They “Realigned” My Role and Handed My System to an Incompetent Nepo Favorite—What They Forgot Was I Still Had the Keys
“We’re pivoting your role to something more aligned with the new org vision,” the CTO said, scratching his neck like the words were giving him a rash.
His lips moved, but all I heard was static, a faint buzzing that drowned out everything except the sound of my own heartbeat.
My stomach dropped faster than the QA environment Brendan once nuked trying to “optimize performance.”
I knew something was off the second I saw the calendar invite.
It was a performance review booked on a Friday, sandwiched neatly between a 2:00 p.m. culture sync and a 4:00 p.m. team mindfulness session.
Nobody got promoted after lunch, not in this glass-walled madhouse they called an office.
Promotions came in morning meetings with celebratory Slack posts and a fake-confetti animation.
Friday afternoon reviews came with phrases like “recalibration,” “strategic alignment,” and “we’re excited about your growth,” which is corporate for: we’re moving you to the basement and asking you to smile.
I walked into that room with a forty-two-slide deck and the calm confidence of someone who had earned the right to be blunt.
Year-over-year conversion rates, funnel acceleration charts, retention curves, churn mitigation, and a slide titled: Pipeline Resilience During Brendan-Induced Incidents.
I even color-coded it.
Green for when I fixed it, red for when I wasn’t allowed to.
I’d stayed up through weekends, holidays, and one memorable New Year’s Eve when the entire payment gateway decided to have a personality crisis at 11:58 p.m.
I had duct-taped legacy code into something stable while leadership posted “Happy New Year, team!” from a rooftop bar.
My deck wasn’t flashy.
It wasn’t “vibrant.”
It was proof.
It was receipts.
And yet there I was, structured, prepared, and somehow still being downshifted into a role so meaningless it practically came with a manual on how to be forgotten in Slack.
Support Engineering Liaison.
A title that sounded important until you said it out loud and realized it was the corporate equivalent of being parked somewhere quiet so nobody had to hear you anymore.
They called it a leadership opportunity, a mentorship pathway, a cross-functional bridge.
They said “stretch potential” like it was a gift.
They said “visibility” while pushing me further away from anything that mattered.
Across the table, the HR rep nodded with the serious expression of someone pretending this was complicated.
The CTO kept using the word “vision” like it was a shield.
I looked at the slide on the screen—pixelated stock photo, two people high-fiving under the caption New Chapter, Same Team.
My eye twitched once, just once.
Then the real punchline arrived, delivered with the casual cruelty of a man who’d never had to fight for his seat.
They were handing my platform—my system, my code, my sleepless weekends—to Brendan.
Brendan, the corporate mascot for male mediocrity.
The same guy who once asked me if semicolons were optional in JSON.
I didn’t flinch.
I didn’t blink.
I watched him through the glass wall of the conference room as he walked by, laughing at something on his phone, unbothered by gravity.
He didn’t know my name without looking at my badge, but he was about to inherit everything I’d built.
The CTO kept talking.
He said words like “continuity” and “shared ownership.”
He said, “We think Brendan will bring fresh energy to the platform.”
And HR added, “You’ll have a wonderful opportunity to mentor him through this transition.”
Transition.
That word is always a lie.
I nodded at the right places.
I smiled when the HR rep said “career narrative.”
I shook their hands like I was sealing a deal, not swallowing a betrayal.
Then I walked out of that room, down three flights of stairs to the parking lot because I needed gravity to keep my rage from leaking out my ears.
In my car, engine off, heat bleeding through the windows, I stared straight into the sun.
My fingers drummed against the steering wheel in a rhythm that sounded like restraint.
My laptop sat on the passenger seat like a silent co-conspirator.
And then I remembered something that made my pulse slow down in a way that almost felt like relief.
They hadn’t revoked my access.
No “offboarding checklist,” no sudden password reset, no Slack lockout, no polite email saying “IT will reach out shortly.”
My admin credentials were still valid.
The keys to the castle were still in my pocket because in their rush to screw me over, they’d forgotten the first rule I’d never forgotten in my life: check your permissions before you burn bridges.
They thought I was too professional to do anything “dramatic.”
They thought I’d take the demotion like medicine.
They thought wrong.
Not because I was planning sabotage, not because I was reckless.
Because I was tired of building empires for men who couldn’t read the map.
Because I was done being the invisible spine of a company that only noticed me when something broke.
