A Severance and a Smile

I wrote the poem a year before they let me go. I wrote it at my desk the day after our executive meeting where our ridiculously young COO, armed with brand new note taking tablet, presented the future of our company. He had obviously used AI to craft a PowerPoint presentation and with every slide I saw a picture of a place where I wasn’t.

The VPs of the company of which I was one didn’t say a word. Lately no one referred to me in the present or in the past tense. It was almost as if I never existed. That's how it starts. Not with a conversation, but with an absence. The meeting invite that doesn't come. The project that goes to someone who stops you in the hallway to ask how the old system used to work. The way people begin to speak to you slowly and kindly, as if you've already gone and they're being polite to your memory.

So, I wrote it down. I filled a page of a yellow legal pad, and near the bottom I wrote the lines that told the truth:

I don't want immortality.
I want visibility.
I want dignity.
I want to finish
the story I started
before you write me out
with a severance
and a smile.

Then I posted the entire poem on vocal.media.com holding back the tears but feeling relief as I poured my heart into a poem which described the death of a career and a position I had held since 1991, and went back to doing my job. That's what you do. You go back to doing your job.

Thirty-five years. I started when the forms came in triplicate and the coffee came out of a can. Hell, I even used a payphone when I was on the road. I had learned every system they brought in, then the one that replaced it, then the one that replaced that. I trained people who became my supervisors. I trained people who became their supervisors. I stayed late through audits, ice storms, through numerous transitions and defended the company from employee lawsuits and came out victorious time after time. Because I knew that there was more than one way to defend a wrongful termination case.

I knew which attorney to call in all of the fourteen states in which we operated and which General Manager needed a text instead of a call in order to get them to respond. I knew where every file lived, not because I had hidden anything, but because I had been the one who filed them.

And I was in the middle of something. Not a grand thing. Years earlier I had started helping the company establish a culture and build their brand, I created team member files, so whoever came after me would find everything in order. I wanted to hand it off finished. I wanted to walk out on a day of my own choosing, shake some hands, and hear someone say, You knew this place better than anyone. This place won’t be the same without you.

That was the story I started.

The meeting was on a Thursday afternoon. Twenty minutes on the calendar. The small conference room on the second floor, the one whose window looks out over the parking lot.

There were two of them. One was the young COO I had trained, tested and with my assistance received his Hospitality Supervisor Certification at twenty-four. The other was the President of the company who had been with us only five short years. He had a look I recognized, because I had worn it myself whenever I had to deliver bad news: the look of someone who has rehearsed.

They used words like restructuring and transition and alignment. They said my position was being reimagined. They thanked me for my service the way you thank a stranger who holds a door.

I waited for the part about the severance. I had written that part myself, years ago, in my own hand. I had expected it.

It never came.

Instead, the President’s executive assistant stepped in the room and slid an envelope across the table. Inside was a card with the company logo on the front, signed by everyone in the corporate office, along with kind words hastily written. Tucked inside the card was a gift card. Two hundred dollars.

She smiled.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because people expect the wrong thing. I wasn't shocked. I had already written this scene. What I felt was closer to being proven right about something you prayed you were wrong about. My poem, it turned out, had been too generous. I had assumed that I would receive an appropriate severance. They hadn't gone to that much trouble.

I did the math sitting right there, the way I've always done the math. Two hundred dollars over thirty-five years comes to about five dollars and seventy cents a year. Less than a cup of coffee at the place across the street.

They gave me the rest of the afternoon to clean out my desk. The young woman in the next office offered to help, then didn't know what to say, so she told me she would miss me and turned back to her screen.

I opened the top drawer. The legal pad on which I had first written the poem before memorializing it in vocal.media.com was there. Under the first page was my poem, my prediction

I read it standing up. Then I read the last lines again.

I want to finish the story I started.

I didn't get to. Someone else will finish the culture and the branding project, or more likely no one will, and in a year, nobody will remember that I was there, that I cared about and lived the culture I was championing. My name will come off the organizational chart, the phone list, the shared OneDrive. That's how it works. I know that's how it works.

But standing in my office with a cardboard box in my arms, I understood something. They could take the job. They could decide how my career ended. What they could not do was write my story, because they never knew it. The young man with the tablet, the executive assistant with the envelope, they knew a line on a spreadsheet. I knew thirty-five years.

At first, I thought I would frame the card as a reminder of how little loyalty actually means in today’s workplace. But instead, I gave it to my son. I did not want to lower myself to spend it. My thirty-five years were worth more.  

I'm seventy-five years old. I don't want immortality. I never did.

I still want visibility, so I am writing this down where people can see it.

I still want dignity, so I am telling it plainly, without bitterness dressed up as gratitude.

And I am finishing the story I started. Not at their desk, not in their company, not on their schedule, but here at my own kitchen table, with my own laptop.

They wrote me out with a smile and a gift card.

I am writing myself back in.