Its aw aboot shaggin - Mark Tyburn (not a real quote)
drive.google.com/file/d/1v5f1Nb_Y4Eqrh2CUjfrxMBdh2I2UGKeP/view?usp=drive_linkKURT on Mark -
“ There's really no better feeling than making Mark
Tyburn happy. From a distance, he was an underwhelming leader - bombastic, a fraud, a philanderer,
and a bit of a creep - but up close, he had that thing, that algorithm-like spy, that made his response to
you making him happy feel like you had purpose. He made you believe your purpose was to follow his
vision, and you believed it too. When his team or a group within his team were following his vision,
especially some bit of his vision that was overly ambitious and preposterous, then he was the happiest
man alive, and you would follow him to the ends of the Earth. He loved being proved correct, as every
vain idiot does, but he particularly loved being proved correct with his team behind him. I mean, he loved
to be a leader more than anyone I've ever met, especially when he was right and we believed in him.
Then the smiles, the drinks, the weed, the dancing in the office - all would come out to play. That
wretched nerd, Prince Fraud, was prancing about and smiling and doing some conga or limbo or
lambada or some other wedding dance in an ironic fashion. Somehow, this was like heaven for us. It
wasn't sexual for most of us or even financial - we all made money - but it was about glory, glory, and
purpose. It was about the fact that we had chosen our Moses, and he had a hotline to Jehovah, and
Jehovah seemed to love him. We felt special, and so we lapped up this change of corporate direction,
and we lapped up moving to Montana. And now we were focused, and Mark, he worked us - oh yes, he
did. He prodded us and made us compete for his favors and betrayed us and bitched about us and was a
dick, and we laughed it up and him and his awful new henchwoman in HR, Joyce Uhg. She turned up
fairly soon after the move to Montana. I sometimes wonder if that's why we moved to Montana - no one
gave a fuck about messed-up tech companies there. I mean, whereas in California, a boss had to play by
the rules, but on reflection, I mostly think it was more primal, like Mark Tyburn had cooked himself and
thought that, I don't know, maybe he was different - not merely above the rules but beyond them in some
vast outer space of his own imagining. See, I think it was something more primal than the chance to work
under different rules. It was the chance to feel like a real king with a kingdom, all those acres of land we
were given in state forest. We were allowed to cut down, geez. I mean, the contrast between wilderness
and technology, the physical empire he could rule over, buzzing between bits of the campus on the
atrociously named Utopia Lane - money and glory. The fondling came later. Well, the worst of it, we
hadn't really seen it earlier. We heard the odd rumor: "Mark gets handsy,
" "Mark's a creep,
" "Is their
marriage open? Are they swingers?"
- usual office crap. But then, towards the end, Mark became... a
maniac. He was having multiple affairs, including with Joyce. I think he was on some odd drugs at that
point. I mean, I hope so; otherwise, he was madder than I thought. So, in the end, for all his vision, his
collapse was the most American of stories: a successful man cannot keep his hands to himself, a
successful man who began to think he was a god.”
(Format fix soon, middle of packing for a big move)
