My work at Pinnacle, three months in, is going well by every measure I can apply. The team is developing. The clients are stable. Owen and I have a working relationship that includes direct disagreement, which is the best kind: he pushed back on a protocol proposal last month, I explained my reasoning, we modified the approach together. The modification was better than either original position.
I earn more than I earned at Morgan Freight. The benefits are comparable. I have a title that matches what I do. My reporting line is clear. When I solve a problem, I say so.
I wake up on Sunday evenings now with the same low-grade awareness of Monday morning, but the texture is different. The Morgan Freight version had an undercurrent I hadn’t recognized for years — something about whether the work was seen, whether the position was stable, whether the arrangement was actually the arrangement I thought it was. That undercurrent is gone.
The Pinnacle version is just the job. My job. A job that I earned through a process that required me to know what I was worth and say it out loud.
I had the Alder section from memory when I built the Pinnacle protocols. Not copied, not stolen — remembered, because you don’t spend nine years with a client’s specific requirements and forget them when you change jobs. I applied what I knew, in the general sense of professional experience, to building something new.
The new thing is mine in a way the old thing, for all its eighteen years, never quite was.