He said: “I’m sorry I didn’t understand it sooner.”
I said I believed him.
I did believe him, which is not the same as saying the apology resolved anything. The understanding had arrived after the fact and the fact remained. But I believed him, which was something.
Owen Reed and the Hiring Process That Was a Hiring Process
Owen Reed’s email came the week after Diane had mentioned his name.
He said Diane had spoken highly of my operational work and that he had a role building out in their operations division. He asked if I’d be open to a conversation.
The first conversation was forty-five minutes by video. Owen ran Pinnacle’s freight coordination operations in the mid-Atlantic region. They were expanding. They needed a senior operations lead who could manage existing accounts and develop the systems and documentation that a growing team would need.
I listened and recognized the job. My job, in its better version. The version where operations had its own seat and its own scope and I didn’t have to translate my work into sales language every time someone asked what I did.
He asked about my background. I described it honestly, including the family business succession that had ended my role. I had practiced this part: clear, factual, without bitterness, with the observation that the transition had clarified some things for me professionally.
He asked one question: “Was the departure your decision?”
I said it wasn’t, and then I said the sentence I’d prepared: “I think the transition surfaced some assumptions about the relative value of different functions that I’d been living with for a long time. My decision now is what to do with that understanding.”