Hey, if you’re still with me, do me a favor.
I’m trying to hit my first 10,000 subscribers ever, and you’d make my day by clicking that little subscribe button.
It’s free.
No awkward performance reviews attached, I promise.
Anyway, that night I poured myself two inches of bourbon, opened my terminal, and logged into the staging server.
Not to sabotage, not yet—just to watch.
Watching is what you do when you know exactly how people fail.
You let them show you what they are when nobody’s correcting their grip.
Inside the logs, I saw Brendan’s first commits.
He’d forked my repo into a folder labeled KarenOld and started pushing UI tweaks directly into main.
No tests.
No versioning.
Just raw, impulsive edits like someone spray-painting graffiti on a cathedral because they thought vandalism was creativity.
One commit message read: legacy junk lol.
I took a screenshot.
Then another.
Because here’s the thing about people like Brendan: they don’t just break systems.
They break them loudly, proudly, and with complete confidence that someone else will clean it up.
I watched him rename variables like he was redecorating a house he didn’t build.
I watched him delete a warning comment I’d written after a 3 a.m. incident that almost cost us a client.
He didn’t even pause.
He didn’t even ask why.
That’s when I started something new.
A blank repo, clean and untouched, hosted outside their corporate cloud, encrypted and off-network.
No company email tied to it.
No shared access.
Just mine.
I named it Mirror One.
Not because I was trying to “compete.”
Because I was finally trying to own what I was capable of.
I wasn’t going to play support.
I wasn’t going to be a team player.
I was going to rebuild my entire system from the ground up—quietly, legally, brilliantly—without their fingerprints on it.
No high-fives, no laminated HR pamphlets, no forced smiles in meeting rooms with inspirational posters.
Just slow, controlled focus.
The kind that looks like patience until you realize it’s strategy.
They scheduled the transition sync for 8:30 a.m. sharp, like betrayal tastes better with stale office coffee.
I showed up early.
The meeting room smelled like dry erase markers and stale pastry crumbs, the kind of place where people announce “new chapters” and act surprised when someone quietly resigns three weeks later.
My knowledge transfer journal sat open on the table—thirty-seven pages deep and growing more passive-aggressive by the hour.
Page one was titled: Please do not delete this file.
Page two read: Seriously, Brendan.
Brendan arrived nine minutes late, naturally, carrying a smoothie the color of nuclear waste and the energy of a man who thought Figma was a Pokémon.
He flopped into the chair like he owned it, opened his MacBook, and I saw seventeen desktop icons blinking like landmines.
“Yo, Karen,” he grinned, already scrolling.
“Excited to get your wisdom, Sensei.”
I resisted the urge to launch him into the drywall.
Instead, I slid the doc toward him and began the demo like I was teaching someone how to safely handle a live wire.
Management framed it as a mentorship opportunity, said with the chirpy insincerity of someone recommending kale chips at a funeral.
The CTO dropped buzzwords like “leadership,” “grooming,” and “cross-functional synergy,” which really meant: train the guy who stole your seat and smile while doing it.
Every morning that week, I sat across from Brendan in that same room, the fluorescent lights too bright, the air too cold.
I walked him through systems he didn’t understand and concepts he couldn’t pronounce.
“So wait,” he squinted at my monitor, “these async hooks are like… optional, right?”
Like asking if a parachute is optional.
“Technically optional,” I said flatly, “until you’re falling.”
He laughed like I was joking.
I wasn’t.
By day three, he was still asking what a cron job was.
He said “cron” like it rhymed with “crayon.”
I kept my face neutral and answered anyway.
Because I was doing exactly what they told me to do, just not in the way they expected.
I began writing a second set of notes off the books.
Encrypted, saved in a private git instance I spun up in my garage at 2 a.m. while eating leftover Thai straight from foil.
Those notes were for me.
Not for Brendan, not for the company, just me.
They included the undocumented workarounds, the little skeleton keys, the one weird trick that made autoscaling logic actually scale.
Brendan’s version was sanitized.
Sanitized like a kindergarten bathroom during flu season.
Clean-looking, and still dangerous.
Every time he swaggered into my cube and said, “Hey, quick Q, what’s the diff between environment variables and like… hard-coded paths?” I died a little more inside.
Not because he didn’t know, but because he didn’t know and still got handed my platform like it was a party favor.
They knew he was incompetent.
They chose him anyway because Brendan was easier to manage.
Brendan didn’t challenge dumb ideas.
