Boss called me to his office with human resources. «Mark, after 17 years, we’re eliminating your position…

The security badge I’d just surrendered had been renewed 16 times. I started the engine and drove home. They had no idea Wednesday would be fun.

I’d been with Meridian since it was just two floors in a business park. Started when my daughter Olivia was in kindergarten. Now she was finishing grad school.

The company grew, and I grew with it. Turned down offers from competitors because loyalty mattered to me. My wife Andrea used to joke that the servers were my second family.

She wasn’t entirely wrong. I knew every system, every workaround, every backdoor solution to problems the executives didn’t even know existed. The infrastructure I’d built had survived three acquisitions and countless innovations that management embraced, then abandoned, months later.

Daniel became my boss five years ago. Young MBA type who called our department IT resources instead of people. He had ideas about streamlining, efficiency, digital transformation, buzzwords that usually meant doing more with less.

At first, I tried to help him understand our systems, the complexity buried under years of growth and adaptation. We need to future-proof, he’d say in meetings, looking right past me. Six months ago, he brought in a consultant named Jason Phillips.

Expensive suit, firm handshake, Stanford degree displayed prominently on his LinkedIn profile. They’d huddle in conference rooms, speaking quietly whenever I walked by. Three months ago, I noticed my access permissions being quietly modified.

Nothing obvious, just small changes to administrative controls. I could have protested, but instead I watched, documented. You seem distracted lately, Andrea said one night as we sat on the porch.

Is everything okay at work? I nodded, sipping my beer. Just changes, nothing I haven’t seen before. But these changes felt different.

I was being sidelined in meetings. Emails about system upgrades stopped including me. Younger team members were assigned to projects I would normally handle.

Then I found it, a company-wide memo about modernization initiatives that had never been shared with me. It outlined a complete restructuring of the IT department under new leadership, Jason Phillips. My position wasn’t even on the organizational chart.

That same day, I discovered something else. While running a routine security scan, one of those background tasks no one else bothered with anymore, I noticed unusual patterns in our financial software. Regular transfers to a vendor I didn’t recognize.

Apex Solutions Group. A quick search showed it was registered just last year with a business address that led to a UPS store. The authorized payments had started small but were growing each month.

I didn’t say anything, just noted it, copied the records, and continued watching. Sometimes the quiet man in the corner sees everything precisely because everyone thinks he sees nothing. The morning after I was let go, I sat in my home office staring at my personal laptop.

No alarm had woken me. No commute waited. Just silence and the weight of what had happened.

Andrea brought me coffee, placing it beside me without a word. After 19 years of marriage, she knew when I needed space. I’m going to the store, she said eventually.

Need anything? I shook my head. After she left, I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out a flash drive. One of several I kept secure.

Company policy strictly prohibited removing data. But years ago, when the legal team needed an audit system for tracking potential insider threats, I’d been clear about needing off-site backups. They’d signed off on it, then promptly forgotten.

I plugged it in and began reviewing the files. Internal emails. Meeting minutes I shouldn’t have had access to.

Financial records that normal employees would never see. There it was. A full history of payments to Apex Solutions Group.

Nearly $1.8 million over 18 months. The approval chain led directly to our CFO, Brian Wilcox. I dug deeper, cross-referencing dates and figures until the pattern emerged.

The payments aligned perfectly with a series of software license renewals for systems we used company-wide. But the amounts were inflated. Sometimes by 15%…