Diane Keller asked for me by name at a quarterly review. She asked because my name was the one attached to seven years of solved problems and handled exceptions and four-hour email responses and one forty-minute phone call about an expansion that resulted in a contract renewal.
The name was accurate.
My father, somewhere along the way, had filed my work under “administrative.” Administrative is not a story about malice. It is a story about a man who watched someone work very hard and understood the outcome but not the labor, and acted on that misunderstanding, and learned the cost of the misunderstanding after it had already been paid.
I paid it. I also built something with what I had left.
The number on my offer letter was $68,000. I did not undersell it. I will not again.
A Note on What I Know Now
There is a question I have been asked, by Sophie and by one other friend who knew the outline of this story, that I want to answer here because I think it is the right question to end on.
The question is: do you wish you had left sooner?
It is a reasonable question. I was forty-two when I was let go. I had been there since I was twenty-four. Eighteen years is most of an adult working life up to that point, and by any external measure the company I gave those years to did not give them back in an equivalent form. The answer that seems most logical from the outside is: yes, you should have left, and leaving sooner would have cost you less.