He had said I “mostly handled the administrative side.”
I have sat with that phrase for months now. Administrative side. In the freight industry, administration means paperwork — invoices, filing, data entry, the clerical infrastructure that makes operations possible. It is necessary and it is not what I did. What I did was operations: the actual coordination of actual shipments across actual carrier relationships, the resolution of exceptions that required judgment rather than a filing system, the maintenance of client relationships that required specific knowledge about specific clients accrued over years.
Administrative side.
I do not tell this to make him a villain. I tell it because it explains something important: he had watched me work for eighteen years and built a mental model of that work that was substantially wrong, and the mental model is what he used when he decided my role could be handed to someone else with four weeks and a document.
The mental model was the problem, not the malice.
Though I will say this: for several months, the distinction between malice and a wrong mental model did not make me feel better.
Eighteen Years, What They Actually Looked Like
I have told the short version of my tenure at Morgan Freight Coordination. I want to tell more of it, because the short version leaves out the texture of what eighteen years inside a company actually is.
I was twenty-four. I had graduated in the middle of a period when logistics and supply chain were not glamorous fields and everyone I knew from college was going into marketing or finance. I went into freight coordination because my father had built a company in it and I understood, in the way you understand things at twenty-four that you couldn’t fully articulate, that understanding how goods moved from one place to another was something the economy needed people to understand.