Brendan didn’t raise red flags when someone suggested using a Chrome extension to “streamline security.”
Brendan nodded.
Brendan smiled.
Brendan made leadership feel smart.
And in a lot of companies, that’s more valuable than being right.
My pride didn’t just take a hit.
It got backed over by a company-sponsored scooter.
But I didn’t lash out.
I didn’t call anyone names.
I started running nightly backups of my original system, quietly, methodically, tucking folders into innocuous directories labeled things like HolidayPictures2023 and CatVaccinationRecords.
Each zip file was a time capsule of the clean, functioning system I’d spent years perfecting.
Every variable renamed with intention.
Every hook annotated.
Every session logged twice—once in Brendan’s clown notes, and once in my real archive.
I watched him break things in real time, then watched him blame the code like it was misbehaving on purpose.
By Friday, Brendan had overwritten the CSS preprocessor and somehow crashed the sandbox dashboard by importing a node_modules folder into itself.
He stared at the error message like it was written in hieroglyphics, then said, “This code’s kind of messy.”
I nodded, wrote it down, and kept my mouth shut.
Let them break it.
Let them repaint it in pastel gradients and post about innovation.
Let them brag about agility while the wheels fell off.
Because while Brendan was fiddling with fonts, I was building Mirror One.
Offline, off-books, untouchable.
Every time he muttered, “This code’s kind of messy,” I smiled just a little wider.
Messy?
We’ll see how messy things get.
The dashboard now had gradients.
Gradients.
Brendan had somehow convinced the product team that launch success hinged on vibrant visual storytelling.
So….
Continue in C0mment 👇👇
he jammed a tick- tock colored UI into the clean utilitarian interface Karen had spent 2 years optimizing for speed and clarity.
Buttons that used to say submit now said let’s go in lowercase cursive. The onboarding progress bar had confetti animations on mobile at 3:00 a.m. on a Wednesday. Meanwhile, the back end her backend started coughing like an old truck in February. Data syncing scripts lagged. PDF bundles failed to generate. The onboarding logic she’d modularized had been restructured by Brendan for flow, meaning it now called the wrong endpoint half the time and duplicated entries when it didn’t outright crash.
Bug tickets multiplied like cockroaches in a Motel 6 wall. Internal slack lit up red. The QA team, ironically, started flagging criticals that Brendan kept marking non-blocking so he could keep chasing color palettes instead of fixing core logic. Karen watched it all from the sidelines like a firefighter forced to stand and clap while her house was handed to a chainsaw juggler.
The first quick favor hit her inbox Thursday. Then another. By Monday, she was up to 14. Some were obvious panic. Hey Karen, sorry to bother. Do you know why the customer success module is dumping plain text passwords into the error logs? Brendan thinks it’s a race condition. Some were desperate attempts at denial. Just checking in, not urgent, but weird that the dashboard now shows undefined where the client name should be.
Could you maybe peak? And one her favorite was from Brendan himself. Yol think the server is throttling. Can’t tell if that’s intentional or like a Karen thing. She didn’t answer a single one. She was not on that team anymore. That’s what the VP of engineering had said in a meeting in front of others as if her memory, her skill set, her blood and sweat and 3:00 a.m.
code deployments were just dust in the Jira wind. So she let the silence build like pressure behind drywall like a hairline crack in the gas man. Her only contribution quietly updating her mirror system with every failure she observed. the malformed JSON outputs, the timeout errors, the git commits labeled hotfix final realiththosone, all of it logged, timestamped, archived out of spite of obligation to her own integrity, to the thing she actually built.
And still there was sorrow, a low humming ache she couldn’t shut off because this was her legacy. This system had carried her through a breakup, through three funerals, through pandemic isolation, through the kind of loneliness only latestage capitalism could engineer. It was the thing that reminded her she mattered.
Now it was bleeding out on the conference room table while a boy in all birds played doctor. Still, beneath the sorrow, something else coiled in her chest. Not anger, not even bitterness, satisfaction, because she knew where this train was headed, and she wasn’t on it. Maybe you were never really senior engineer material.
That’s what the VP said casually over limp chicken wraps in the breakroom as if he were commenting on the weather or the office playlist. Like her entire career was just a case of mistaken identity. Karen stood there with a plastic fork midair, staring at the wilted lettuce while the word never echoed like a fire alarm inside her skull.
