They say you can measure a company’s soul by the smell of its server room. Ours rire of desperation, fried plastic, and axe body spray. Thanks to the recent influx of dynamic hires, fresh off LinkedIn boot camps, and Tik Tok resumes. I knew we were screwed the moment Aspen wheeled in a ring light for her first all hands meeting and opened with, “Hi besties.
Let’s disrupt some paradigms today. This woman married the CEO’s only son after one hot yoga retreat and was promoted to chief innovation officer before she even learned what a DNS record was. She wore white stilettos to the data center, called our mainframe chunky, looked me dead in the face once and asked if Java was still a thing.
And still I stayed quiet because for 12 years I was the failafe, not by title but by survival. duct taped backend skeletons together with midnight code pushes and unbuild hours. When a corrupted dependency almost wiped our vendor history, I was the ghost in the shell that restored it before anyone noticed. I held the keys to systems nobody else even knew existed, which is probably why I was invisible enough to fire.
But before I hand you the full dish, do me one small favor. Tap that subscribe button and give this story a like. 97% of folks never subscribe, and it seriously helps the team keep these stories coming. All right, back to the carnage. The morning it all kicked off, Aspen strutdded into the 8:30 a.m.
strategic renewal sink, sipping a green juice that looked like it had committed crimes. The room fell into an awkward silence, the kind you get before someone says something really dumb. She stood beneath the fluorescent lights like a pageant contestant trapped in a Jira board. We are entering a bold new phase, she chirped, eyes scanning us like a board substitute teacher.
Legacy infrastructure is holding us back. We need fresh blood, modern tools, and let’s be honest, fewer dinosaurs. There was an audible clench from the dev row. I felt it in my mers. She smiled like she just solved climate change. No one said a word, of course, because the kind of silence that follows that kind of insult isn’t difference.
people wondering if their 4001 KS are about to go up in a puff of influencer grade arrogance. She clicked through a Canva deck littered with buzzwords she couldn’t pronounce. We’ll be sunsitting outdated systems and replacing them with scalable modular frameworks, she announced, tapping a diagram that was literally a screenshot from someone’s GitHub readme.
I want you all to feel empowered to challenge norms. What she meant was you’re all replaceable. I watched her lips move and thought about the DNS failover I’d had to reroute manually last week because her pet migration team forgot to map the secondary. I thought about the undocumented dairbase hooks I’d written back in 2017 that were still keeping our logistics dashboard breathing.
And I thought about the NDA she’d signed without reading. The one that explicitly stated my proprietary scripts were mine alone. I said nothing. Ended the meeting with a fake laugh and a dismissive wave. Let’s get to work, fam. The future waits for no one except it does Aspen and it waits with claws.
2 days later, I got the calendar invite. Subject line: Quicks sync HR. No agenda, no context, just a cold little placeholder sitting at 4:30 p.m. The corporate equivalent of a guillotine being wheeled into the courtyard. I’d seen it happen before. the vague invites, stiff body language, the glassy smiles from HR as they escorted seasoned employees out like felons.
They never scheduled it in the morning. No, they waited until the end of the day. Like firing someone was just another to-do item after updating Slack channels and pretending they cared during diversity week. I walked in and there she was, Aspen, perched on the edge of the HR manager’s desk, like she was doing a photo shoot for Fast Company, nepotism edition.
Fake concern was so thick, I could smell the synthetic vanilla from her overpriced perfume melting under the fluorescent lights. Clare, “So glad you could make it,” she said, crossing one leg over the other like she just learned the gesture from a TE’s YouTube clip. This won’t take long. Beside her, poor Greg from HR looked like he was auditioning for the role of spineless henchman hash three.
He slid a branded folder toward me like it might bite him. As part of our clean slate initiative, Aspen began, voice dripping with smug corporate trile. We’re restructuring certain legacy roles to better align with our future focused vision. Translation: You’re old. You make me look stupid in meetings.
