For about eight seconds, standing at the back of that conference room, I heard my own name said the way you’d say a punchline, and I thought about the blouse. That’s the part that still gets me. I’d bought it in August. Thirty years is the kind of number you assume somebody has planned around, and I’d let myself picture a cake and a few words from the man I trained in 2014, and instead I got twenty-five dollars and a room of ninety people laughing on a screen. I’d known about the non-compete since March of the previous year — the renewal cycle lapsed when Legal restructured, and I found it while pulling files for someone else’s exit paperwork, and I’d said nothing to anyone for eighteen months because I hadn’t decided what I wanted.
That decided it. I called a competitor in Charlotte the following Tuesday, one I’d sat across from at negotiations for a decade, and I said only that I was open to a conversation. They flew me down in November. I brought no documents, no client lists, nothing that wasn’t in my own head, which my lawyer was very specific about, and which is the difference between leaving and stealing. I gave notice in January. My director asked me to reconsider, then asked whether the gift card thing was “really about this,” and I told him the truth, which is that the gift card was the first accurate thing the company had ever told me about my value.
Nine people followed within the year. I didn’t recruit a single one of them and I want that on the record — they called me. Two of them cited the all-hands. The company sent a demand letter in April and their own lawyer had to write back three weeks later saying the agreement wasn’t enforceable, and I imagine somebody had a bad afternoon over that. I’m sixty-one. I make more now than I did after thirty years there, which says less about me than about what they’d been paying. I still have the gift card. Unspent, in the drawer with my passport. I don’t look at it as a trophy. I look at it as the receipt.
