![[My Life, Revised_Chapter 2.mp3]]I went back to my desk still holding my coffee, sat down, logged into my computer, and opened my email just so I had something to stare at while I tried to process what had apparently happened to me. I have a lot of experience looking busy at work. Probably more experience than I have doing anything that would impress a normal person. This was the only company I'd worked for since I graduated college, which sounds better than it is. People hear that and think loyalty or stability or some kind of career trajectory. Really it mostly means I got used to one kind of disappointment and kept cashing the checks. We sold food-processing equipment at Meridian Process Solutions. Pumps, separators, heat exchangers, stainless-steel things with polished brochures, heroic stock photos, and absurd price tags. Or technically I sold it, though "sold" was generous. I was a sales associate. Mostly I made quotes, resentfully answered questions that were already addressed in the catalog, and moved paperwork from one inbox to another until a machine showed up somewhere and everyone acted like that counted as value. Sometimes there would even be one of those congratulatory internal emails where six people replied-all `Great work team` as if we'd done anything more noble than successfully move a stainless-steel rectangle across state lines. As far as I was concerned, my job ended once the quote was out and the order moved downstream. I wasn't there to hold anybody's hand. I wasn't there to think for the customer. I definitely wasn't there to be morally accountable for what happened after they'd signed off. So I knew the routine. Open Outlook. Click around. Change what was on the screen every so often. Keep one hand near the mouse. Furrow your brow a little bit like you're evaluating something unpleasant but necessary. Maybe open a PDF of a product bulletin nobody was going to read and let it sit there like evidence. Bradley didn't usually care what I was actually doing as long as, from a distance, I looked like one of his sales associates was in motion. As far as he was concerned, management meant keeping bodies pointed in the direction of work. If a body was upright, facing a monitor, with a green Teams dot and not openly revolting, that usually counted. I stared at my screen until the letters started to blur together. Then I stared through the screen. I was in no condition to think about work yet. I just kept circling the same impossible thought. I write in a journal, and somehow that changes my life? It was absurd. I wanted to tell somebody. Not to investigate it. Not to test it. Just to say it out loud to another person and hear how insane it sounded in the air. But obviously I couldn't do that. If I told anybody, they'd think I'd lost my mind. And maybe they would be right. Maybe I had lost my mind. Maybe I was having some kind of break. Maybe I only imagined staying home all weekend. Except my calves were still burning from the hike. Except my body kept messing it up. My legs hurt. My shoulders hurt. There was dirt on my shoes. Victoria remembered me being there. She remembered things I had said. She remembered me complaining, which honestly made it harder to dismiss because that sounded like me at least. If she'd told me I'd been cheerful the whole time I probably could've thrown the whole thing out immediately. I kept trying different explanations anyway. Maybe I went and forgot. Maybe I dreamed staying home. Maybe there was some stress thing or sleep thing or brain thing that would eventually get a real name. I kept doing that over and over until I was too tired to keep doing it. After a while I more or less gave up on making it make sense right then. Something had happened. Fine. I still didn't understand it. A couple hours went by like that. Then a couple more. Every now and then I clicked into a different email or opened a quote or moved a window around so nobody walking by would see the same screen frozen there forever and start getting ideas. Mostly I was waiting for lunch so I could run home and read that letter again. I wanted to see the rules one more time. Maybe there was some line I had skipped. Maybe I read something wrong. Maybe there was something in there that would make this feel at least a little less insane. During that whole stretch I had the same half-written email open to Aries Corporation. That was the customer who had approved a quote for one throughput and one footprint on a heat-exchanger package, then came back after release wanting nearly double the line speed without changing the space, the utilities, or the delivery date. Which, somehow, had now become my emergency. Never mind that I had basically treated the whole thing like a menu. Here are the options. Here are the specs. Pick one and sign. I hadn't really pushed them. I hadn't really guided them. I hadn't said, with any seriousness, this one fits what you're actually trying to do and this one doesn't. I just gave them the catalog and answered whatever question they managed to form badly enough for it to reach my desk. I was maybe three sentences into a response when Victoria had derailed my entire understanding of reality, and the draft had just sat there ever since. Two