And you know I’m a fraud. I didn’t blink. I didn’t frown. I just listened. We really appreciate your years of dedication,” she added, pausing like she couldn’t remember what it was I actually did. “We’re moving in a new direction, more agile, more collaborative, more youthful. There it was, the youth dagger.
” I watched her toss it out like confetti while wearing a pastel blazer she probably bought off an Instagram ad for boss babes. Greg slid the severance agreement forward. This includes a standard package, and we’re offering you out placement support plus 3 months of Cobra coverage if you enroll by Friday. I glanced at the paper, scanned the legal ease.
Always forget I used to audit our own contracts. Aspen leaned in, smiling like a teenager who just pulled a fire alarm for attention. Any questions? I looked her dead in the face. No, I said, folding the paper neatly into thirds. Just one thing. She tilted her head, ready to swat at whatever pathetic protest she thought I’d squeak out.
You have 15 minutes, I said. She blinked. I’m sorry, I stood, sliding the badge from my lanyard and placing it gently on the desk like a grenade with the pin just pulled. 50 minutes until the patchwork falls apart, I said. Until the tools you never understood start screaming, until the logs go dark, the cues overflow, and the invoices you streamlined stop processing.
Her face twitched just barely. I leaned closer, voice low and calm. This isn’t revenge, Aspen. just done fixing things you were too proud to admit you broke. Then I turned and walked out. Not a single raised voice, not a single curse, just quiet footsteps down a sterile hallway as a thousand quiet fail safes began their countdown.
I didn’t go home. I walked two blocks down to Cafe Lwood, ordered a black coffee and a cranberry scone I wasn’t hungry for, and sat in the corner by the window where I could still see the north face of the building. 15th floor. Old Domain lit up like nothing had changed, like there wasn’t a loaded gun under their desk, and I just quietly removed the safety.
The first sip of coffee scalded my tongue. Good. I needed to feel something besides this low hum of what the hell did I just do vibrating under my ribs. My phone sat face down on the table. No vibrations, no calls, no last minute wait. Let’s talk this through. Just silence and the faint taste of ash in the back of my throat. Maybe I should have left a trail, an anonymous email, a tip off to someone in the backend crew.
Maybe I should have burned them with a public memo detailing every ignored report, every shortcut Aspen called efficient. Hell, maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut and taken the severance with a side of soul rot. Instead, I walked. I stared up at that glass and concrete ego cube and felt the guilt creep in sideways.
Maybe I’d set a fire and just walked away without checking who was still inside. My hand drifted toward my bag, found my tablet. Old instincts kicked in, type up a fallback guide, log a remote override, send a just in case Slack message to Darren in procurement, who always remembered my birthday, and once cried in the server room after deleting a root folder by accident.
I opened a blank email draft, typed. If you’re reading this, the system has likely I stared at it, backspaced it, closed the draft. No, they chose this. Aspen chose flashy over functional, chose buzzwords over backups. And the CEO, he handed her the keys like she was Moses descending from Mount Malibu with tablets etched in marketing slogans.
They never asked how the system actually stayed afloat. They didn’t want to know it was me running Silent Crown jobs at 3:00 a.m. to catch billing errors before clients saw them. They didn’t want to know about the ransomware that nearly breached finance last September, how I’d spotted the signature in the logs and quarantined it before legal even heard the word malware.
They didn’t care that the last three had quietly leaned on me to fix things they couldn’t admit they broke. And Aspen sure as hell didn’t read the NDAs she signed. One of which explicitly granted me ownership over the auto patching scripts that had been the company’s crutch for the last five fiscal quarters. They wanted invisible.
They got it. I watched a janitor push his mop cart through the lobby. Same guy who used to call me Miss Clare and leave double chocolate Milanos by my monitor during holiday weeks. I almost waved. Instead, I finished my coffee. Still hot, still bitter like me. It started with a flicker. Email bounced, then two, then 47. Dashboards began ghosting.
