I’d self financed for a career change and finished one job to complete my final studies full time for a year, my ex got a great job offer in another part of the country and when we moved my job opportunities shrunk from reasonable to almost zero but her salary more than doubled so the move made sense. After 18 months of scrabbling around doing low skill temp jobs I managed to get a firm to take me on; I was the lowest paid in the firm, even my secretary earned 40% more than me. I worked hard, introduced new ways of using tech that we already had to speed up and simplify the job and developed things like standard templates and using ‘the Internet’ to get contract documents compiled and sent out within an hour instead of two or three days.

A feature of this work was to keep track of each contract, although there were case management systems available they were costly and didn’t quite tie in with our particular corner of the market, one of the junior partners had been tasked with finding a solution. My secretary mentioned at a meeting that I was using one .. silence .. I explained the system I was using was in its very early stages and was particular to my way of working, which I had presented months earlier and ignored (we always do it this way). This partner didn’t ask for more information, she ignored me and from that moment my days were numbered. I was about 18 months into this contract without any pay rise and my secretary fell ill, the firm brought in temps but they weren’t experienced in our specialty so I would do the technical part of their job as well, another big mistake. The firm saw I was able to do pretty much two jobs so being the avaricious bastards they were they stopped using the temp. To cap it all my dad was taken ill and twice a week I would drive 120 miles after work to visit him in hospital then drive home getting back about 10pm, I took the day off when he was in surgery. The next day at work, the partner pounced and said a client had complained because he wanted a contract to go in a certain way - I’d told him twice it would lead to serious financial exposure, nobody would progress a contract that way unless he gave specific written instructions acknowledging and accepting the risk. He claimed I didn’t tell him that. Yes, you guessed. With me doing two people’s work, I had misfiled that one memo .. she had me. Rather than accept the disciplinary route I handed in my notice.

My revenge? Because I was doing my and secretary’s work it accelerated the development of my case management system just so I could stay on top, during that process I worked out how to encompass the other aspects of our business, given another month or so we could have rolled it out. It would have been developed in house, so no cost, and saved hundreds of hours of lost time. Only I knew about it, only I had the only copy of the process (on three floppy disks .. you may have to Google that) so during my notice period I deleted everything off my computer that I had developed in addition to my case management system. I walked out on my last day with a smug feeling that they would still be working as they had done for the last forty years. Three years later during the 2008 financial crash the firm was hit badly, that partner was let go, my (ex) secretary told me with some glee that as partners buy into the firm her buy in was returned but as the firm had been devalued it was at a much lower rate, oh dear.