hours, maybe more. Same email. Same blinking cursor. Same apologetic corporate font. By then the whole screen had that cooked, overused look to it, like my brain had been sitting under the same fluorescent hum too long. Apparently it showed, because the thing that finally snapped me out of it was Bradley yelling my name from his office. "Derek. Derek." I turned and saw him through the glass. He lifted a hand and called again. "Derek, can you come in here?" So I got up and walked over in kind of a shell-shocked daze. I was tired already from not sleeping much the night before, and now all that confusion had settled into me like wet concrete. Bradley's office was as cluttered as always. Papers stacked where papers shouldn't be. Product sheets. A few family pictures. One of his kids had drawn something in crayon that was taped to a filing cabinet. There was a little whiteboard with lead numbers on it and a coffee cup that looked old enough to qualify as evidence. In one of the framed photos his wife had her head leaned against his shoulder and one of the kids was on his lap. Just a normal happy picture. Nothing remarkable. Which was probably why it annoyed me. He motioned to the chair across from his desk. "Take a seat." I sat down and said, "What is this about?" He turned his monitor slightly toward himself and said, "I can't help but notice you still haven't responded to the customer complaint from Aries. They seem pretty upset." "Yeah," I said. "I'm working on it. I'm writing the email." He looked at me for a second, then back at the screen. "I can see that you've been writing the email all morning. We've also had a couple new leads come in, and you've ignored both of them. I need you focused on work." "Yeah. Sure. I just have a lot on my mind right now." He gave me that look managers give when they want to pretend they are being patient with a category of human problem rather than an actual person. "Whatever it is, can it wait until you're back on your own time?" "Yeah," I said. "Sure. Whatever." Then he leaned back a little and looked me right in the eye. "I really need you to take more responsibility around here." "Yeah," I said. "I got it." This was not the first time Bradley and I had this conversation, and I doubt it would have been the last if things had continued the way they were going. Just seeing him could put a bad taste in my mouth. Not because he was uniquely terrible, honestly. That would have been easier. It was because he was a walking reminder of how unfair I thought the company was. I'd been there longer than he had. Longer by about a year. And yet somehow he was the one with the office, the title, the little managerial tone, the family photos on the desk that made him look settled and adult and legitimate. He had shown up after me and still ended up above me. I couldn't stand that. It felt like evidence. At the time I wouldn't have said it that way. At the time it was simpler than that. I hated his face. Hated the calm way he talked to me when I was already wound up. Hated that he had a wife, kids, a promotion, and some kind of basic confidence in the shape of his life. And I figured all the extra little things he did were mostly kiss-ass behavior for his own boss. Follow up fast, remember details, act like every customer issue was life or death, say the right responsible-sounding thing in meetings. That was how I saw him. So when he told me again to focus, something in me flared up. "Focus on what?" I said. "The Aries customer? Nobody over there knows what they want. They signed off on one throughput, one footprint, one utility package, and now suddenly they want the line to run twice as fast and still fit in the same space. Then they act shocked when the schedule slips. They agreed to that schedule because of the ridiculous sales contract they signed. Honestly, I don't even know if we should be doing business with them." Bradley didn't rise to it. He almost never did. He just said, "You're the expert on the system. They don't know how to use the equipment." "It says it in the catalog," I said. "The line speeds are in there. The utility requirements are in there. Can't they just read?" That got me going, so I kept going. I told him I was tired of walking customers through the same options over and over like the brochure was written in ancient Greek. I told him none of the available choices were ever good enough once I actually laid them out. I told him that somehow every bad decision upstream became my problem by the time it landed in my inbox. I also left out that "laying out the options" usually meant I refused to recommend anything if recommending it might make it more my problem later. Bradley leaned forward a little then, which usually meant he was about to stop talking like a manager and start talking like someone trying not to watch a car drift into a guardrail. "Derek, you're acting like your job ends when the quote goes out," he said. "It doesn't. They're buying an outcome. If they don't understand what they need, you need to help them get there. And right now you need to call Aries, apologize that they ended up with the wrong spec, and help fix it." And then Bradley gave me one of his little commandments. He'd said versions of it so many times that it had basically turned into office scripture. "Derek," he said, "we don't sell machines. We sell peace of mind." That was one of Bradley's favorites. He'd say it in meetings like it was supposed to settle something. We don't sell machines. We sell peace of mind. Like I worked in some boutique store with scented candles instead of a building full of stainless steel and laminated spec sheets. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said. "I've heard it." He ignored that. "You're not listening to me. I need this client to feel taken care of. I need you to own this all the way through. That starts with apologizing." "Well, I was already halfway done writing an email to them anyways," I said. "No," he said. "Please call them." I leaned back in the chair and stared at him for a second. An email was distance. An email was documentation. An email meant I could say exactly what I wanted to say without having to hear disappointment or confusion or anger in real time. "Apologize?" I said. "For what? They picked it." He kept looking at me. "For where they ended up. Yes." I actually laughed once through my nose when he said it. I had done my part. I got the quote out. I answered their questions. They made the choice. Saying sorry for their mistake sounded less like responsibility and more like humiliation in a collared shirt. "Sure," I said. "Yeah. I got it. Can I go now?" It looked like he had more to say. I could actually see him deciding whether it was worth trying one more time. "I'm serious," he said. "I'm trying to get you to think bigger than just moving paper." There it was. One of those lines people use right before they explain why your life is your own fault. I was already done listening by then. The apology was not happening. Bradley liked to manage, but he also liked efficiency, and once he decided a conversation wasn't paying out, he'd cut his losses. So I stood up, walked back out of the office, and dropped into my chair hard enough that it gave a little squeak under me. For a minute I just stared at the phone and the half-written Aries email and replayed the conversation in my head with all the important parts corrected so that I was clearly right and Bradley was clearly insane. Apologize. That was the part that kept sticking in my throat. Not call them. Not fix it. Apologize. I could maybe understand calling them, even though I didn't want to. But apologizing for their mistake? For them ordering the wrong model, approving the wrong throughput, agreeing to the wrong setup, then acting betrayed when reality stayed consistent with the thing they had signed? That was ridiculous. That was the kind of logic this company loved. The customer can light his own hair on fire and somehow sales is supposed to apologize for the smoke. I sat there and ran Aries through the same mental shredder I always used on customers once they got under my skin. They never read. They never decided anything until after they'd already decided it wrong. Then suddenly everybody else was supposed to apologize because machines had dimensions. The worst part was that I knew exactly what Bradley wanted. The soft voice. The careful pause. Some sentence with `I'm sorry` in it that was somehow supposed to cover a food plant full of adults not knowing what they were doing. He wanted me to stand there and absorb the whole thing like that was the job. As far as I was concerned, it wasn't. Quote goes out. They sign it. Stainless steel appears somewhere. End of my department. I was a sales associate, not a priest. Still, he was my boss. And he was watching. So I let another minute burn off, picked up the phone, looked at the number on the Aries file, and called. I got their project manager after two rings. "Aries Corporation, this is Nolan." "Hey, Nolan, this is Derek Ryan from Meridian Process Solutions." "Yeah," he said, like I'd interrupted something more important. "I wanted to follow up on the heat-exchanger package and, uh, talk through where things are with the specification." There was a pause. Then, "Okay." So I kept going, because at that point I was still trying, technically speaking, to do what Bradley had told me to do. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry this has become frustrating, and I'm sorry that you ended up with a configuration that's not meeting your expectations." And that was as far as I got. Nolan gave this little incredulous laugh and said, "Not meeting expectations? Derek, we told you this was going into an existing space. We told you our operators weren't technical. We told you we needed room for washdown and service access. Then you sent over a quote that reads like it was assembled by a Roomba with Outlook access. This whole thing's been handled like an idiot wrote it." That word hit me like a slap. Just because it was simple. Clean. Idiot. Not the quote. Not the process. Me. Something in me snapped into place immediately after that. Everything suddenly got simple. He had crossed the line first. That was enough. "No," I said, and my voice came up faster than I intended. "That's not what happened. You signed the quote. You approved the throughput. You approved the footprint. You approved the utility package. If you people don't know what you're ordering, that's