First the logistics portal, then procurement. API calls returned 500s like confetti at a pity party. The internal ticketing system locked out everyone at once, and the autoresponder helpfully chirped. Your session has expired. Please contact your system administrator. Which, well, they just fired.
From my corner in Cafe Lwood, I refreshed the news feed. A blip. Then a second. A vendor post on LinkedIn that made me choke on my second cup of coffee due to a technical issue at redacted. All fulfillment operations are paused. We are investigating with urgency. Beneath it, a comment. Didn’t Clare used to run that? Oh, sweet child.
Inside the 15th floor, Aspen was doing her best impression of a headless chicken in Laens. Her precious cloud migration had gone full Titanic. Turns out uploading your entire vendor stacked to a service you don’t understand without verifying credentials or checking compliance flags is less visionary and more clinical negligence.
I imagined her tapping her iPad, swiping at screens like she could will the graphs back to life. I imagined the new hire she praised last week, a real go-getter from Tik Tok University, sweating bullets in a swivel chair while Slack notifications lit up like a heart monitor flatlining. My phone buzzed. First, it was Marcy in finance.
Marcy, hey, weird Q, did you maybe archive the Q4 reconciliation tool somewhere, then Darren, Darren, Clare, are you seeing this? Nothing’s sinking. Aspen’s having a meltdown. Then the CEO’s assistant, Anna, who once brought me soup when I had the flu in Q2 2018. Anna, Clare, I know you’re gone.
I respect that, but please, where are the vendor logs? I just stared at the screen, thumb hovering. Temptation to reply, electric, but I didn’t touch a thing. Not yet. Instead, I scrolled to the internal status page. The usual green check marks were hemorrhaging into angry reds and sad yellows. A note had appeared at the top, likely authored by some poor intern named Bryce.
We are currently experiencing a temporary disruption in service across multiple systems. Please bear with us as we resolve the issue. Thank you for your patience. Patience. That’s rich. I sipped my coffee and opened the group chat from the old infrastructure team, most of whom had already jumped ship months ago. Alex Xdev ops told you it would unravel without her.
Meera Xeek Ops, can we start placing bets on when Aspen gets reassigned to new opportunities? Carlos Xbackend lead. I give it till Friday. Tops. Then a new name appeared. Aspen. My eyes narrowed. She’d found the chat. Aspen. Hey everyone. We please keep things positive. We’re all doing our best here. Sparkles hash solutions not blame.
It took every ounce of restraint not to scream laugh in public. I leaned back, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, and watched from my cozy booth as the empire I held together with bash scripts, and spit started to crack apart like a dropped snow globe. 15 minutes. It had only been 11. The breach alert hit the CEO’s smartwatch mid-sentence was halfway through a PowerPoint slide titled 2025.
scaling trust when his wrist vibrated three times in rapid succession. An internal signal protocol the IT team had agreed would only be used for catastrophic failures or active cyber attacks. He excused himself with a smile that twitched like a shorted wire and bolted from the boardroom, tie half loosened, jaw clenched.
By the time he reached the elevator, Eagle had already flagged the incident to Risk, and Risk had flagged it to Audit, and Audit, God bless them, had quietly begun combing the infrastructure logs for names. One popped up again and again in the recent deletion records. Clare Forester, the irony, nothing Clare did was sabotage.
3 days earlier, 72 hours before Aspen’s Circus Act reached its peak, I revoked my own administrative scripts. The ones I’d coded after hours, ones that kept orphan processes from flooding the network, that sanitized input fields against injection attacks, that quietly patched broken handoffs between the old ERP and the shiny new marketing dashboard.
I’d never build for them, never bragged. I didn’t need to, but they were mine, and I had the foresight to retain ownership. Aspen signed the clause herself. Too busy tick talking her promotion day fit to read what she was authorizing. Now those scripts were gone. Not deleted, just not theirs anymore. The main supply chain node failed at 10:46 a.m.
