Cast aside

I landed the job at Amazon through a temp agency. Every contract that we temps were on was zero hours and truly "temporary". After nine months, Amazon would either take you on permanently or cast you aside and, realistically, only the latter ever really happened.

In practice, you were lucky to make it to nine months. We were informed on our first day that if we were “outstanding”, then Amazon might conceivably retain us for permanent jobs. However, we were also told that we should be “under no illusions that this is a temporary job”. At least our local manager was honest, unlike so many others who are deluded and then burn themselves out trying to achieve an impossible goal of a blue badge.