not me being an idiot." He came right back at me. "We relied on you to guide us. That's literally your job." "My job," I said, louder now, aware I was saying it into the whole office whether I meant to or not, "is to quote the equipment you ask for. I am not responsible because your team can't read a spec sheet." At that point I knew people could hear me. The office had gone quiet in that particular way it does when somebody else's problem starts spilling over cubicle walls. I didn't lower my voice. Nolan said, "You know what? Forget it. I'll just call Bradley." "You know what?" I said. "That's fine. Deal with Bradley from now on." And I hung up. For a second I just sat there gripping the phone and breathing hard like I'd done something athletic instead of stupid. He had crossed the line first. He called me an idiot. He acted like I was supposed to babysit grown adults through a purchasing process. If he wanted Bradley so badly, great. He could have Bradley. When I looked up, a couple people in the office were watching me with that careful neutral expression people use when they don't want to become part of whatever just happened. One of the engineers turned back to his monitor so fast it was almost charitable. Somebody in accounting had frozen halfway through opening a bag of trail mix. "That project manager is an asshole," I said to nobody in particular. "And I had to deal with him like an asshole." Nobody said anything. I set the phone down, sat back, and tried to get back to work. I clicked into the CRM. Looked at my inbox. Opened one lead, closed it, opened another, stared at the notes. My body still had all that leftover heat in it from the call. It was hard to settle down. Hard to care. I looked at the clock in the corner of my screen. 11:30. Close enough. I stood up, grabbed my keys, and started walking. Behind me I heard Bradley's voice from his office. "Derek. Where are you going?" I didn't stop. "On my lunch break," I said. "Am I allowed to have that still?" I didn't wait for an answer. I just kept going out the back door, across the lot, and into my car. The second I shut the door I started replaying the call in my favor. I can't believe that guy called me an idiot. That client is ridiculous. They don't know what they're saying. They don't know what they want. All they had to do was read. I backed out, pulled onto the street, and kept running the same loop while I drove home. If nobody else was going to hear me be right about it, apparently my own brain would have to. He called me an idiot. He approved the quote. He approved the specs. What the hell was I supposed to do, climb through the phone and force him to understand a catalog? Maybe I should have just taken a second and calmed down. Maybe I should have let him talk and handled it differently. Then the light changed and I thought, no, fuck that. Fuck that client. They suck. They don't know what they want. All they have to do is read. A few minutes later I was back at my apartment. I went upstairs, unlocked the door, and headed straight for the kitchen junk drawer. The journal was still there. I left it where it was and pulled out the letter instead, then took it to the couch and sat down with it spread open in both hands like I was about to study for an exam in delusion. I read through it again. The same rules. The same calm, matter-of-fact tone that was somehow more unsettling than if it had sounded mystical. Real past choice-points. No impossible knowledge. No changing other people. Only my decisions. Sunday night. That was the line I kept coming back to. Only my decisions. I sat there turning different fantasies over in my mind and watching each one get rejected by the page before I even fully formed it. Maybe if I just had a raise. Maybe if I just switched places with Bradley. Maybe if somebody competent higher up had seen what was really going on and promoted the right person in the first place. Bradley didn't deserve it anyway. Except every time I followed one of those thoughts out, I hit the same wall. Not other people's decisions. Not reality directly. Mine. I slumped back on the couch and stared at the ceiling with the letter in my lap. Why does anyone have to work at all? Why was it set up like this in the first place. That was what I didn't get. You show up somewhere five days a week, sit under bad lights, answer emails nobody should have to answer, talk to people you would never choose to talk to, and if you don't do it with the right attitude suddenly you're the problem. As if food and shelter and a little breathing room are some prize you win for being sufficiently agreeable in a beige building. It just felt like a scam when I thought about it too long. Like, sorry, I need permission to exist unless I can make somebody else money first? And even then it's not enough. You still have to care more. Smile more. Own more. Stay later. Why? Why does every version of adult life come with somebody standing there asking what else you've got? I looked at the clock. 