In honor of WeWork’s second annual Holiday Market (a smashing success, thank you very much), we decided it wasn’t fair for such great goods to be limited only to those who were lucky enough to hang with us last weekend. So we decided on a little contest, inviting folks to tell us who they’re grateful for and why. After all, ’tis the season for goodwill. Dozens of people responded, and we selected the entry that moved us most.
It was by Taylor Reifurth, a member who is right now on vacation in Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She deserves the break, having put in a hard first eight months in at her job at 3Qi Labs, a web and mobile app testing company. She’s planning on going to Asia soon, to celebrate finishing her last classes in formal education. And she owes a lot of her good fortune to a terrible tattoo.
What makes this tattoo so terrible is in fact multi-layered. First, there’s the design, a triangle which made Reifurth hiss out “hipster.” Moving on from there, you also have the creation of it, a poorly done stick-and-poke as opposed to anything professional. And then there’s the tattoo’s owner, an ex-boyfriend we’ll call Matt. Matt and Taylor dated while in college in San Francisco. Matt exposed Taylor to a lot of art, design, and video editing, which she greatly appreciated while she was being frustrated while pursuing her degree in advertising. They started living together. Matt may have had positive qualities, but he didn’t know how to keep the secret that he was seeing another woman. Taylor found out about this when he rolled over in bed one day and saw this stick-and-poke tattoo suspiciously near his groin, a tattoo Matt soon admitted he got with the other woman. Taylor was furious. Within a few days, the relationship was over.
Luckily for 3Qi, Taylor was able to separate the skills from the guy. She was able to move one hundred and eighty degrees away from the visual nausea of this triangle tattoo, and move into video editing as a full-time career. Being able to leapfrog over the sins of boyfriends past is something truly worth being grateful for, and in a gracious act Taylor nominated Matt as our WeWork box recipient, to thank him–really!–for introducing her to the life she now has and loves.
The runner-up, Natalie Kwee, wrote about her boyfriend. That may seem kind of cliche, but wait until you see how she wrote:
