I Got Fired for “Having Two Jobs” — But HR Never Bothered to Find Out What Those Jobs Really Were

Part I — Conference Room Ice

They thought cutting me loose would be simple. They thought the ritual would feel like power: close the blinds, pour a glass of room-temperature water, speak in phrases fashioned to be legal and forgettable. They forgot that I built the alarms they were about to trip. They forgot that I was the last pair of hands between their crown jewels and the very dark ocean that waits outside every company’s walls.

The conference room glowed cold under a wedge of morning sun. On one side of the glass, people in hoodies shuffled between standups. On the other, Marcus from HR had arranged his face into benevolent authority. He slid a tablet across the table. The screen showed a still frame of me passing through a lobby’s turnstile, hair up, hoodie, messenger bag. Time stamp, late. Badge reader labeled: VIDIAN TECH.

“Unauthorized activity after hours,” Marcus said, tapping the photo as if it could confess.

Clara, HR’s second spine, leaned in. She always wore lipstick the color of a signed NDA. “Your contract forbids working for competitors, Zara. Loyalty is everything here.”

I knew what was coming long before I got the calendar invite labeled “Quick Sync.” I’d already made peace with it. I’d already cleaned my desk in stages so no one would see me walk out with a life in my arms.

“You’re terminated,” Marcus said, moving through the sentence like a man on a treadmill. “Effective immediately.” He slid a folder of papers over the tablet—final pay, acknowledgment, a line about not interfering with company property as if I were the kind of person who wounded on the way out.

I set my badge down on the table, a small surrender. The weight of three years rose off my shoulders in a way that felt like rage learning to exhale.

“Fair enough,” I said, standing.

Marcus blinked. Clara frowned. No pleading, no protest, no list of reminders about nights saved and weekends surrendered? No. They weren’t owed the inventory of my sacrifices.

“One job is enough for me,” I added, and watched it land.

“Excuse me?” Clara asked.

“Nothing,” I said, and smiled because I had earned the right to enjoy a line.

“System credentials,” Clara snapped, recovering. “Right now.”

“Everything’s documented,” I said. Not a lie. Just an unhelpful truth. My notes existed. My runbooks existed. So did the maze.

Security met me at the door like kids playing cops. I collected a cracked mug, a notebook with more drawings of threat models than feelings, and the tiny cactus that had somehow chosen survival inside fluorescent winter. From his glass office, Julian, the CTO, pretended to check email. He held my eyes a fraction too long and then dropped them to his keyboard. He knew what he had just lost. He also knew how to tell himself stories to get through a night.

Outside, Seattle’s chill licked my lungs like a dog that had missed me. I didn’t cry. I had run out of that particular reaction last fall, somewhere between the breach that would have rewritten our history in a single night and the $300 gift card I received as thanks.

My phone buzzed.

Lena: “Still good for 3:00 p.m.?”

I typed: “Yes. Full-time sounds perfect.”

Part II — The Job That Wasn’t My Job

When I joined Aevum Systems, Julian promised a team: three blue teamers, two cloud engineers, a threat hunter with a caffeine problem. Layoffs came; promises went; five people became one me. The board loved the slide where security spend dipped while “risk remained flat.” No one asked how you measure the absence of catastrophe.

We migrated to cloud with the precision of a shotgun wedding. Identity and access policies were “temporary.” Secrets got stored in what the intern called “that environment variable thingy.” We split a monolith, stitched together a microservices quilt, and prayed no one looked too closely at the seams. Attackers came like weather. I lived in logs. I learned to sleep in twenty-minute increments, waking not to an alarm but to a feeling that something at the edge was probing the fence.

When I stopped a real one last fall—an unsandboxed plugin, a poisoned package, a phantom user that almost became a superuser—my reward was a meeting where the CEO explained to the board how he personally had championed zero trust. Someone handed me a $300 gift card with a handwritten “thx!!” on the envelope.

At a Chicago summit two months later, I met Lena from Vidian Tech—a company we’d never compete with unless you think “everyone using the internet” counts as overlap. Head of Cybersecurity, hair pulled back, eyes that didn’t look past you to the person more useful. We talked frameworks and failure. We talked burnout like a diagnosis that needs a second opinion. On the flight home, she emailed: “Weekend advisory? No conflict, purely meta. Your brain is valuable. I’ll pay for it.”

I checked the clause. Advisory wasn’t employment. Meta wasn’t competitive. Aevum’s policy said “no secondary employment without approval,” not “no thinking outside these walls.” I said yes. Two Saturdays a month, I whiteboarded Vidian’s auth narratives, threat modes, and incident comms. I didn’t touch code. I didn’t touch prod. Mostly, I translated leadership’s anxiety into engineer statements and back again. They listened. They implemented. They sent me a thank-you note that didn’t include a gift card.

Someone saw me near Vidian’s building one Friday night when Lena and I debriefed an executive tabletop over dumplings in the lobby restaurant. Two people who had never read my contract connected two dots that weren’t on the same page. HR didn’t ask. HR assumed. HR wanted to be seen assuming.

By the time they staged their little inquisition, I was halfway out the door. Vidian had made me an offer: triple the pay, actual headcount, authority aligned with responsibility, an environment where curiosity wasn’t a liability. I said yes. I would have said yes for less if they’d promised me afternoons where I could think in whole paragraphs.

Part III — The Only Job I Keep Now

My new office at Vidian had a door, but I kept it open because silence can feel like a threat when you’ve lived in alarms. The team was ten people and a budget that didn’t require a séance to conjure. These weren’t keyboard jockeys who wanted a better hoodie—they were architects hungry to build a fortress with windows facing the ocean we all pretended to ignore. They didn’t salute. They laughed. They asked questions that sounded like good songs.

“Walk me through your favorite failure,” I asked in our first standup.

They did.

We built guardrails that weren’t just documents. We wrote tests that failed loudly and meaningfully. We stopped putting secrets in places secrets go to be exfiltrated. We made auth boring, which is the highest compliment I can pay any system. We ran our first incident in staging like an orchestra warming up: cacophony first, then something that felt like music.

Meanwhile, Aevum began to cough.

Monday: a Slack from an old coworker who still owed me coffee. “Our CI is slow. The box keeps dying.” Translation: shared runner, unpatched kernel, jobs piling up like snow. Not fatal. Annoying.

Tuesday: authentication errors. Tokens expiring prematurely. Devs reauthing in loops. Something was off in the clock drift we’d never bothered to measure.

Wednesday morning: the logs filled faster than anyone could clear them, because no one had tuned the quota on the logging cluster since I’d asked six months ago and been told we needed “to focus on feature velocity.” The SIEM choked. Detections missed their cues.

Wednesday afternoon: the network fell in on itself—a misconfigured sidecar decided everything was a friend, and the east-west traffic spiked. Rate limiters went sailing past the red line. A botnet that had been nosing at our edge found the door we’d promised to lock after we’d “just ship this one thing.”

By 3 p.m., their public status page had learned a new vocabulary word: “degraded.”

My phone lit like a dashboard at takeoff.

Zara, we’re crashing. Please help us. —Julian

We’re invoking your… duty of care? Do you have any obligations? —Clara, as if legal Latin could resurrect goodwill.

Zara, it’s Marcus. I know we parted ways. Can we talk? —I didn’t open that one.

I responded once: “I only focus on one job now.”

Thursday morning, their story reached the press. “Unscheduled downtime” turned into “catastrophic outage” turned into “Aevum’s controls fail customers.” The stock opened 35% down, panicked on the hour, and ended the day limping.

The chairman called that night. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “Marcus and Clara are gone,” he said, because sacrifices must be named out loud. “Name your price.”

I did. “$40,000 an hour,” I said, “four-hour minimum. Remote only. Public apology posted by the CEO by end of day tomorrow. Severance remitted to the team you laid off last spring. And a fully funded security department with veto rights over release gates, signed by the board.” I paused, then added, “And I choose my successor.”

He agreed in seconds. Money changes how quickly people pronounce words.

Part IV — How to Fix a Thing You Warned Would Break

I didn’t log in. I didn’t need to. I had built the map. I had left them a legend; they never learned to read it. I opened my notebook, the one with more network diagrams than poetry, and I walked them through it on a video call with fifteen faces in various stages of panic.

“First,” I said, “stop. Stop touching prod. Stop ‘just trying’ things. You are bleeding and still running. Lie down.”

One: cut the botnet off at the edge. Their WAF rules were six months old; the bots were not. We wrote a narrow rule that blocked the signature enough to make them angry but not enough to invite them to pivot. We shunted traffic through a temporary filter that looked like a layer seven colander.

Two: reset auth. Their clock skew was a symptom, not a cause. NTP had been left to “default later.” Later was now. We reoriented the cluster to a sane time source, then rotated the signing keys they were sure lived in one place and actually lived in three.

Three: resuscitate logging. We raised the quota on the logging cluster so they could breathe, then put a short-term cap on the noisiest sources. The SIEM blinked, stood up, and walked out of the room with a bad attitude. We put a few detections back on paper and deployed them like polite dogs.

Four: restart the specific services that had decided they were the only ones who mattered. We rolled them not all at once but in the order I’d trained my old team to recite in their sleep. (There was no team now, of course. From somewhere, I heard the universe’s laugh.)

Five: and this was the part that most executives forget—public comms. We wrote a status post that said exactly what the customer needed to hear and nothing about the internal politics that had caused it. We told them when the next update would be. We hit publish on time even when nothing had changed. We did not pretend “no news” was news.

By midnight, the bleeding stopped. By 2 a.m., the pressure held. At 3:17 a.m., someone in the Aevum Slack posted a cactus emoji. I leaned back, stretched my hands until my knuckles barked, and closed my laptop.

The apology went up at 9:04 a.m. The severance wires hit at 10:23. HR posted a photo of Clara’s empty chair with a caption that sounded like gratitude and wasn’t.

My name became an anecdote, then a headline, then a case study. People whispered in hallways at companies I had never entered. A Security Lead in Austin wrote a full Slack thread called “Things We Won’t Do Because Aevum Did.”

Marcus sent me a note that said nothing and everything: “I wish I had asked.”

Part V — One Job

Three months later, Lena and I presented to Vidian’s board. The slide deck was a thing of quiet beauty—no flames, no lightning bolts, no clip art of padlocks. The numbers were simple: seven clients, all of them companies who had watched Aevum and decided they preferred spending money before the sirens. Our new division’s revenue line bent upward not like a startup’s fever dream but like a well-designed ramp.

“You’re proof of what happens when talent is ignored,” Lena said when we clinked coffee cups in the hallway outside the boardroom.

“Talent is everywhere,” I said. “The trick is to design places where it doesn’t have to choose between self-respect and a paycheck.”

We hired three of the people Aevum had laid off. One of them, Elle, built a threat hunting playbook so elegant I almost cried. Another, Miguel, had a gift for turning “management wants to know” into a dashboard that didn’t lie. The third, Priya, started her first day by asking, “Do you want the truth or the numbers?” and spent the rest of the quarter proving they could be the same thing.

At a conference six months after the outage, Aevum’s new head of security found me near a table of stale cookies. She looked tired in the way leaders are supposed to. “You saved us after we let you go,” she said. There was no flattery in it, only the factual tone of a person taking inventory.

“Some lessons are expensive,” I said. “But they last.”

She nodded. “We’re building the department you asked for.” She paused. “We should have done it when you were there.”

I didn’t tell her I understood. Understanding is not absolution. Our jobs are to tell the truth earlier and louder, even when it makes people sit differently in their chairs.

Part VI — The Other Job I Never Want Again

People love to say I had two jobs. HR said it. The press said it. Even my mother said it when she read about me in the business section as if she’d been right all along that I should have gone to law school.

I didn’t.

What I had was one job and one errand. My job was the same in both places: protect systems so that people I will never meet can do work I will never see. At Aevum, that job was the difference between “we learned something” and “we don’t exist anymore.” At Vidian, it was the difference between “we can plan for this” and “we hope.” The errand was Saturday mornings with someone who listened to my map and asked good questions about rivers.

It is hard to explain to people who don’t climb into the machinery why some of us talk about networks like weather. It moves. It is indifferent. It knows how to find the lowest point. When you build walls, water waits. When the door is its favorite shape, water is already inside, just not excited yet. My job—the only one I keep now—is to watch the sky and the soil and the line on the basement wall where someone twenty years ago scrawled “2007 flood” with a Sharpie and an optimism that makes me kind of love them.

I think about three moments when I almost decided to shut up.

The first: the night I stopped the poisoned package with a hunch and a curl in my spine. I wrote the postmortem. Three people read it. One told me I was “a little dramatic.”

The second: the day the CEO said zero trust on a stage and I stood in the back like a bodyguard. The crowd clapped. The slide had a circle labeled “human.” I wanted to scribble “fallible” under it in Sharpie.

The third: the morning HR slid the tablet across the table. I could have transacted my pride for a quiet exit and a decent reference. I could have kept my mouth shut when the chairman called. I could have named a lower price.

Instead, I said no to pretending.

Part VII — Clear Ending, Not Neat

The cactus that survived fluorescent winter sits on my Vidian windowsill now. It keeps its own counsel. Once, Elle knocked it off the ledge while gesturing. We laughed and swept the dirt and put it back and watered it more than we should have and then less. It’s fine. It understands resilience better than most executives.

Marcus took a job at a startup that promises to use AI to make HR kinder. I wish them luck and a living budget for people who aren’t founders. Clara went to a boutique PR firm where she writes apologies for people who don’t mean them. I hope she learns to mean one. Julian stayed, because men like Julian know how to shed skins without changing their bones. He’s not my problem.

We hired a rotational intern program at Vidian that pays rent, not exposure. We wrote a policy that forbids “second jobs” only when there’s actual conflict, not imagined betrayal. We asked people to disclose side work, not confess. We built a culture where “no” is a complete sentence and “why” is a compliment.

Sometimes I walk past Aevum’s building on my way to lunch. The lobby smells the same—cleaner, coffee, fierce yellow flowers in a vase as if cheer were a disinfectant. I stand on the sidewalk, look up at the glass, and think about how easily a fortress can turn into a fishbowl when you forget who’s responsible for the water. Then I keep walking. Not out of spite. Out of alignment.

At home, my notebook sits on a shelf between a cookbook and a novel I pretend I’ve read. The first page still has the list I wrote the day I graduated from the school that taught me which ports mean what and how to tell if a packet is lying.

I got fired for “having two jobs.” HR never bothered to find out what those jobs really were. They were the same job: see the whole board, tell uncomfortable truths, build systems that hold even when the people in charge don’t. When I said, “One job is enough for me,” what I meant was: protecting people is enough.

If you need a tidy bow, here’s what qualifies. Aevum rebuilt its security department, not because I asked, but because absence taught them what presence costs. Vidian’s consulting division doubled in a year and then doubled again, not because I’m special, but because fear is abundant and discipline is rare. The chairman sent me a bottle of something expensive I don’t drink and a note that said, “Next time, call me first.” I sent it back with a sticky: “Next time, ask before you assume.”

And because endings should reveal the thesis without a projector: When someone in a glass room slides a tablet at you and says the word “loyalty,” ask them when they last earned yours. When they tell you to surrender your keys, remember that keys are easy to replace and convictions aren’t. When you walk out with a cactus and a cracked mug, breathe. The air will feel like freedom because it is.

The fortress I helped build is standing again, with better beams and a real map. The ocean is still out there, patient and hungry. It always will be. That’s why the only job I will ever keep is the one where I watch the weather and make sure the doors answer to the right names.

Part VIII — The Autopsy Without Blame

The week after Aevum’s resurrection, I asked Lena for something I never would’ve dared request in the old world: two uninterrupted days to write the story. Not the press version, not the legal version, not the spin—an autopsy without blame. She carved out a conference room, stocked a fridge with bad seltzer, and told my team I was to be interrupted only for fires or cake.

I turned my notebook to a clean spread and wrote at the top: How a Fortress Becomes a Fishbowl. Then I wrote down everything, from the moment I’d been promised a team to the hour I had walked out with a cactus and a cracked mug. I mapped technical debts like arterial clogs. I traced decisions to incentives, incentives to stories, stories to people’s names I didn’t print because the point wasn’t to shame; it was to see.

We’d done the thing every company swears it won’t: we treated security as a tax you pay when you want to look serious, not an engine you tune because you want to go far. We made exceptions for “just this one release.” We taped policy to the wall like art. We congratulated ourselves on not being hacked yet. We confused the absence of headlines with the presence of safety.

At midnight, I ordered noodles. At 2 a.m., a sentence appeared I didn’t expect to write: I helped create the conditions for my own exit. Not because I did anything wrong in the way HR thought, but because I accepted a hero role every time a system begged for a team. I said yes to being five people. I said yes to overnight saves. I folded my anger into a competence that made leadership think pain was free.

When my team filtered in the next morning, I read them paragraphs between mouthfuls of cold noodles and shame. They interrupted where it hurt. Elle pointed to a passage about “guardrails” and asked who had ownership. Miguel circled the sentence about “exceptions” and wrote, “Name them next time.” Priya underlined my throat-punch line about heroics and said, “Let’s design this so that the only way to feel useful is to keep things boring.”

We turned the autopsy into a playbook. We titled it How We Refuse to Be Interesting. We turned bullet points into tickets and tickets into rituals. The board signed off on the budget that made those rituals feasible. Not glamorous, not viral. Just funded.

That afternoon, I got a message from an engineer at a company I’d never worked for. “Our HR wants to know if your side advisory created a conflict,” she wrote. “I’m exhausted from being everything. Can I be something somewhere else sometimes without being a traitor?”

“Check your clause,” I replied. “Ask for permission, not forgiveness. Frame it as professional development. If they say no, that’s data. Go where your curiosity isn’t a crime.”

Part IX — HR, Revisited

Months later, I ran into Marcus at a networking breakfast that tried too hard to be a party. He looked thinner around the eyes the way people do when they become slogans online for a minute and then have to keep working. He approached with a caution you develop around people who might write about you.

“I read your autopsy,” he said.

I hadn’t published it; I’d shared it with the people who could use it. It had traveled anyway. Truth does when it is tired of hiding.

“You were fair,” he added. “Harsher on yourself than you needed to be.”

I let him stand in that sentence. “You could have asked me,” I said finally. “About Vidian. About ‘two jobs.’ About what my contract said versus what you assumed. You didn’t.”

“We had to move quickly,” he offered, the ancient human defense.

“You had to look decisive,” I corrected. “Those aren’t the same.”

He nodded. “I’m trying to build policy that recognizes the world you live in now. Knowledge workers with portfolios. People who give their brains to more than one problem. But the lawyers—”

“Love bright lines,” I finished for him. “Because their job is to keep you from friction. Mine is to wade in it.” I paused. “Do it anyway. Ask better. Assume less.”

He studied me like a problem he wanted to re-solve. “You’re happier.”

“I’m more myself,” I said. “Which is not always the same as happy, but it is a better baseline.”

Before he left, he said, “Clara started a podcast about accountability.”

“Send it,” I said, and meaningfully did not say I’d subscribe.

Part X — The Red Team That Saved a Marriage

We launched a quarterly red-team program, the kind that makes executives cancel golf. Our first external crew called themselves Pallas—they came from the world of people who prefer rules made of honor, not law. They were expensive. Worth it.

They broke in on day one through a door we thought we’d sealed: a third-party contractor’s Jira instance that still had default credentials on a forgotten project. They pivoted from a stale ticket titled “temp role for test” into a dev sandbox where someone had left a God-mode token in a readme as a joke, then into a staging environment that mirrored production a little too faithfully.

The post-exercise debrief felt like a couples therapy session. Dev rolled their eyes at Sec’s “paranoia.” Sec pointed to Dev’s “velocity.” Product said “roadmap.” Finance said “budget.” Pallas made us breathe and ask the question no one had: What are you afraid of that isn’t about code? We answered honestly for once. Dev feared missing deadlines and losing bonuses. Sec feared being irrelevant until the disaster. Product feared being last in the demo. Finance feared a number they couldn’t defend.

We wrote those fears on a whiteboard and treated them like requirements. We built processes that respected them. We wrote runbooks that began with feelings and moved to commands. We created a Slack channel where the only emoji allowed during incidents were eyes and tools, not flames and skulls. We made the red team’s report required reading at leadership offsites. It saved us twice—once when a board member wanted to rush a launch, once when a vendor tried to pass off a defanged pen-test as proof.

At the end of the second quarter, Pallas sent us a note: “We rarely say this, but you got boring. Congratulations.” It felt like being told your marriage would likely last.

Part XI — A Chair at the Table

Lena asked me to join Vidian’s investment committee for security startups. The first meeting felt like being invited to a kitchen where people decide which foods will exist next year. Founders pitched dashboards that looked like video games and agents that promised to make humans unnecessary. We passed on the magic Peloton for CISOs and funded a startup whose software taught incident commanders to speak in plain English.

One founder asked me on a follow-up call what I look for. “Humility,” I said. “People who admit the sea will always find a crack. People whose demos include the failure mode. People who know empathy is a control.”

He blinked. “Empathy?”

“If your tool blames the user, it’s a weapon aimed in the wrong direction,” I said. “If your tool makes the right thing the fun thing, it’s a control that might actually get used.”

We invested in a team building a “seatbelt for prod”: you can ship without it, but everything in the car insults you gently until you click. Six months later, one of our clients reported a 70% drop in Friday-night rollbacks. Their CFO sent us a bottle of champagne I still haven’t opened and a spreadsheet I looked at twice for the joy of seeing numbers arrange themselves into a story that didn’t end in blood.

Part XII — The Postmortem That Became a Talk

The first time I told the story publicly, a thousand people sat in a room too beige to hold this much electricity. I titled the talk “One Job,” because clickbait tastes different when you have to swallow it on stage. I walked them through the photo in the conference room, the HR script, the cactus, the crash, the $40,000 an hour, the apology, and the work that followed. I didn’t name the company. I didn’t need to.

I put one slide up that stayed for three minutes: a bulleted list titled How to Be Unfireable in a Way That Makes You Proud.

Ship documentation you’d want your favorite rival to inherit.
Automate away your heroics.
Teach out loud until your calendar is a classroom.
Say “not yet” to anything that hurts tomorrow to help today.
Build a bench that can bench you.

Afterward, a line of people formed with the same expression: tired hope. Some wanted advice; some wanted absolution; some wanted me to tell their HR something they couldn’t. One woman, early thirties, shoulders squared like a soldier, said, “I’m him. I’m the person who slid the tablet across. What should I have asked?”

“Do you have a conflict?” I said. “And if you don’t, how can we make space for your curiosity so I don’t lose you to a place that will?”

She nodded, wrote the sentence down, and then, without looking up, whispered, “Thank you.”

On the flight home, I sketched a talk I’ll give someday: “How to Quit Quietly Without Sabotage.” It begins with: Leave the house in better order than you found it. It ends with: No one can take your name from your work if you keep writing it in places that matter.

Part XIII — The Letter I Wrote to the Person Who Fired Me

Six months after the crash, the chairman of Aevum sent me a terse note: “We’ve assembled a new Security Advisory Council. Would you consider a seat?”

“No,” I typed. Then I waited, because sometimes maturity is just letting your better self find you. I wrote a letter instead. I didn’t send it. Maybe it’s for you.

“You wanted to perform decisiveness and you chose a stage too small for the audience required. You thought I had two jobs; I had one. You thought loyalty was a leash; it’s a garden. You’re trying now; I know. The trick is to keep trying when the headlines stop. Fund boring things. Measure boredom. Reward it. Align power with responsibility so that no one says ‘I told you so’ after the outage because the right people had the right vetoes before it.

“Listen for the quiet truth tellers. They sound inconvenient until you realize the alternative is silence, and silence is where companies die. And next time you see a still from a camera, ask for the audio.”

Part XIV — The Day the Botnet Said Please

A year into my new life, an attacker we’d watched for months did something beautiful in the way hurricanes can be beautiful from space. They wrote a polite botnet. No crash and smash. No greedy scans. Just a “please” in the headers and a slow walk through chatty ports like a thief who wears felt on his shoes.

