The Collected and Ephemeral Works of
  Paulina Borsook
     California on My Mind



And then the day came when I saw utility.com listed on fuckedcompany. Of course, energy was on all of our minds (shivering in the damp dark, we were. It was winter...), because we weren't having any in California. Even then, years before all the incriminating evidence about Enron and all the other corrupt energy trading companies came out, I had a suspicion that there were bad games, foul play, on the loose: it just couldn't be that all these power plants had to be taken offline for maintenance at a time when we don't have any energy.

So I was reading about utility.com, and people were saying various things about the incompetence of the management there. And then I saw the name of the CEO --- was my princeling. And I thought "Oh no! he became head of a dotcom?" Thanks to Google, I tried to reconstruct his history as much as I could. I saw he'd gotten some sort of masters degree in some sort of ecology/environment/biology something --- and then, the dark forces took over.

He had gone off to Stanford

to get his MBA. While I don't have infinite respect for people who get MBAs from Stanford, I'd also say my princeling was not a brainiac (I remember that he got held back a year after we had met in middle school --- me in fifth grade, him in sixth grade --- so that we were in the same high-school graduating class, better for him to with stand the academic demands of Thacher), so it was hard for me to imagine he got into Stanford entirely on the basis of his GMATs, but I could be wrong.

From there, he went on to become something like vice-president of public affairs at PGE. Then he went on to some very shady-looking energy and power-related businesses that seemed to have gone down in lots of law suits and bad blood and managerial squabbling. But I hadn't heard about this all in the years that this all had been going down because I hadn't been paying attention to either energy policy or corporate governance --- nor had I any reason to.

So there I was reading about my princeling on fuckedcompany. People were impugning his competence, his intelligence, his sexuality, his everything.The details of this didn't really matter to me, and I can't really know the truth of them anyway.


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