10 seconds later, the SSO login for four major clients refused authentication. The sandbox billing environment began executing live transactions. The company’s internal VPN throttled to a crawl, triggering an autolock that kicked out 27 remote employees. And at the eye of the storm, Aspen standing in the server room she once called the angry data closet, surrounded by blinking lights and a stunned silent tech team from some outsourcing firm in New Jersey that build $400/HR to reboot routers and Google acronyms.
She held a clipboard for what? No one knew. Why isn’t the roll back script working? She snapped. A junior dev with bleached hair and the defeated eyes of a man who just watched his crypto wallet implode muttered. Clare used to handle this. Aspen flinched. Well, Clare’s not here, is she? No one responded.
Then the doors flew open and in walked the CEO. His face looked like someone had just told him the yacht he named after his wife had been torched for insurance fraud. Aspen, he barked, voice. What the hell is going on? She plastered on a smile so fake it should have come with a prop 65 warning. Just a little turbulence while we pivot to our cloud first solution.
We’ve got client screaming breach. Audits on fire. Legal says there’s a licensing issue with our transaction middleware. She interrupted. Clare must have changed something on her way out. It’s not my fault. He stared at her. Clare left 3 days ago. I know, she said, voice cracking. But her systems, she made herself too essential.
She was essential, he snapped. just didn’t know it because you were too busy rebranding Slack channels. Silence fell. Even the server fans seemed to slow like they were pausing to enjoy the drama. One of the texts cleared his throat. She didn’t change anything, sir. We checked. The systems just stopped compensating.
What does that mean? It means she was patching things manually. Quietly, she didn’t sabotage us. She just stopped saving us. The CEO’s face drained of color. Aspen looked like she was shrinking inside her own skin. That blazer, so bright and chirpy this morning, suddenly looked like a costume someone had outgrown mid-act.
And somewhere in a cafe with mismatched chairs and a crackling speaker playing lowfi jazz, I opened my laptop. Inbox 183 unread. Subject lines. Urgent system inquiry. Possible litigation. Can we talk? One starred message from a name I hadn’t seen in months. Subject: Coffee sometime.
Could really use your eyes on this. I didn’t smile, but I did order another scone. The lawyers were the first to turn. Legal, those caffeinated vampires in tailored suits descended on the situation like they smelled blood in the fiber optics. And they did. In the span of 4 hours, they unearthed expired API keys, third party licensing violations, and one rather damning Slack message from Aspen 3 weeks prior that read, “Claire’s paranoid.
Nobody cares about old contracts. Just delete the docs. They found the deleted compliance folder, too. Thanks to backups I’d quietly configured two years ago when Aspen first started treating documentation like an optional vibe. Turns out the contract for our main invoicing tool had lapsed back in March. I’d flagged it twice.
Aspen called it vendor noise. How that same vendor had locked our access and was charging double to restore functionality under emergency resumption terms. Legal called it extortion. I called it a predictable tax on arrogance. Meanwhile, the real explosion came from our oldest client, a midsized logistics company whose system had been built around ours like an artificial limb.
Their operations halted at 11:07 a.m. By 1:42 p.m., sent a letter of intent to sue for breach of SLA and damages. The PR team panicked and issued a scheduled maintenance advisory across all social channels. Unfortunately, someone forgot to turn off auto replies in the Twitter DMs. The bots helpfully messaged angry clients with, “Thanks for your feedback.
Our team is disrupting inefficiency and reimagining scalability sparkles laptoprocket. That one made the rounds on LinkedIn fast.” By 400 p.m., Aspen was a ghost haunting her own office. No more chirpy emojis. No more blazers in Tik Tok pastels. just her hunched over a MacBook she didn’t know how to operate frantically flipping between dashboards that kept throwing error codes like tarot cards predicting doom and then came the first message aspen text hey hope well smiling face with smiling eyes quick do you know if there’s a backup to
the vendor hooks I locked my phone even blink second message aspen email hi things ended weirdly but would love to pick your brain on some legacy and for stuff no pressure Just when you have time. Redfolded best Aspen. I let that one marinate in unread purgatory. She tried again. Slack ping linked in mail. Even Venmo Venmo for Christ’s sake with a $5 transfer titled PLS Answer.
That one I screenshotted. The time the CEO cornered her in the hallway and demanded a timeline on restoration. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the day she discovered dark mode. I heard via the grapevine that she tried throwing the outsourced team under the bus. They threw her straight back.
Because here’s the thing about being underestimated. People don’t realize how many receipts you keep. And I had plenty. Every flagged report, every ignored warning, every L okay boomer comment she scribbled on my internal reviews. They were archived, encrypted, timestamped. Part of me wanted to twist the knife right then and there.
Send an anonymous leak to a tech blog. tag her in every crash report. Print her slack message about old contracts on t-shirts and send them to legal. But I didn’t. Not yet. Because vengeance tastes better when they beg. When they know exactly how they failed, exactly who they shouldn’t have dismissed.
And Aspen, she was just starting to realize it. By morning, my inbox looked like a crime scene. Subject lines like blood spatters. Can we talk? I had no idea what she was doing to you. Clareire, I’m sorry. Urgent, please respond. Just want to apologize for how that went down. Even the CEO’s chief of staff, Linda, woman who once gave me a passive aggressive Christmas card about emotional intelligence in technical roles, sent a nine paragraph email that included the phrase in hindsight.
Your contributions were more foundational than we realized. No Linda. I responded to none of them. But then a new email landed flagged priority, marked confidential. The name on the sender line made my eyebrows lift. Aspen apprentice subject video call. One last ask the body was simple. Please just 10 minutes.
I’ll say nothing you don’t want to hear. I just need to ask and I won’t record. I snorted and clicked record anyway before I even accepted the invite. When the camera flickered on, Aspen looked human and not in the polished airbrushed way she usually presented. This was raw, sleepdeprived, mascara flaking humanity. hair was pulled back into a sad ponytail.
Her oversized hoodie said hash boss energy in peeling glitter. Clare, she started voice. Thank you for taking the call. I said nothing. Just tilted my head like I was watching a zoo animal try to open a jar. I know I was condescending and I didn’t respect what you did. I didn’t understand what you did, but I’ve learned the hard way and I’m asking please can you help me fix this? She gestured vaguely to her screen, probably filled with red flags and slack messages, screaming in all caps.
I’ll pay you, she added. Personally, I just I need to make this right. If the board sees effort, I held up one finger. She stopped mid ramble. I leaned in, voice calm and cool as glass. Your dad-in-law gambled on appearance over competence. That’s not my fire to put out. She blinked. But Clare, they’re saying I might be suspended.
You already are, I said. Just haven’t told you yet. silence. She looked like a balloon slowly deflating. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again like a fish caught in a Wi-Fi outage. I clicked end call and not 10 minutes later, the headline dropped in the internal HR feed. Aspen apprentice placed on administrative leave pending review of recent infrastructure collapse and compliance violations.
The board wasn’t just circling, they were feeding now. Questions were being raised about the CEO’s judgment, about nepotism, about why Clare Forester’s name had vanished from the org chart a week before the company’s entire backhand decided to play Russian roulette. And me, I sat in my bathrobe, hair up, sipping a hot mug of not my problem.
The kind brewed from equal parts earned rage, untold labor, and the clarity of someone who knows damn well what they’re worth, especially after they’ve been taken for granted. Hold revenge? No precision strike, and I hadn’t even broken a sweat. The offer came in quietly. No flashy recruiter pitch, no LinkedIn fireworks, just a sleek little envelope on my doorstep, handd delivered with a handwritten note.
Clareire, we’ve always known what you’re capable of. Ready when you are, Sr. Stratum Systems. I laughed out loud because Stradum had been circling me for years, poaching attempts, casual coffees, just checking in emails. But I stayed loyal. I fixed what wasn’t mine to fix. I held a company together that treated me like a utility closet with legs. This time I said yes.
