeepers showed up. “Halt, Amazonians,” they yelled. Unfortunately, under the influence of so much wine and fame, some of the fellas did not gloss that as a real command. They thought it was pretty funny. They whooped it back, in what I thought was a pretty friendly way, but the PrimeKeepers disagreed. They climbed onto our float and pulled us off. One of them was opening the cab of the float, and pulling our driver out. I was trying to figure out what was going on when I caught a baton in the mouth. Some of the fellas got hit on the head, and one got socked in the gut. He threw up PrimeWine all over the PrimeKeeper’s shoes! They beat him up bad for that one. The next thing we knew, our float was being steered out of the parade, and we were being carted off to a Central Processing Facility.

It was at the Central Processing Facility that we got the charges read to us by Alexa, who is Alpha and Omega. “Generally, transgressors did knowingly and with great malice create, in effigy, a derogatory representation of Godking Bezos. Specifically, it looked like disgraced actor Kevin Spacey, in his younger years, if he had gotten in to human growth hormone.” Well, what could we say? In our haste to repair the float, we had lost some of the nuances of the design, and it did look a little like disgraced actor Kevin Spacey. No wonder we’d been brought in! I was so ashamed, and so sad. I cried around my mouth full of broken teeth. It was supposed to be the greatest Prime Day Loyalty Parade ever, but it was turning out the worst.

We all knew there was no coming back from charges this serious. The PrimeKeepers let the fellas and I all have a good cry together. We hugged each other, said what an honor it had been to undertake this project. I loved these guys! After that, we got our Penance Postings – I was put on hard warehouse duty for the next ten months. I said goodbye to my friends, and I went and punched in.

I don’t remember much after that. The days have been bleeding into one another, and I am no longer sure when I am asleep and when I am awake. I was fitted for an Amazon WarehousePerfect unit when I arrived, so I don’t get to take bathroom or nap breaks. I stay on the floor, running packages all over the place. It’s a major drag, but there is an upside: I’m earning PrimePoints doing it. When I get out, it’ll be with enough points to get back on my feet, and maybe, just maybe, me and the fellas can pool our resources and kick back with a really luxurious snack pack for next year’s Prime Day, instead of all this rigamarole trying to enter the Loyalty Parade. I sure hope so. After all, it’s the best day of the year. ▩