12:18. Shit. I folded the letter, stuck it in my pocket, left the journal in the junk drawer, and headed back out to the car. On the way to the office I stopped at a place called Coastline Burger, which was close enough to the office that half the building practically treated it like a cafeteria. I got a double burger, fries, and a Coke. Food usually helped. Not in any grand way. It just gave my brain one more stupid little physical thing to do besides replay the same argument. By the time I was back in the car with the bag open on the passenger seat, the fries had already started doing what fries do. Hot, salty, a little too crisp at the ends. A few minutes of that and the inside of my head wasn't quite as loud. By the time I got back to the office, most of the heat had gone out of me. I sat down, finished the fries, wiped my hands on a napkin, and called back a couple of the leads I'd ignored that morning. Nothing dramatic. Just back to the grind. Back to acting like the day was still normal enough to continue. The rest of that Monday went by in the same dull office rhythm everything there eventually collapsed into. Phone calls. Emails. Quotes. Product sheets. The fake urgency of internal follow-ups. People asking for status updates on things they had no intention of helping with. A sales huddle where somebody said `visibility` three times and nobody improved as a result. Room-temperature coffee. Conference-room air that always smelled faintly like dry-erase marker and old bagels. I called back the leads I had ignored, did just enough to keep my name from floating to the top of anybody's list again, and let the day flatten out. By Tuesday I had already started telling myself that maybe the whole Aries thing had burned off a little. Nobody hauled me into an office. Nobody gave me another speech. Bradley was around, but not on top of me every five seconds. I did catch him once coming off a call with that tight look on his face and glancing over at my desk, but he kept moving. The air had that slight loosening to it that makes you think maybe you survived the worst of something. So I took what was offered. I came in a little later. Not absurdly late. Just late enough that if someone noticed it, it would feel petty to mention. I let lunch run long a couple times. Left a little earlier once. Sat on emails longer than I needed to. Moved slower. The whole week had that same padded, low-stakes quality to it, like I had somehow slipped just outside the main beam of attention. It felt like maybe I was finally getting a little room to breathe. Maybe people were backing off. Maybe somebody had realized I didn't need to be micromanaged every second like some teenager at his first job. Or maybe everybody was just busy and I was flattering myself, which was less fun, so I didn't spend much time on that version. Mostly, though, it just made the days feel even more dead. And when work got dead, my mind kept sliding right back to the journal. Not in some noble, focused way either. More like poking at sore spots. I'd be halfway through some dumb quote and suddenly think maybe I should've handled Aries differently before it got this bad. Maybe I should've slowed one of those early calls down and made Nolan actually explain what they were trying to do instead of pretending I understood enough and rushing him off the phone. Then it'd slide sideways into other things. Maybe I should've said something different to Bradley in that office. Maybe I should've just answered leads faster for a week and stopped acting like everything was beneath me. Then outside-work stuff would sneak in too. Maybe I should go back to the gym instead of thinking about going back to the gym. Maybe I should stop burning whole nights on my phone. Cook once in a while. Call my mom and not sound irritated the second she asks a normal question. Talk to Victoria a little less like everybody's wasting my time. Then, because my brain is my brain, it'd drift right into the useless fantasy versions. More money without having to become one of those people who loves calendars. A promotion. Bradley somehow not ending up Bradley. Same life, just arranged better. Once I started doing that, it got hard to stop. Every boring stretch at work turned into this private little game of rearranging things I hadn't done yet or things I maybe could still get back to if I picked the right moment. But the letter had said Sunday night. I kept coming back to that. Sunday night. So I told myself I didn't have to know yet. I had time. I could keep thinking about it. I could wait until the end of the week and decide then. I kept checking the clock. 10:14. 11:02. 1:37. 2:11. Just making sure time was, in fact, continuing and had not decided to park itself over our building out of spite. By Friday afternoon I was already mentally gone. I had one browser tab open with a quote I was pretending to review and another with shipping notes I had no intention of dealing with until Monday. I was maybe twenty minutes from leaving when my desk phone rang. I almost let it go to voicemail. Then I saw the extension and picked up. "Derek," the voice said, "come see me please." It took me a second to place it, mostly because I almost never heard it directly. It was Bradley's boss. His name was Martin Calder, though nobody called him Martin. Around the office it was always `Mr. Calder`, even when he wasn't there, which told you pretty much everything you needed to know about him. He had been with the company