The debrief

When loyalty costs you yourself

The conference room fits ten people.

Jenny would sit near the door. Mary was near the head of the table. Mark would sit near the window, always near the window, like he needed the option of escape.

Doesn’t matter anymore, John thinks.

The room is warmish. Maybe that’s just the vacuumed carpet smell. Stuffy.

He’s been in this room before. Many times across the two years he gave this company.

Two years. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but his stomach turns, remembering, forgetting.

Fluorescent light above flickers once, twice. Office sounds outside. Feels almost noise-cancelling in here. But it’s not serene, not safe, he knows.

There’s an HR person sitting in front of John, young, legs crossed, going through some papers. Silent. He doesn’t know her. Probably junior. Makes sense.

The room’s setup has been orchestrated. They’re both sitting on one side of the conference table, chairs facing each other. No barriers. Safety.

HR junior flips a notebook to a blank page and readies her pen. She finally looks up.

“So, John, as you know this is an exit interview, since you’re leaving the company. But I want you to think of it as more of a chat really, a debrief.” She smiles, practiced warmth. She’s good, thinks John.

“We’d love to hear about your overall experience with us, the good and the bad, you know how much this company values feedback. And remember, we’re a family here, you know our values, haha, so what you share is genuinely valuable to us going forward and to the people who come after you, so -”

Time, thinks John. Can’t get back time. Just keeps on ticking forward. Fuck. What was that t-shirt, with the lines and little squares that represented the weeks of your life…?

“So, John…”, she looks down at her notebook. “What’s something you would change about our work environment, if you could?”

He looks at her.

“I’d…”, he starts. Then stops.

What the hell is this? It’s too late for this question. A year too fucking late.

But John’s quietly furious, just how he’s wired. Which means he doesn’t show it, which means she has no idea, which means he has to sit here and go through with it.

“I think I would…”

He drifts. And the room shifts around him.

---

The project landed ten months ago.

The kind that tests even the most capable. Nonstop pressure, the kind that doesn’t let up long enough for you to catch your breath between one problem and the next.

Roles blurred. Timelines were aspirational, devoid of logic. The Gantt chart was a fictitious endeavour that everyone nodded at in meetings and quietly ignored the moment they were back at their desks.

John went full in. He absorbed it. That’s what he did. What he’d always done.

He worked every day till his mind went numb.

The manager demanded more.

John supported. He covered for the people who went quiet under pressure, either due to being unsure or panicky. He felt for them and did his best to absorb their pain.

The manager pushed them harder.

John took on more. Picked up the slack from the ones who got territorial when things got hard, “That’s not my job Mark, it’s yours. Just get it done!” Some of Mark’s tasks somehow ended up with John. So did Jenny and Mary’s. Especially Mary’s, since she was crumbling under pressure and struggling to keep up. But John was there for her.

The manager stretched their limits.

John started early and stayed late. Not because anyone asked him to but because he couldn’t leave knowing something would fall if he did. His loyalty had nothing to do with performance. It was just how he was wired. He’d missed many a family moment, but he’d always been told that success meant sacrifice.

The manager demanded ‘team work’ and alluded to the fact that disagreement with him meant you were ‘not being a team player’.

If the team needed holding together, John held it together. Smoothing out tensions. Ironing out conflict and outbursts and blaming and sometimes even outright hostility. That was the deal, as far as he understood it.

Nobody had ever explicitly made that deal with him. But he’d kept his end of it regardless.

The manager poured out more tasks, more responsibilities, assigned more blame for unrealistic deadlines not being met.

Three months of that. Then it was over.

The project landed.

Not perfectly, but well enough. Relief. Team celebration.

The debrief was scheduled for a Tuesday. The conference room.

John’s manager opened it with the tone of someone who’d already decided the shape of the conversation before walking in. Good energy in the room. People smiling. There was coffee, which felt like a signal that this was going to be one of the better meetings.

John sat towards the middle. Waited. Smiling alongside the others.

What did we learn, what would we change, that sort of thing.

The obligatory post it notes with hand scribbles of one-word answers that didn’t mean anything. A bunch of them. People looking serious writing them out, as if they held holy insight.

“Any feedback for each other?”, suggested the manager.

Names came up.

Jenny got a mention for her stakeholder management. John was happy for her because she was really good at that.

John spoke up second, and praised Mark for holding the technical side together without any mistakes.

