Ben Compton

Sarah Vowell came to Amazon.com HQ to do a reading from “Assassination Vacation” for the employees right after the book came out. I’m not sure if she does a lot of that kind of corporate reading—you can imagine that it might feel awkward and weird, giving a reading at the offices of a big stupid online bookseller—but she handled it well. She was, of course, extremely charming and funny.

Jpak was the guy around the office who was freaking out about this Howard Dean fellow long before I heard of him through any other source.

He loves the monorail.

He is absurdly tall.

That’s it.

I went over to Todd’s crazily-shaped house one day last year and played guitar with him, Joe Goldberg and Erik Benson. It was surreal, because at the same time, he was having carpet installed. So now, I think that he probably has carpet installed all the time. Because that’s what past experience tells me.

Todd’s my hero because he was the first person I knew who quit Amazon without actually knowing what he was going to do next. Or at least that’s true as far as I knew.

Matt was my first manager at Amazon.com, and remains the best one I’ve ever had.

He got me to learn emacs and shell commands by barking them to me over and over again from my side as I typed. He would groan with dismay when I would do something the long way instead of with whatever arcane shortcut that he knew that I can now not live without.

He helped teach me how to play foosball by shellacking me every day after lunch, along with Andy and Val.

He’s easily the funniest person I have ever met, or am likely to meet.

Also, he has strange ideas about how sandwiches should be made.

She and I went up to some casino north of Seattle and played 2-4 Hold ‘em one Sunday night several months ago. I lost about $100, but she ended up about $150 up if I remember correctly.

This one guy at our table was just there waiting for the no limit table to open up, playing just to pass the time. He kept making betting mistakes because he wasn’t used to playing limit. But he won almost all of the pots he played in, anyway, which made me want to punch him in the nuts.

Then we found out he was another Amazon employee. Figures.

I interviewed him for the Robot Co-op job since I happened to be in the area when he was by for interviews.

He was a good interviewee. Didn’t bite or nothin’.

I have bad dreams about Andrej, where no matter where I am or what I am doing, Andrej is telling me that I am not doing it right, and telling me to “follow through” like I’m playing tennis or pickleball when really I’m changing a diaper or driving a car. But he says it in this ghostly way, in my dreams, like a ghost on Scoobie Doo would say it.

This is because the one and only time I’ve played pickleball Andrej wouldn’t stop telling me to follow through. I still don’t follow through, and I never will.

The End

I call him “Ben the Decommissioner” because during our first year or two at Amazon he would systematically undo or rework just about any feature that I had worked on only months before. Now don’t get me wrong, Ben is a talented software developer and he only made things better, but it was still sad to see all of my hard work evaporate before my eyes.