The VP didn’t even look at her when he said it. Just kept scrolling his phone, sipping his green juice like it tasted better than the silence he left in his wake. The never wasn’t what hurt most. It was the fact that he meant it. Somewhere between Brendan’s refactors and Karen’s polite exile to tech support purgatory, they’d rewritten her story, turned her from architect to appendix, a leftover part they didn’t know what to do with, so they just decided to cut her out. Then came Brendan’s internal blog.
Bringing velocity to onboarding, a postmortem on pre-launch optimization. Bold title for someone who just found out what a dependency tree was 2 weeks ago. Karen skimmed the post with clinical precision. Paragraph 1, all buzzwords, zero meaning. Paragraph 2, a detailed breakdown of legacy inefficiencies he streamlined.
Paragraph 3, a photo of Brendan pointing at a whiteboard with her architecture diagram behind him. cropped just enough to cut out her initials from the footer. He wrote about modularization, a synchronous task handling, load balancing, tech he didn’t understand, let alone implement. She knew because she was the one who had built it alone in silence with coffee breath, eye bags, and a spine shaped like a question mark from hunching over her desk during two consecutive Thanksgivings.
And now this floppy-haired clown was getting shoutouts in the leadership slack. Karen didn’t rage. She didn’t reply. didn’t call anyone out. She just smiled, walked calmly back to her desk, opened her encrypted container, and doubleclicked a local instance of the system system. It ran like a dream, sleek, stable, everything still where it belonged, untouched by Brendan’s cartoonish design instincts or management strategic amnesia.
She called it Keystone because without it, everything else would fall. She hadn’t planned to do anything with it at first. It was her security blanket, her proof of life. a reminder that she wasn’t crazy, that the mess unfolding around her wasn’t her fault. Brilliance doesn’t die just because someone else has the mic. But then a thought flickered, not revenge, not even payback, precision.
There was a certain poetry in letting them fall by their own hand. But what if she handed someone else a parachute? What if instead of salvaging the train wreck, she built a faster train? Her old mentor once told her, “Don’t fight a system designed to erase you. Outbuild it.” So Karen began sketching outlines quietly, strategically for lunchtime in her car during mindfulness breaks she spent watching their bug tracker hemorrhage red flags.
She pulled old contacts from her encrypted phone. Asked careful questions, got careful answers. A storm was coming, not the kind with lightning, the kind you don’t hear until it’s already overhead. The first sign was subtle. A Slack message buried in a thread no one reads. Hey, anyone else seeing weird storage spikes in staging? Then came the CPU alerts.
First ignored, then silenced. Must be a logging hiccup, Brendan chirped. I tweaked the handler to be more verbose. Verbose was an understatement. Brendan’s patch to the backend script had unccorked a digital fire hose, dumping uncompressed logs into the main storage bucket like a toddler flinging Legos into a bathtub. Every page render, every click, every whites space event was being tracked in real time with timestamps and full payloads and user data.
Karen noticed because one of her old staging alerts, something she’d written back when the system still had guardrails, pinged her personal inbox. A ghost from a version of the code that still knew how to scream when it hurt. She watched the logs bloat, watched the discs crawl toward capacity, and sipped her tea chamomile with honey.
By midweek, staging was crashing twice a day. Dev Ops was duct taping instances like madmen in a house built of wet cardboard. Logs folder alone was eating into production memory. And Brendan, bless his heart, couldn’t figure out why user uploads were getting rejected or why the form builder randomly replaced drop downs with null.
Executives cool as cucumbers at an HR barbecue. It’s fine. The VP of product said during the Thursday all hands, brushing away the charts like fruit flies. We’ll patch post launch. What matters is hitting the demo deadline. Perception is everything. Perception. Karen filed that one away. That same day, she got an urgent request from her old team lead.
The subject line, need your eyes on onboarding support help during roll out. She read it twice, sipped, read it again, then typed a oneline reply. Thanks, but I’m not on that team anymore. No anger, no flourish, just a gentle reminder of the knife they’d already buried. She deleted the follow-up ping, opened her alternate licensing draft, and got back to work.
The agreement was almost done, tight, enforcable, and blessed by a lawyer who owed her a favor from back when she caught a flaw in his firm’s billing software. The terms were simple. Her mirror platform, Keystone, would be offered to select clients under exclusive, non-transferable usage rights.
