Don Wheeler

Don Wheeler is a former software executive whose fall from a high-spending retirement into seasonal warehouse labor gives the book a sharply individual view of workamping’s economic pressures. At sixty-nine, divorced and living in a travel trailer near Amazon’s Fernley warehouse, he embodies both the ingenuity of mobile workers and the vulnerability that persists even when a temporary job becomes permanent. His story turns on an unexpected offer: the seasonal worker is invited to stay, but the security of a regular job makes him newly cautious about being seen or heard.

Identity and Former Life

Don spent the final two years of his main career traveling internationally as a software executive, flying to Hong Kong, Paris, Sydney, and Tel Aviv. Retirement in 2002 brought a striking reversal: instead of continuing to travel for work, he could settle in one place, a 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival house in Berkeley, California, shared with his wife. He also had time to pursue a longstanding enthusiasm for fast cars. He bought a red-and-white Mini Cooper S, modified it to 210 horsepower, and practiced until he placed third overall in the U.S. Touring Car Championship pro series.

That life did not endure. Don and his wife divorced, and she kept the house. The 2008 market crash erased his savings, and he had to sell the Mini Cooper. By the time he corresponded with the book’s reporter, his former career and expensive retirement had given way to a much narrower financial margin. The contrast is specific, not abstract: the man who had once spent about $100,000 a year learned to manage on as little as $75 a week.

Life as a Workamper

Don lived in a 1990 Airstream he named “Ellie,” a reference to its 300LE model number. His home also carried visible traces of the life he had left behind: a plastic hula girl stood on the dashboard, while race-car posters rested against the drawn blinds. He shared the trailer with Rizzo, a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier, and stayed at Desert Rose RV Park near the warehouse in Fernley. These details make the trailer more than a generic sign of mobility: it was both shelter and a compact place for the memories and possessions that remained.

His work at Amazon demanded long, physically strenuous shifts. For the 2013 holiday season, he anticipated working five nights a week, with overtime shifts lasting twelve hours and running until shortly before dawn. He would receive and scan inbound freight, spending most of the shift standing, with thirty minutes for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. Don had an artificial right hip, replaced after he fell from a pickup truck during another temporary job at an Oregon campground. Even with that history, he did not indulge complainers. He called the work hard but the money good, while he and his coworkers counted down toward the end of the season, December 23.

Don described workampers as mobile travelers who take temporary jobs around the country in exchange for a campsite, often with utility hookups, and sometimes a stipend. He placed the practice in a longer history of itinerant skilled labor: workers who moved from job to job repairing, building, harvesting, and earning meals or pocket money. In his account, the modern motor coach or fifth-wheel trailer had replaced the older wagon, while retirees brought business experience and technical skills to seasonal work. His term for this updated tradition was “techno-tinkers.” It framed workamping not only as a response to hardship but as a practical identity grounded in mobility, useful skills, and the ability to move on when one job ended.

The Unexpected Job Offer

As the other CamperForce workers left Fernley for the New Year, Don stayed. His original plan had been to finish his last shift on December 21, pass through Quartzsite—which he nicknamed “Burning Man for geezers”—and visit friends in the Colorado Rockies. Instead, Amazon offered him a full-time, year-round position. The offer stood out in the reporter’s three years of coverage: nothing similar happened again among the CamperForce workers he observed.

Don joked by email, “Hey, I’m seventy, who else is going to hire me?” The job turned him, in Amazon’s terminology, into an “Amazon associate.” On the warehouse floor, he would be a “blue badge,” named for the blue identification cards worn by permanent employees. The change mattered in immediate and measurable ways. Within a few months he had paid off debts, obtained long-delayed dental work, bought new glasses, contributed to his Roth IRA, and begun saving for a Harley. A seasonal worker living on an extremely small budget had acquired a steadier source of income and room to address needs that had been deferred.

Secrecy and Precarious Security

The promotion also altered Don’s relationship to the reporter. He asked that his name be kept out of the writing, explaining that entry-level employees were not free to speak to the media without risk. Before the offer, he said, he could afford an insouciant attitude toward corporate power because he was a workamper. Now he felt that he belonged to the company and needed the job. His fear was concrete: if his name appeared in national media, Human Resources might remove him, and his badge might stop admitting him to the warehouse.

Don called that feared rejection the “ACS (Amazon Cold Shoulder)” and stressed that there would be no recourse because he was an employee at will. He anticipated that Human Resources might describe itself as supportive while still acting against employees considered troublesome. His email linked a change in employment status to a change in what he felt safe saying: the mobile worker could take a comparatively casual posture toward corporate authority, but the newly hired associate could not afford public attention. The offer improved his finances without making his position feel secure; instead, it gave him more to lose.

Narrative Significance

Don’s trajectory complicates any simple division between seasonal hardship and secure employment. His case is unusual within the book’s reporting: Amazon’s offer provides a route from temporary work to a year-round position, and his improved finances show what that route enabled. Yet the same turn brings him under workplace rules he fears he cannot challenge. His story therefore presents advancement and constraint together, without treating the permanent job as a complete escape from precarity.

His account of workampers also gives the practice a history and a vocabulary of its own. The campsite, the skills carried from job to job, and the possibility of moving on all belong to his description of a working tradition, not simply to a temporary label for Amazon labor. But his experience makes the economic limits behind that self-description visible: the crash had taken his savings, the warehouse shifts were physically demanding, and the unexpected job’s value depended on keeping it. Don’s movement from race-car competition and an executive career to an Airstream and night shifts is not presented as a seamless reinvention. It is a record of lost resources, adaptation, and a narrow opening toward stability that came with its own conditions.