Memo #2 — The Writing on the Wall

✏️ Memo #2 - The Writing on the Wall

Before FFS, there was my old job.

I won’t name the company because I still believe in professional discretion, plausible deniability, and not wasting my future legal fund on men who describe themselves as “disruptive leaders” because they once moved a meeting to Thursday.

But I will say this.

By the end, the place had the energy of a group project where everyone had lost the instructions and the loudest person had appointed himself captain because he owned a whistle.

I had four bosses in one year.

Four.

At that point, you stop updating the org chart and start treating leadership changes like weather.

“Oh, we have a new VP? Lovely. Should I bring a cardigan or a resignation letter?”

Boss Four was the problem.

He arrived with a title, a volume setting, and the emotional range of a LinkedIn post about excellence.

He liked to talk over people.

Not occasionally.

As a hobby.

Possibly as cardio.

He had this habit of saying my name repeatedly while explaining things I already knew, which is how you know a man is trying to establish dominance and has definitely skimmed a leadership book in an airport.

Boss Four: B, what I think B needs to understand is that B has to become more strategic.

Thank you.

B will alert B.

He was not tall in spirit, let’s put it that way.

But in meetings?

Enormous.

He could fill a room with confidence and absolutely no useful information.

It was almost athletic.

Meanwhile, the company was bleeding money.

Not dramatically.

No sirens. No smoke. No one carrying bankers’ boxes through reception while pretending they were “just reorganizing storage.”

More in the quiet corporate way where the biscuits disappear from the kitchen, travel approvals suddenly need “extra review,” and Finance starts attending meetings they previously avoided like there was a curse on the invite.

Then there was Oliver.

Oliver was younger, clever, fast, and hydrated to a level I found medically unnecessary.

He wore expensive trainers, said things like “low-key obsessed,” and could build a slide deck in the time it took me to find the one I had saved somewhere sensible, which of course meant I would never see it again.

He was lovely.

Annoyingly lovely.

This was inconvenient because I prefer my professional threats to be less charming.

He also made, as far as I could tell, approximately half of what I made.

Which is when the writing on the wall stopped being metaphorical and started wearing a name badge.

I could feel it coming.

Not because anyone said anything directly.

Companies rarely do.

They prefer to communicate through tiny behavioural clues, like emotionally unavailable boyfriends with HR departments.

A meeting disappears from your calendar.

A project you used to own becomes “shared.”

Someone asks you to document your process.

Someone else says, “We just want to make sure there’s coverage.”

Coverage.

The corporate word for “please train the cheaper person before we escort your dignity to the parking lot.”

My work bestie, Nina, saw it too.

Nina had the gift of saying horrifying things in a cheerful tone, which is one of the reasons I loved her immediately and trusted her completely.

She had been there through Boss One, Boss Two, Boss Three, and now Boss Four, whom she referred to privately as The Human Caps Lock.

Unkind.

Accurate, but unkind.

After one particularly grim meeting where he used the phrase “own the urgency” six times and produced no decisions whatsoever, Nina messaged me.

Nina: Just checking. Are we being empowered or replaced?
Me: Hard to say. The lighting was bad.
Nina: I think empowered. But in the severance-adjacent sense.
Me: Lovely. I’ll update my values statement.

This was Nina’s role in my life.

Part witness.

Part emergency contact.

Part Greek chorus with a Teams account.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the only person in the building who could say “what the actual fuck” with her eyebrows.

The final clue came in a “quick chat.”

A quick chat is never quick and rarely a chat.

It is a scheduled ambush wearing business casual.

Boss Four wanted to discuss “future structure,” “role clarity,” and “aligning cost pressures with operational priorities.”

Which sounded fancy.

What it meant was:

We are broke.
You are expensive.
Oliver is not.
Please keep smiling while we slowly remove your chair.

I nodded in the correct places.

I have been working long enough to recognize when a conversation is wearing a costume.

This one had a fake moustache, a severance package in its manbag, and the stale smell of a decision already made.

So I went home, opened my laptop, and stared at my résumé.

It looked tired.

Not bad.

Just tired.

Like it had attended too many meetings, absorbed too many acronyms, and quietly lost the will to bullet point.

I tried to update it myself.

Everything I wrote sounded either painfully modest or like I was applying to manage a regional paperclip division in 2008.

So I asked AI for help.

Just to polish it.

Just to make it sound a little less like I had been raised to believe confidence was rude.

Just to see what the ballsier version of me might look like on paper.

And my God, she was impressive.

Apparently, AI had no trouble saying things about me that I would only admit under sedation.

Strategic leader.
Operationally agile.
Cross-functional problem solver.

I read it and thought:

Who is this woman, and why has she been letting me answer emails for her?

Then I sent it.

Because sometimes a person reaches a point where the options are:

I chose door number two.

And here is the uncomfortable truth.

Part of me was relieved.

Not because I wanted to be pushed out.

Not because I wanted another boss, another password, another onboarding portal with a cheerful video about culture that makes you want to put your head through drywall.

But because sometimes the door you were too sensible to open gets kicked in by someone else’s cost-cutting exercise.

And once it’s open, you can either stand there holding your sad desk plant and your dignity, or you can look through it.

I looked through it.

There was FFS.

Future Forward Solutions.

A company claiming to be “reimagining wellness at scale,” which sounded suspicious as hell, but not necessarily worse than being slowly replaced by a man who shouted strategy at women.

So I applied.

Or rather, AI and I applied.

A small but legally important distinction.

Nina said it best.

Nina: Honestly, B, this may be the universe giving you a shove.
Me: I prefer a written transition plan.
Nina: The universe does not use templates.
Me: That explains a lot.

Two weeks later, FFS called.

Apparently, they were impressed.

So was I.

Mostly with the résumé.

And that is how I went from watching the writing on the wall to accidentally drafting my own escape route.

New company.

New title.

Same ability to spot nonsense in a blazer.

And somewhere in the background, a tab remains open.

Not for another job this time.

For somewhere else entirely.

B.