No shared code, no shared infrastructure, clean slate. She already had interest. Quiet ping from a former partner, now CTO at a rival firm. We’re not impressed with their current roll out, he wrote. Would love to see your version. She kept the reply short. Let’s talk Monday. I’ll bring the clean build. By now, she barely flinched when Slack blew up.
Someone tagged her in a public thread at Karen quick. Any idea why new signups are generating blank PDFs again? She ignored it. Instead, she reviewed her final checklist. DNS set. OFFlow rebuilt from scratch. Cloud deployment pipeline tested and airgapped. Documentation tripleproofed her documentation, not Brendan’s blog core nonsense.
Theirs was crumbling under its own weight. Hers silent, sharp, ready. She wasn’t angry anymore. She wasn’t even sad. Karen had simply moved on. And soon the rest of the world would too. By 4:00 p.m. Friday, war drums had gone silent. Not because the bugs were fixed. God, no. Because they were too many to name, too chaotic to track, too fast to catch before the next one spawned.
It was like trying to plug a dam with a fistful of spaghetti noodles. And yet, the official slack thread still bore its name like a crown. Hash prunchaunch hype. Karen watched from her corner seat in a half empty bar six blocks from HQ. bourbon meat in front of her on screen glowing like a campfire.
She scrolled through the slow motion implosion as Brendan, bless his half-baked soul, led what was optimistically called a launch readiness dry run. At 3:37 p.m., someone posted the first red flag. Form PDF not rendering client name shows null user 42. Happens in both Firefox and Chrome. At 3:38, onboarding links now trigger 5002 on refresh.
At 3:39, Brendan replied, “Definitely a rendering glitch. Probably a caching thing. Talk to Dylan.” Dylan was a junior front-end dev who hadn’t been on the onboarding flow at all. Brendan just needed a scapegoat with no political currency. Karen took a sip and smiled into her glass. This wasn’t anger. This wasn’t triumph.
This was weather. A calm barometric drop right before the lightning hits her spine. She didn’t need to gloat. Reality was doing that for her. Phone buzzed again. Screenshot from an old teammate. The PDF module, one Brendan claimed he’d simplified for performance, was now sending files with raw template code visible in the final render.
Instead of a formatted client welcome packet, new signups were receiving things like first name, welcome to the platform. Please verify your email, email token. One sales rep had already emailed marketing. Is this a joke? Client asked if this was some kind of fishing test. Karen watched the thread balloon into a slack-shaped landfill. 37 messages in 9 minutes.
Brendan responding with fire emojis and links to random Stack Overflow threads he didn’t understand. One VP asked if they could roll back to the legacy version, unaware that Brendan had overwritten it entirely last week in a cleanup push. The lights in the bar dimmed for happy hour. Her drink got warm. He didn’t check her email.
Instead, she unlocked her encrypted drive and opened Keystone. Flawless, clean PDF render, proper O tokens, signed cookies, the onboarding path smooth as buttered glass. She ran a test instance on a virtual client, just one, not for validation for archiving. Then she toggled the passive logger she’d built into Keystone.
Begin archival mode, launch day 000. It would run silently, watching, recording, logging every inconsistency. The official system leaked into the wild. Not intercepting, just witnessing every malformed response. Every timeout, every postmortem waiting to happen because Karen wasn’t going to burn it down.
She was going to let it drown in its own ignorance. At 6:12 p.m., Slack exploded again. Internal users can’t access onboarding anymore unless they’re in admin mode. WTF? Brendan replied. Karen probably left some legacy logic in there. working on it now. Karen stared at those words for a long time. Then she closed Slack, flagged the message, and renamed the screenshot blame protocol01.
PNG no rage, no revenge playlist. Just a mental note, final proof. That night, as her old team scrambled into overtime, Karen sat alone, a slow grin curling on her lips. Not for what was happening, but for what was about to. Launch day arrived dressed like a funeral in startup drag.
The office was buzzing by 6:00 a.m. Half cafe lattes, branded hoodies, sticky notes slapped across monitors like war paint. Brendan wore a t-shirt that read code deploy dominate and acted like it was his Super Bowl. Someone queued up a playlist titled Launch Vibes only. At 7:00 a.m. sharp, the new platform went live. By 7:03, it was already coughing blood.
Onboarding froze, not slowed, froze. Clients clicked start now and were met with spinners that never stopped spinning. PDF packets arrived blank if they arrived at all. The live CRM data was sinking backwards, pulling stale entries and overwriting fresh leads without dated info. At 7:08, the first fire alarm hit support.
