…”the Halvorsen account. All three client service agreements. To a consulting firm called Apex North.”
I’d never heard of Apex North. I told him so. I told him I’d never signed anything on my last day except my exit checklist, and I hadn’t even signed that, because my manager said HR would “handle it.”
There was a long pause on the line. Then the CEO said, “Apex North was registered four months ago. The owner is your former manager’s brother-in-law.”
It came together quickly after that. My manager had been planning for months. He’d fire me, the person who’d managed our biggest client for seventeen years. Then, during the “transition,” he’d use a document with my forged signature to show that I’d authorized moving the client’s service contracts to an outside firm. His firm. Once I was gone, nobody would be left who knew the client well enough to question it.
Except the client did question it. When I called them that first evening, just to say goodbye, their operations director said, “Wait, you’re leaving? Then who signed this transfer letter we got this afternoon?”
That was what put the contract under review. Not me. Them.
The company’s lawyers brought in a handwriting expert. The signature wasn’t mine. My manager was terminated that week, and the company referred the forgery to the district attorney.
The CEO asked me to come back. I said I’d think about it. I thought about it for exactly one weekend. Then I went back with three conditions: my retirement package restored in full, a title that reflected what I’d actually been doing for seventeen years, and a team of my own to train.
He agreed to all three.
My team is four people now. The youngest is twenty-six. She’s sharp, funny and impatient, and on her first day she asked me, very seriously, how I’d kept a client for seventeen years.
“I answered the phone,” I told her. “Every time. Even on vacation. That’s the whole secret.”
She wrote it down. I’m retiring in two years. When I do, the Halvorsen account is going to her. She’ll keep up just fine.