forever. Long enough that people spoke about him the way people talk about freeway exits or old stadiums, like he had become part of the local geography. I didn't deal with him much. Which was fine with me. Every time I did, the whole interaction had this tight, formal, unpleasant quality to it, like accidentally finding yourself underdressed at a funeral. His office was in another part of the building I almost never had reason to walk through. The carpet even looked different over there. Quieter. More expensive. Less coffee-stained. As I headed that way past doors and framed product photos and people whose names I only half remembered, another thought started building itself automatically. Maybe after all this time somebody had finally decided to correct the obvious mistake. I'd been here for years. Longer than Bradley. Longer than a lot of people. Maybe the whole weird tension of the week, the relative quiet, the not-being-hassled, maybe that had been something else. Maybe this was finally the conversation where somebody admitted I had been overlooked. Maybe this was where I finally got what I deserved. "Come in," he said. Calder looked exactly how a man named Calder should look if you worked in an industrial sales office. Balding on top, gray around the sides, broad face, heavy glasses, expression already arranged into managerial disappointment before a word had been spoken. His desk was too clean. Not empty. Clean. Everything aligned. Yellow legal pad squared to the edge. Pen parallel to it. Monitor angled just so. There was no trace anywhere that a child had ever drawn him anything in crayon. He pointed at the chair. "Sit down." I sat. He didn't ease into it. "We're ending your employment effective today." For a second I honestly thought maybe I had misheard him. "What?" "Your employment is terminated effective today," he repeated. Same tone. Same posture. Like he was clarifying a shipping date. I looked at him for a second and then said, "Why are you doing this?" That came out a little sharper than I intended, but not by much. He folded his hands on the desk. "Because this is not one incident. Aries was the latest incident." He started talking then in the clipped, pre-arranged way people do when they've already said the thing once to HR and once to themselves and now they're saying it a third time to you. Aries was one of their largest clients. They'd done a substantial amount of business with them over the years. Other people in the company had managed those accounts successfully. They could not have a sales associate mishandling communication with a customer at that level. He referenced the phone call. The language. The refusal to take ownership. Then he moved quickly into other examples, which was somehow worse because it meant there had been a list. Delayed follow-ups. Slow quote turnaround. Poor handoff notes. Customers left uncertain about recommended options. An unwillingness to do the extra work necessary to make sure projects landed cleanly. At one point he said, "Bradley has gone to bat for you more than once." That was the closest he got to sounding human. Then he went right back to being rigid. "But at a certain point," he said, "the pattern is the pattern. You're not giving us enough to justify keeping you." I didn't have much to say after that. Part of me was still waiting for the room to change shape and reveal some alternate meaning. A warning. A suspension. A last chance. Something. Instead Calder slid a cardboard box across the desk toward me. "Take what you need. Leave your badge with reception on the way out." That was it. I stood up, took the box, and walked back through the office in that strange tunnel where you can feel people noticing without looking directly at them. When I got back to my desk, I set the box down and started picking things up one by one. A couple pens. A charger. Old notebooks. Product binders I had no desire to ever look at again. A cracked coffee mug I hadn't liked in the first place. Half the stuff sitting there didn't even feel like mine. It felt like props from a set I'd been standing on too long. I threw away more than I packed. By the time I was done, the box held barely anything. I took it to the car, set it on the passenger seat, and started driving home. Then, at a stoplight near the coast, I looked over and saw the sky. The sky was all copper and pink and gold in a way that honestly felt a little insulting given the day. The beach was right there. Literally right there, maybe a quarter mile off. And the first thing I thought was that I'd worked in that office all this time with the ocean basically next door and still spent most of my days under fluorescent lights staring at stainless-steel spec sheets like some kind of idiot. So instead of going home, I turned. I parked near the sand, left the box in the car, took off my shoes, and started walking. The sand was cool already where the sun had dropped lower, and every so often I'd hit a patch still holding the day's heat. I walked near the edge where the sand got packed darker and flatter by the water. Picked up a couple stones and skipped them badly. Watched one actually go three hops and then felt weirdly satisfied by that, which probably says something unflattering about the state I was in. Mostly I just walked. If you're going to feel bad for yourself, the ocean is a pretty solid background. I kept running the day back through my head. Calder's voice. The box. `Effective today.