Big client says their entire onboarding dock shows someone else’s data, names, emails, everything. 710. Why are user IDs mapping to the wrong accounts? At 7:12, Karen, are you seeing this? But Karen wasn’t in the building. She was sitting in a corner booth at Miller’s Diner 3, wearing sunglasses indoors and nursing a mug of burnt coffee.
The waitress, bless her, didn’t ask questions. Just refilled her cup and slid over the laminated dessert menu like she knew Karen was mourning something no one could see. Phone buzzed like a trapped bee on the table. Slack was hemorrhaging. A 130 message pileup in hash launch support. Sales reps were tagging everyone with a pulse.
DevOps was spinning in circles. Someone uploaded a screenshot of the admin dashboard showing a total onboarding completion rate of 3%. 3%. And then came the voice calls. Executives screaming into Zoom like hostages in a Wi-Fi war zone. Who built this script? Where’s the failover? Is anyone even logging this? Where the hell is Karen? That one popped up four times in Slack, in Teams, even as a voicemail. Karen didn’t answer.
She flagged them all and silently archived each notification like she was folding memories into a shoe box. She scrolled through screenshots of broken templates. Slack quotes blaming legacy Karen logic and Brendan’s increasingly panicked updates. Just a hiccup in the config files, deploying a hot fix in 10 7:32.
A junior dev pinged the CTO privately and leaked it 2 minutes later. We can’t even trace the failure point. There are six nested patches on top of each other. No one knows what Brendan actually changed. Karen smiled, not cruy, not smug, like someone watching the tide come in exactly as the moon promised it would.
She signaled the waitress. I’ll take the cherry pie. Warmed up, please. She said it’s a big day. Her phone lit up again. It’s time from HR. The subject line, urgent availability request. She closed it without opening because somewhere across town, people were scrambling over the ruins of what used to be her work, her structure, her scaffolding.
And they were finally realizing the foundation had been pulled weeks ago quietly, carefully without them even noticing. And now they were screaming for the only person who could have saved them. But Karen wasn’t coming. She had pie. She had silence. She had no interest in rebuilding what they were so eager to throw away.
Karen was halfway through her second bite of cherry pie, still warm, crust flaking just right when her phone buzzed softly on the vinyl tabletop. Subject: final signature received body. Contract executed. Welcome aboard. Keystone is now live. She exhaled slow. The kind of breath you only let go when you’ve been holding your entire self in for 3 years straight.
She tapped the screen once, opened the attached PDF, and scrolled through signatures like a surgeon reviewing clean vitals after a risky operation. All there, every clause, every safeguard, every comma, she triple checked. Her mirror system, Keystone, was now the core onboarding platform for the largest competitor her former employer had ever feared.
an exclusivity clause signed, sealed, and delivered, which meant her old company couldn’t license it, couldn’t copy it, even approach anything similar without risking a lawsuit so sharp it would make their general counsel cry into his branded Patagonia vest. She stirred her coffee, let the silence sink in. Slack was still pinging in the background, but she’d muted it 20 minutes ago.
There were still threads begging for answers, theories being floated, postmortems already halfwritten, while Brendan blamed legacy formatting conflicts, and tried to deploy a roll back he didn’t understand. Too late. At 8:13 a.m., she opened her inbox one last time and composed a single email to HR. Subject re request for availability for my updated NDA clause.
All further contact should be directed to legal. Regards, Karen. She hit send, closed the laptop, and sat there watching the diner hum around her like the world was finally spinning at the right speed again. The waitress returned, offered more coffee. “Celebrating something?” she asked. Karen smiled. “Yeah, I finally quit a job I wasn’t allowed to leave.
” The woman nodded like she understood more than she let on. “Hell of a thing.” Across town, her old company was having the worst morning of its fiscal year. Client escalations, refund demands, marketing in full PR scramble mode, and in one boardroom, a whiteboard now bore the hastily scribbled phrase, mitigating key person risk.
Someone had finally said it out loud. Too late, of course. But still, it made its way into the minutes. They’d finally realized what they lost. And Karen Karen didn’t need an apology. She didn’t need applause or headlines or petty revenge. She just needed the quiet, the clean code, the signed contract. The system that would never carry Brendan’s fingerprints and pie. God, the pie was good.
Appreciate you sticking around, you wise old rebels. Smash that subscribe button or this fossil might just cause another epic fiasco.