Mary was told that she worked well under pressure. People nodded, murmured agreement. John was slightly taken aback, since Mary was the person he’d helped the most, picking up her tasks, reassuring her, well, whatever…

There was a round of loose, warm acknowledgement for the team generally, people starting to say positives that were steeped in fiction, but John didn’t mind. This was a time for celebration. It was all about the team getting a boost.

But John’s name didn’t come up.

He waited a little longer, gave it just a little more time. Surely someone in this room had noticed.

Manager also praised Mary for holding it all together efficiently under such enormous pressure. Mary? MARY?

Surely, someone will say something, surely…

THEinsaneworkloadTHEconstantsupportTHEFUCKINGpeacekeepingTHEpickingupeveryonesslackTHEneverendingdaysTHEFUCKINGfamilysacrificesTHEvoluntaryfavoursTHEabsorbingwithoutcausingafussTHEFUCKINGpatienceTHEFUCKINGpatienceTHEFUCKINGPATIENCE

The meeting ended.

People smiling and laughing and leaving and high-fiving and recalling tough and funny moments and talking loudly and buzzing.

John was last to get up.

He didn’t say anything. Of course he didn’t. Not in his wiring to toot his own horn. He’d always believed that good work spoke for itself. That the people around him could see what he was carrying, what he was doing for them. That you shouldn’t have to perform your own value like a fucking circus act just to have it acknowledged.

As he left the room, he didn’t even notice that his lips were tightly fixed into a smile. Back to his desk. Monitor screen. Incomprehensible visuals. Still smiling.

The remainder of work was a silent, black and white movie reel of the debrief, until he left for the day.

---

He barely registered his wife and child when he got home. Going through the motions. Hugs with no feelings attached. Mechanical.

Dinner? Dinner. Play? Play. How was your day? Fine. Daddy, I want to be an animal doctor when I grow up. That’s nice.

Everyone asleep now. John’s not tired.

Lights off almost everywhere. Quiet.

As if guided to move, he went to the little storage room. Bike, old vacuum, books, clothes, a guitar case, ‘Fender’ embossed. He pulled it out of the stacks of things that blocked its way, took it with him to the living room.

John wasn’t operating his body, or maybe he was, but his mind was definitely in control somewhere.

The music, man. Remember the music, how it flowed through you and made you feel fr –

The latches had a resistance to them, but not rusty. Just not opened in years.

That time you were jamming with the band and got so caught up in the moment that –

He gently pulled out his electric guitar. Mesmerised. As if seeing it for the first time and remembering it all at once.

Sat on the edge of the sofa. Propped the guitar on his right leg. Caressed the neck. Heard the scratch of the strings when he glided his palm over them.

His fingers grouped together in a pattern, he gently pushed them to the strings, and plucked them with his right hand. E minor rang out. Then C major. G major. Back to E minor.

Chords he’d known since he was a teenager, muscle memory surfacing through the years of disuse. A self that hadn’t existed in years.

Minutes flew by. Half hour. Hour. Hours.

In a haze. Reconnecting. Flowing.

During that time he didn’t think about the debrief. Not consciously at least. But something was working through him in the half dark, something the playing had made room for.

By the time he put the guitar down, he felt something stir in him.

Something had settled into a decision he hadn’t quite made yet.

“I’m not going back”, he said out loud to himself.

---

“John?”

HR junior leaned forward. “Anything you would change about our work environment?”, she repeated.

He’s back in the warmish, stuffy room. She’s looking at him with the polite concern of someone who isn’t sure how long he’s been gone.

“Sorry”, he says. “I was thinking.”

She smiles. Double clicks her pen.

“Take your time.”

He looks at her. She’s young. She probably believes in this process. She probably believes the answers she collects in that notebook go somewhere useful.

“What would I change…”

Not a question. He’s found it.

He thinks about the debrief. The coffee. The pointless post-it notes. Jenny’s name. Mark’s name. Mary’s name. The manager. The high-fives on the way out.

“I would have liked someone to notice.”

She writes it down.

He watches her write it and wonders if she knows what she’s just recorded.

She looks up expectantly, pen poised to continue writing.

“That’s it… I would have liked someone to notice.”

John stood up. Got his jacket. Thanked her. Left the room.

She was saying something as he left but he couldn’t hear her voice or the office soundtrack.

He was filled by a chorus of Emin, Cmaj, Gmaj.