` The fact that Bradley had apparently defended me, which I didn't especially enjoy knowing. The fact that I'd still gotten fired anyway. A lot of old disappointments started crowding in too, because once your mind has one open slot for `here we go again` it tends to fill the whole board. By the time I turned back toward the parking lot, the sun was lower and the air had cooled off enough that people were zipping jackets and carrying shoes in their hands. That's when I saw Bradley. He was walking toward the water in a wetsuit with a board tucked under one arm like this was the most ordinary thing in the world. There was sand stuck to one ankle and a little block of wax in his free hand. I almost didn't say anything. Then I did. "Hey, Bradley." He looked over, saw me, and slowed. "Hey, Derek." There was a pause there. Not awkward exactly. Just careful. "So," I said, because apparently I was going to be the one to do it, "I guess you heard." He shifted the board under his arm. "Yeah." "Calder did it about an hour ago." "I know." I nodded once and looked out at the water, mostly so I didn't have to look directly at him while I kept talking. "Pretty unbelievable," I said. "After all this time." He didn't jump in to agree. He also didn't give me the corporate line. "I'm sorry it happened like that," he said. That was soft enough that I looked back at him. "Like that?" I said. "You mean at all?" He let that sit for a second. "I mean both," he said. That irritated me a little, but not enough to keep talking over him. "You surf?" I asked, because for some reason that seemed just as important suddenly. He glanced down at the board, rubbed the wax across the top in one absent-minded pass, and then looked back at me. "Yeah. Usually Fridays if I can get out in time." "I didn't know that." He gave this tiny shrug. "You probably didn't know a lot about me." That hit me more than it should have, mostly because he wasn't even trying to be a dick about it. "Fair enough," I said. He looked out toward the water. "It's good, honestly. Gets everything down to one thing at a time. No phone. No inbox. No kids climbing on me. No wife asking what time I'll be home. Just waves. And if you screw up out there, at least it's a real thing." He said it matter-of-factly, not like a man selling his lifestyle. Just stating the terms of a temporary escape route. "Sounds nice," I said. "It is." We stood there for another second. Then I said, "Did you really defend me?" He looked at me, and for the first time all day nobody seemed eager to make me feel smaller than I already was. "Yeah," he said. "Of course I did." I didn't know what to do with that. He adjusted the board again and said, "Half the time talking to you was frustrating because you'd catch the problem fast and then act like noticing it meant you were done." "Then why let them fire me?" "I didn't let them do anything." He said it calmly, but not cold. "I just couldn't keep covering the same ground for you." I looked away again. "Aries was a mess," I said. "Honestly, half the problem is that the people you work with on those projects don't know anything. If the clients were just a little more knowledgeable, or easier to deal with, or even just better at saying what they actually need, half this stuff wouldn't turn into a disaster." Bradley looked out at the water for a second. Then he said, "You can't surf the waves you wish were there. Only the ones that are." I laughed a little at that and kept watching him paddle out. "Yeah," I said. "Okay." He nodded out toward the water. "I should get in before the light drops." "Yeah," I said. "Sure." "Take care of yourself, Derek." Then he headed down toward the water and left me standing there holding nothing. I watched him paddle out. That line stayed with me while I sat on the sand and watched him move farther from shore. You can't surf the waves you wish were there. Only the ones that are. The longer I sat there, the more that call with Nolan started replaying, but not in the version I'd been using. Not the version where he was just a moron and I was the only competent adult left in North America. The actual version. Him saying they were putting it into an existing space. Him saying the operators weren't technical. Him saying they needed room to wash the thing down and get at it for service. I had heard all of that. I remembered hearing it. I had just filed it under the category of `stuff they should already understand before it becomes my problem` and kept moving. Not in some noble way. More in the annoying way where once you notice one bad little truth, a couple others come walking in behind it. I kept watching Bradley out there. He'd paddle, wait, miss one, turn around, paddle again. No visible argument with the ocean. No outrage that the wave wasn't cleaner or bigger or in a more convenient place. He wasn't out there standing on the shore yelling about the waves he would have preferred. Which, now that I think about it, was pretty much my whole approach to work. I wanted the customers to know