Throwaway because some former coworkers still follow my main.
I’m Megan Walsh, 31F, living in Chicago, Illinois. I work in project management at a mid-sized logistics company—decent benefits, downtown office, the usual corporate grind. For the last four years, one guy on our operations team stood out for never standing out: Greg (late 40sM).
He sat in the corner cubicle, headphones on, always early, always the last to leave. Never joined happy hours, barely spoke in meetings unless asked directly, just quietly produced flawless reports, fixed data errors no one else caught, and kept our biggest clients from jumping ship. Everyone relied on him but barely knew him.
Our director, Kyle (38M), was the opposite—loud, golf-with-clients type, always taking credit in leadership meetings for “his team’s wins.” Kyle would dump last-minute crises on Greg, then present Greg’s fixes as his own strategic brilliance. We all saw it, but Greg never complained. He’d just nod, fix it overnight, and move on. People joked he was a robot.
Then one Monday in November, Greg didn’t show. No call, no Slack message. By noon, Kyle was panicking because a major client report was due and the numbers were a mess—turns out Greg had been correcting Kyle’s sloppy inputs for months. HR sent the standard “Greg has left the company” email. We figured burnout, felt bad, moved on.
Two days later, an email from Greg’s personal account hit every inbox—employees, directors, even the C-suite and board members he’d somehow dug up addresses for. Subject line: “Why I’m Gone – For the Record.”
It was calm, factual, devastating.
Greg laid out five years of examples: Kyle overriding his accurate forecasts with “optimistic” numbers to hit bonuses, then blaming the team when shipments failed; Kyle deleting Greg’s warnings from shared files to cover mistakes; expense reports where Kyle billed personal trips as client dinners (with receipts attached); emails showing Kyle telling Greg to “make the data support my narrative” for investor calls. Greg had saved everything—screenshots, timestamps, version histories. He ended with: “I stayed quiet hoping things would improve. They didn’t. I can no longer be complicit.”
The office exploded. Slack went silent, then frantic in private channels. Kyle was escorted out that afternoon “pending investigation.” Within a week, three other directors who’d signed off on the cooked reports were placed on leave. The board hired an outside auditor. Half the leadership bonuses from the last two years got clawed back.
Greg never responded to anyone’s messages. Rumor is he took a remote contracting gig for double the pay and zero meetings.
The company is still reeling—new interim director, mandatory ethics training, actual consequences for fudging numbers. Some people lost their jobs; others got overdue promotions once the real contributors were clear. Morale is weirdly better, like a weight lifted, but no one trusts upper management the same way.
I think about Greg a lot. He took years of crap without a word, then dropped the mic on his way out. Legend.
