Professional Background

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Mark Haas abandoned his dream of becoming a major league baseball player at the age of six after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and Ebbett's Field was razed to make way for a low-income housing project.

Later in life, after a stint as a New York City taxi driver and a few other truly odd jobs, Mark stumbled into his first career in 1976 editing and acquiring college-level electronics textbooks for McGraw-Hill, Inc. The publishing giant eventually grew tired of his pranks and designer suits and transferred him to a rural village in southern New Hampshire (pop. 5000) where he took the reins of BYTE magazine as its first managing editor and rode roughshod over its unruly editorial staff. Mark enjoyed threatening editors, shoveling snow, swatting bugs and running the computer industry's leading monthly magazine, which grew to more than 700 pages, but to preserve his sanity, not to mention his marriage, he next transferred to Berkeley, California to serve as technical director and editorial director for Osborne/McGraw-Hill, a leading publisher of microcomputer trade books.

Mark began his next career in 1988 with startup Copithorne & Bellows Public Relations (now Porter Novelli International) as a senior associate and their principal writer and technologist, developing product positioning strategies and press materials for leaders in the computer, telecommunications, networking, software and semiconductor industries, among others. After helping C&B become the leading high-technology public relations agency, Mark set off to try his hand as an independent copywriter in 1991 to serve the specialized communications needs of high-technology companies and public relations agencies, and has been terminally unemployable ever since.

New York University is still trying to understand how it awarded Mark a bachelor's degree in physics, his high school English teachers have all had heart attacks after learning of his successful writing career and he dreams of the day when Californians will learn how to drive.