I did not take any files. I did not take client data, carrier contacts, contracts, or any document that belonged to Morgan Freight Coordination. I had eighteen years of work in the exception log and the client records and the carrier relationship notes, and I left all of it on a server I no longer had access to.
This was the correct thing to do. I want to be clear that I knew it was correct, not because I was afraid of the consequences of doing otherwise but because doing otherwise would have been wrong.
What I had was my own memory, my own experience, and the professional knowledge I had built over eighteen years. This is mine in the way that what a surgeon learns in practice is theirs, or what a teacher builds over decades of standing in front of a classroom is theirs. The knowledge lives in me. The files are theirs.
The drive home from my last day at Morgan Freight Coordination was twenty-two minutes. I know this because I have driven it enough times to know it without counting.
I went inside. I made tea. I sat at my kitchen table with my personal laptop, a blank document, and the understanding that the next thing I did was entirely up to me.
The Budget
The spreadsheet I built on the first morning of unemployment is probably the most honest document I have ever produced.
It had no aspirational line items. No category called “entertainment” or “dining” in amounts that assumed a salary. It was a document about what things cost and how long I could pay for them.