Like an emotionally abusive high school coach still haunting your anxiety dreams, the specter of Steve Jobs looms over the Apple of today. Maybe preserving his office three years after his death is making that worse.

From a new profile of non-dead Apple CEO Tim Cook in Businessweek:

Steve Jobs's office remains Steve Jobs's office. After his death in 2011, Tim Cook, his friend and successor as Apple (AAPL) chief executive officer, decided to leave the sparsely decorated room on the fourth floor of 1 Infinite Loop untouched. It's not a shrine or place of mourning, but just a space that Cook sensed no one could or should ever fill. "It felt right to leave it as it is," he says. "That's Steve's office."

Although it's not a shrine in the sense that people are kneeling at it and praying (that happens in the bathrooms), this cryo-frozen office is absolutely a tribute to Steve Jobs. The only other organization I know of that maintains symbolic offices for deceased founders is the Church of Scientology. So yes, it's a shrine of sorts: a sacred acknowledgement that the executive was a tremendous and terrifying man. Not even in death will anyone risk crossing Steve Jobs.