Our detections yawned. Our rate limiters poured coffee. Our honeypots set the table. We spoke to them in packets. They asked if we were home. We said yes in a dialect that sounded like silence. They proceeded to the traps, we logged, we learned, we blocked with rules that didn’t break Saturday. On the postmortem call, Elle said, “They were good.” Miguel said, “We were boring.” We high-fived anyway.

That night, I made dinner for the team. We ate on paper plates around my living room and told stories about the time our jobs had saved someone we loved without them knowing it. Priya said, “My grandmother FaceTimes me now without her router becoming an art installation.” Elle said, “My brother still clicks on every blue underlined thing like it’s 1999, and he still hasn’t had his life stolen because we resent the same people.” Miguel said, “We should put that on a shirt.”

I looked around the room at the people whose names would never trend and felt a steadiness I hadn’t known in years. This is the job, I thought. Not glory. Not rage. Not revenge. Stewardship.

Part XV — Clear Ending, Kept Open on Purpose

Eighteen months after I walked out with a cactus, Vidian announced our division’s second-year results: doubled revenue, churn near zero, an NPS score I didn’t love because I don’t trust scores that imply everyone loves you. Our best case studies weren’t the splashy saves; they were the mundane turnarounds where the lights stayed on without fanfare.

Aevum stabilized, then shrank, then was acquired by a company that knows how to run infrastructure like a utility and drama like a tax. Julian took a “strategic advisor” role that probably pays him to golf. Their new head of security hired one of my mentees as a director. Sometimes I join their brown-bags anonymously and watch from the back as someone says, “We don’t do heroics here anymore,” and the room nods like they understand that’s a love letter, not a scold.

Lena got promoted. She refused to move into an office with a door because she remembers what open doors do to a floor. She and I fight exactly as often as healthy leadership teams should. We keep score with apologies, not wins.

I still carry the cracked mug in my bag when I travel. It reminds me that some breaks become stories you tell yourself to stay true. It also keeps me from overpacking a life I finally like.

Sometimes a message arrives from someone whose name I don’t know. “I sent your talk to my CEO,” it will say. Or: “I asked HR the question you told me to ask, and they said yes.” Or: “I started documenting as if I might leave tomorrow. I didn’t, but just knowing I could changed how I sit in meetings.”

If you’re looking for justice, here’s the subtle, sturdy kind I believe in now: a company where a young engineer tells a VP “not yet” and keeps their job; an HR policy that says “disclose” instead of “forbid”; an incident channel with more tool emojis than flames; a leader who knows when the most courageous act is to slow down.

They fired me for “having two jobs.” HR never bothered to find out what those jobs really were. Here is the truth that got me to the other side: we each have one job, whatever our title says. Protect the people. Sometimes that means code. Sometimes it means budgets. Sometimes it means the courage to say “no” to the meeting where they slide the tablet across the table and ask you to perform a loyalty that never loved you back.

In the end, my story boils down to a hallway, a cactus, a network map, a price that made a room go quiet, and a team that turned heroics into habits. If you want a line to tape to your monitor, take this one: be the reason your systems are boring and your people are proud.

Epilogue — Operating Manual for Future Me

On bad days, open this.

Remember: when the HR person says “loyalty,” ask them for behavioral definitions and budget line items.

When an executive slaps a zero-trust slide onto a deck, ask them which service they’re willing to delay for auth.

When a red team calls you boring, bake them a cake.

When you feel indispensable, automate something until you’re less so.

When someone asks if you’re available Saturday for “just a quick patch,” say no twice, then offer Monday with context: “We don’t trade tomorrow for today.”

When you get scared, turn to the thing you can do in the next hour. Then the next.

When someone sends you a photo of yourself entering a building and assumes it proves the worst, take a breath. Put down your badge. Pick up your cactus. Walk out into the air. It will feel like freedom because it is.

And when they call you later because everything is on fire, name your price and ask for what won’t fit on an invoice: a culture where the truth goes first. Then do your one job: protect the people.

That’s the ending. It’s not neat. It’s clear. The fortress is sturdier. The ocean is still there. The weather is coming. Now you know what to do.

END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.