She said: “I want to ask you something professionally. I want to be respectful about it, and also direct.”
I said I appreciated direct.
“You’re no longer at Morgan,” she said. It was not quite a question. It was the statement of someone who has arrived at a conclusion through observation.
I confirmed this.
She said: “That explains several things.”
She told me what had happened at the review, framing it carefully as what she had directly observed rather than what she’d heard secondhand or inferred. She is a precise person and she was precise about this.
At the review, she said, Luke had prepared a performance summary that covered the standard metrics but was missing the exception reconciliation for two delivery windows from Q3. She had asked about them specifically because they were items that had been flagged in the prior review as open for follow-up.
Luke had not had that information readily available. He said he’d circle back.
Then she had asked about a specific carrier change on a lane that Alder used for time-sensitive merchandise. The change had involved a substitution, and the substitution had been handled without following the notification protocol that Alder required for that lane.
This protocol was in the handover document. It was in the exception log. I knew it the way I knew my own address.
Alder had received late notification on two shipments. Not service failures, she said. But not what they’d been promised.
She had asked, in the meeting, whether Grace Morgan was still the operations contact for the Alder account.