more. I wanted Bradley to leave me alone. I wanted the job to be simpler. I wanted the hard part of every conversation to somehow happen before it got to me. And when it didn't, I mostly acted offended. It felt more like getting cornered by a pattern I had been using for a long time and realizing it was embarrassingly obvious once you stopped calling it bad luck. Aries wasn't just one bad customer. It was me hearing enough to know they were out of their depth and deciding that was still close enough to not my problem. It was me preferring a shorter call over a cleaner outcome. It was me liking the part of the job where I could say `here are the options` and then disappear. By the time the sun dropped lower, I still didn't have anything I would call wisdom. I just had a more irritating version of the story. One where I was still not wrong about everything, but I also wasn't nearly as innocent as I'd been acting. So when I got up and walked back to my car, I wasn't thinking, okay, now I understand life. I was mostly thinking, great, now I get to be unemployed and also partly at fault. Really excellent development. At home I went straight to the kitchen junk drawer, took out the journal, and brought it to the table more because I didn't know what else to do with all of it than because I had some plan. I sat there with the pen in my hand for a while without writing anything. The apartment was getting darker around me. The page stayed blank. That actually felt about right. Eventually I wrote one line. Don't act like confusion is an insult. I stared at it, then crossed it out. Then I wrote: If a customer sounds lost, slow down. Then I crossed that out too, because it sounded like something I'd nod at in a training and forget by lunch. I wrote a few more bad versions after that. Ask more. Stay on the phone. Stop rushing people. None of them felt real yet. They all felt like I was trying to write myself a new personality on a Friday night because I'd gotten fired and then run into Bradley heading out to surf. So I shut the journal, made something lazy for dinner, and spent the rest of the night being annoyed that Bradley's stupid surf line was still in my head. Saturday was worse in a quieter way. It didn't feel like a real Saturday because I didn't have a job anymore, so none of the usual relief had anywhere to land. I slept in. Scrolled. Made coffee. Opened the journal. Closed it. Read the letter again. Walked around the apartment like there was some chance a better answer was waiting in a different room. And I kept trying to redirect it. Maybe work wasn't even the thing. Maybe the whole point of the notebook was to fix something bigger or better. Money made more sense. My body made more sense. Go back and actually stick to the gym. Stop eating like a divorced man in a motel. Maybe it was Victoria. Maybe I should be thinking about dating or where I lived or some other area of my life that sounded more interesting than becoming a more attentive equipment salesman. But every time I tried to make the answer prettier than it was, the same irritation kept coming back. I had just lost a job over this exact pattern. Not the whole job, obviously. Not every single thing. But enough of it. Enough that pretending it was all about clients being dumb or Bradley being a company pet started sounding stale, even to me. That was the shift, I think. Not some big emotional breakthrough. More like my excuses losing a little of their flavor every time I repeated them. By Sunday I was sick of hearing myself explain it. I read the letter again. Only my decisions. Not the customers. Not Bradley. Not Calder. Not the fact that work is stupid in general and people shouldn't have to spend their lives doing it. Maybe all of that was still true. It just wasn't useful. It wasn't a lever. I couldn't do anything with it. My part was the only part I could actually get my hands on. Sunday afternoon I pulled the journal back out and tried again. This time I stopped trying to make it sound important. I wrote it the way I'd actually need it if I was the version of me on those calls. When somebody sounds like they don't really know what they're asking for, don't speed up. Slow down. Ask what they're trying to do. Ask what space they have. Ask who is using the equipment. Ask what they think they need and why. Write it down while they're talking. Read it back to them so both of you can hear whether it makes sense. If you know one option fits better, say so. If they still sound unsure, call them back before the quote goes out instead of pretending the catalog did your job for you. If something is half done, finish it. If it takes staying late, stay late. That finally felt like something I could actually do, which was irritating in its own way because it meant the answer wasn't hidden or mystical or even very impressive. It was just work. Slightly more careful work. The kind I had spent years acting was beneath me while also somehow failing at it. By Sunday night I had the journal back in the junk drawer and the letter folded beside it. I set an alarm before bed even though there was nowhere I had to be in the morning except my own life, which wasn't exactly great to think about right before trying to sleep. But I set it anyway.