Fired for Black Coffee

Summary

At Monday’s meeting, my boss announced in front of everyone that I was fired for drinking my coffee without sugar. The excuse was ridiculous and everyone knew the truth. Victor Crane had decided his wife’s brother, Kyle Turner, had fully mastered my core technology. I was now a disposable pawn he was eager to remove.

The room went silent. Only Kyle, now VP, failed to hide his smirk. I had spent six years in R&D. First year, I was the only engineer, sleeping in the server room for forty-five hundred a month. Third year, when the system collapsed, I stayed up three days rewriting code. Victor was so moved he promised to take care of me for life. Fifth year, with over a million users, I led endless maintenance on twelve thousand a month. Before the holidays, Victor brought in Kyle, who barely finished middle school, as an intern and asked me to explain the core logic.

Now Victor believed Kyle had mastered the sacred art of copy and paste. I, the person who actually understood the technology, had become too hard to manage. He tapped the table, saying the company needed to get younger and my tech was outdated. He seemed to have forgotten something important. The platform’s underlying encryption algorithm was my personal invention patent. I had never transferred it. All this time, I had merely allowed the company to use it for free.