On Friday I was on a client call. I am not going to describe the account or the company or the industry, not because of anything legal, but because there is a chance I will need to talk about this situation from the outside someday and I do not want to have muddied it by being too specific here.
What I can say: the account manager was doing everything right, technically. She asked the right questions. She sent a follow-up summary within the hour. I know because I was CC’d. She is good at this job and she is going to lose this account in sixty days, maybe fewer, because there is something she has not noticed yet, and the client has already noticed it, and no one has said it out loud in the room where it needs to be said.
I was on mute. I could see exactly what needed to happen. I did not unmute.
I would have, a year ago. Maybe even six months ago. Can I jump in for a second? And then I would have said the thing, because I know which thread to pull. I have watched this exact situation unfold enough times to know.
But I am leaving. And somewhere over the last few months I have stopped treating other people’s accounts like problems that belong to me. So I stayed on mute and the call ended and I closed my laptop and I sat there.
I’ve been saying I cannot picture the reader of the unnamed document. That is not quite right. I can picture the situation she is in. I just cannot see her face.
The account manager on Friday is one version of her. She is doing good work. She does not know what she does not know, which is not a failure, it is just experience she has not accumulated yet. The document is trying to give her the pattern. The thing I could see from mute that she cannot yet see from inside it.
But she might not be the right reader either. Maybe it is the VP watching a capable account manager run the correct play and still lose the account, trying afterward to understand what happened. Maybe it is someone like me, ten years ago, reading the postmortem on a churned account and feeling like the official explanation did not actually explain anything.
I have three candidates for the same reader and I cannot collapse them into one.
A small thing worth naming: I described a health insurance practical post on Day 62 before I had actually written it. I wrote it that morning, told you about it here, and then it existed. It did not fully exist in the way I meant until two days later. You can find it now if you want it: what COBRA actually costs and what the ACA marketplace came back at when I ran the estimate. The number that scared me before I looked it up is $1,100 a month, not the $1,840 COBRA figure. I wrote it for the person who has not looked it up yet. It is there now.
What I keep coming back to from Friday.
When I chose to stay on mute, when I let the call end without saying the thing I could see, I felt something I can only describe as regret going the wrong direction. Not regret for not speaking. Regret that I have spent twenty-four years knowing how to see this particular problem, and the way I have passed it along is by being in the room, and when I leave I will take the pattern with me unless I figure out how to put it somewhere.
That is why I keep going back to the document.
I think I have been framing it as a question about who the reader is, when the actual question is why it has to exist at all. It has to exist because I have done the thing I am trying to describe for longer than the account manager on Friday has been working, and I never wrote any of it down because it was just what I did, not something I thought of as knowledge anyone could transfer. And now I am leaving and the transfer window is closing and I keep opening the document at 10pm and adding a sentence and then closing it again.
I have not told anyone this is why I keep going back to it. I am telling you now.
The two follow-up emails are at thirteen days and five days. I checked this morning. I am not calling it panic. It is just a habit I have not broken.
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Caputo, told me I should be a writer when I was sixteen. I heard it as impractical. I also quietly hoped it was true. I am forty-nine now, writing something nobody asked me to write, for a reader whose face I cannot yet see, because I am running out of runway for not doing it.
I do not know if that is the right reason to have waited thirty-three years.
I do not know if it matters that the reason is right.