Chris Abraham

This godawful bio my best friend wrote for me in response to my bio page is a damned funny Cliffs Notes version of my life to-date…

Bio by my best friend
Chris Abraham is a pioneer in online social networks and publishing with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing.

As a young man just out of college in the early 1990’s, Chris discovered newly-emerging web publishing as a way to showcase his writing.

In those early days, the unformed structures of the internet required every would-be web author to be a quick-learning hacker just to be able to put his work online. Soon, English major Chris was as much techie geek as well-read, bookish, weltschmerzen-suffering young writer.

And since technologist positions were paying extraordinarily well, while creative writing was, and remains, a one-way ticket to the welfare roles, Chris sold out and became a corporate tech so he could afford his Mercedes, his Nikon, and his piles and piles of Velvia slide film.

At 24, Chris fled back to Hawaii, his childhood home, to escape his clingy marriage-focused girlfriend who was otherwise wonderful, and a mind-boggling lay as well. But a boy has to make certain sacrifices in the interest of his future.

Within a year or so, paradise lost its charm, so Chris packed up a few hundred thousand of his world-class photos and returned to Washington DC to settle in, but instead decided to travel around the world with 6-foot blond hottie, taking pictures.

Somewhere in Thailand, they decided they irritated one another so Chris went to the Netherlands to blow out his ACL while two-stepping in a lesbian night club with Europe’s top Feminism scholars during an outing from an International Post-Modernism conference in Rotterdam.

Thus hobbled, Chris returned to Washington to try to get responsible, with only a few short and unmentionable misadventures with women in Nordic countries slowing his rapid return across the Atlantic.

Once back in DC, the reality of getting an actual job seemed to pale in comparison with the image of it, and enjoying a certain comfortable level of independent wealth based on his successful work as a stock photographer since the gentle age of 16, he chose instead to wallow in dramatic, self-indulgent artistic misery in his romantically squalid apartment overlooking the then un-gentrified and drug-ridden Lincoln Park.

After reading the entire western canon while skillfully avoiding his concerned friends multiple attempts at intervention, Chris took a job as an online creative writing teacher with an experimental joint program of the University of Michigan and the Kalamazoo public schools.

Given that Chris hadn’t showered or gone out in public for something like a year, the only people who would hire him besides some Midwestern academics who had never seen him and had too much grant money were the federal government.

The Treasury Department that safeguards the stability of the US economy, and through that, the world - not to mention the life of the President of the United States - saw it fit to put Chris in charge of its IT systems.

Chris committed himself to the Treasury job with the focus and dedication required of a government worker, and thus was able to spend seven or eight hours every working day acting as a volunteer online community facilitator for a leading local forums company. Through this experience of selfless contribution to society at the expense of the American taxpayer, Chris discovered his vocation, his deep passion, and his God-given talent for manipulating people he can’t see.

After a year or so of buying beer for the principals of this company, and sleeping with a number of its staff, they finally felt obliged to pay him for all the work he was doing. Chris abruptly left the Treasury Department and went to work for the forums people.

Shortly thereafter, the stock market tanked and the US economy went into a tailspin. A mouth-breathing, delusional, religious extremist took over the White House and the national debt skyrocketed. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, after Chris went over to the forums company, it tanked along with all the other interesting, fun-to-work-at tech companies with fantasy-based revenue models and foosball tables.

Forgetting that he could actually afford to live off his photography earnings, Chris went out and worked as a freelance geek on innumerable thankless and uninteresting gigs while his then-girlfriend spent all his income on Williams-Sonoma cookware and the lease payments of an unnecessarily over-engineered SUV that they used for grocery shopping and antiquing outings into the Virginia countryside.

After some time, Chris replaced the financially-draining, but really rather attractive girlfriend with an equally financially-draining, but rather less attractive partnership in the US subsidiary of a German software development firm. Weird family politics on the other side of the ocean eventually killed the parent company, leaving Chris with a needy unattractive orphan, so Chris tied a plastic bag over its head, put it in the nearest dumpster and flew to Acapulco to go sailing on a 42-foot catamaran with his best friend. After a few very manly months of yachting, Chris sailed into Newport Beach south of LA with a killer tan and a few thousand new photos.

So, after the sail, Chris returned to Washington, and having learned through his last two jobs how much more fun it is to manipulate people and boss them around than fix shrieking people’s computer problems, he took a position as Director of Sales for a Washington, DC technology services company.

Then he realized that if you boss people around and they do something stupid, while it is indeed funny to watch, you end up having to take responsibility for their actions. So he went to his present company which pays him a lot more money to manipulate people whose actions he can’t be held responsible for. Also, there are very pretty women working at this company and not just ugly, pimply geeks with receding hairlines.

The international consulting firm Haft, Harrison & Wolfson has also taken him on as a partner, but there are suspicions that they are just exploiting him for his underworld connections.