About a decade ago, I sat in on an interview by the local business journal, on the occasion of the buyout of my then-company. No real reason for me to be there: my ownership stake was not large, and the acquiring company had their branch manager assuming duties like this already. Still, as a courtesy, I was asked (being the only employee of the acquired company based in my town), and as a courtesy, I accepted. The reporter knew he didn't have an actual story, just a couple of paragraphs of column filler, and was sort of sleepwalking through what I presume were the usual questions. Branch manager gave the usual answers; I stood mute, as it wasn't my show.

Couldn't resist speaking up when we got to one ritual question, though. The reporter asked whether the amount of cash paid in the acquisition was disclosed, and branch manager said that it was not. Slouched in a chair off at right angles to the axis of discussion, I broke in, deadpan: "Under a billion." Both of them looked at me, shocked that a number came out of my mouth, and the reporter's hand actually moved toward his notepad before everyone realized I hadn't imparted any genuine information. They turned back to each other with hardly a remark about my jest, but were somehow unable to recapture the self-importance of the discussion. It ended quickly after that, and I felt a pang of guilt at wrecking it for them, though I'd been the one who sweated the most to be there on that day. Just a pang, though, and obviously I'm still smirking to this day about taking the wind out of their sails.

(I'm still somewhat proud of having actually worked a business from a startup to something that sold out for cash, with a stake in precisely that outcome. Damn near everyone in my industry tries that at some point, and damn few can actually say they wound up in the black. I cleared on that deal, after taxes, in the high three figures, having refused salaries five figures higher to do it. I'm somewhat dumb... but it's one of the proud kinds.)

A few months passed, and it became clear that the acquiring management wanted to do different things than we had before, than I believed would be good for me then. The job search began, and just short of one decade ago I made a new deal. I was pacing frantically on the phone with one of the owners of the new place, in a hotel room in the capitol city of the state just south of here. I passed over higher-dollar offers to do it, to be with a company that was young and growing again, because this was gonna be the one that made me independent, either by paying off in and of itself, or by launching me into a business of my own with fine contacts and the right nest egg. I finished the old job on Friday, started the new one on Monday.

I busted my tail for them - lost a few, won a bunch - and got some options when the company got to the right size. (It was a tech company under a non-Bush presidency; it was quite the fashion at the time.) Being a "manager" in charge of portraying higher management's love to my fellow workers, and responsible for selling them on signing non-compete agreements as a part of the option deal, I of course took up the pen and signed one myself. I would personally have been against it, having left the previous company in part to avoid making that kind of promise, but I'd taken on the duty to make that promise seem like a good idea. Throw in the chance of winding up in the money again, and sure, I signed.

I became one of the old men of that place by the time it sold - with the average tech career only stopping at one employer for an average of three years, I was ready to start on another when the sale happened. While the options didn't pay off cash to me at time of sale, for reasons too shifty to fully grasp, there did appear to be some compensation. We were being backed by some serious financial might all of the sudden, and this let management make plans. The guy who I'd been talking to on the phone back in that hotel room spent twenty minutes with me one night doodling with the plan numbers. The company numbers he put at the bottom of the whiteboard showed me as an equity millionaire three years out. Given that, and my being proud again about having helped get us that far, he had no problem getting me to spend another tech career there.

I won't go through all the ways that that went wrong, and how I came to have be well into my third three-year "tech career" there before I punched out of that place. (Even though that time is what changed me from blond and boyish to grey and paternal.) At a high level, and once again, the acquiring management wanted to go another way, and it was eminiently clear that nobody in charge was even really aspiring anymore to the numbers that had made me a whiteboard millionaire. Without the hope of that paying off, and knowing the nest egg that made me my own man was also (for all the best reasons) out of my grasp, I finally managed to relax my grip on the place, and all the aspirations I'd had when I began.

My last day there was a tough one. I'll always owe a debt to the people that brought me to my knees at the end of that day, who forced perspective on me and let me see where I was, independent of all this floating context. Daddies leave, absolutely - there's a reason that leaving isn't quite forbidden. You don't always get where you want to go just because you devote yourself to it, and there's not always a point in anyone pretending you will.

(Did I mention proud earlier? Never mind.)

The day after that was fairly awful, too. I slept in, after indulging thoroughly at my own professional wake, so late that mail had been delivered by the time I was fully cognitive again. I started my day pondering how I'd spend the next few days. It was the one long weekend of joblessness I was prepared to allow myself, after sixteen solid years with a W-2 on file at one or more employers at all times, encompassing every minute of the time I'd been a daddy in a family needing income. Seeing expensive stationery in what I'd dragged from the mailbox while pondering, I was curious enough to open the envelope before forming plans for my hiatus. I thereby succeeded in turning that unique time into an oscilllation between fear and rage.

The envelope contained a lawyer letter, and a copy of the non-compete I'd signed so long ago as a matter of duty. My end of a pact which had proved worthless to me. The letter made demands for information on behalf of my recent ex-employer, the place run by the same man I'd talked to in a hotel so many years previous, the man who'd lied on my whiteboard. It was clear that the intent was for me to honor my promise completely or more, with the threat of law behind it.

The information requested formally on paper was something that was generally known, but not spoken of, when I left. When I'd talked, as my last serious discussion there, with the same man who'd phoned me for my first, he'd told me he was assuming he knew for whom I'd be working. To me, this implied he understood the competitive implications. (I ain't much of a rainmaker, but I do make some difference - I'm well into my second million dollars of billing since I met him, just for my time directly.)

Getting a letter from his lawyers, saying that I needed to write down and sign how exactly I was competing with him, was therefore terrifying. Was this a notification that I would have to spend my family's income on a lawyer to play with him, just because he could? What could possibly make him think I'd be dishonorable to him without the law firm getting involved? What the hell did he want to have in my head at that point?

I wrote the law firm a short but well-worded response - shorter than this, in fact. Writing and removing bitter paragraphs from it was how I spent the majority of my precious time that weekend, the one weekend in my son's lifetime when no man could fire me.

After that response was received, I got a phone call from that man, the man for whom the lawyers worked. I sent the call to voice mail - there would be no more words of mine spent on him, and I was rather more interested in my new job by that time than my old. Still, I eventually listened.

His message was partially sheepish, and partially an evasion of responsibility. He seemed mildly embarrassed that some claimed mixup had gotten me sent a letter, and rather more thoroughly aware that it would be a serious black mark with anyone I might tell, if I pinned said mixup on him. I honestly forget if I ever acknowledged that message in any way - I do recall thinking that I had been mailed a rather explicit list of what I owed him, and conversation was not on that list.

One of the quirks of that list was the eighteen-month term of the non-compete - I had recalled only a twelve month period after my departure during which the agreement enjoined me from doing certain things, talking to certain people about certain things. I went back to my copy and verified it matched what I'd been sent better than it did my memory, and cursed myself for being sloppy again. Eighteen months it was.

The agreement wasn't punitive, however; just things that I'd always felt I'd owe anyway after an ending. Don't be malicious - don't try to sabotage other things he had going just because it was over between him and me. A dozen pages spelled out the ridiculous details of it, but it was easy to just forget it all and simply shy away from any situation that might cause me to think of it again.

Calendars are hard to hide from, though, and I realized this weekend that the day had come when those eighteen months had passed. For the first time in almost a decade, I was under no obligations whatsoever to the man who'd phoned me up in a hotel room and offered to underpay me for a chance at reaching my dreams.

I mean him no ill will at this point, and honestly, I rarely have. I think he would have liked to see me be a millionaire out of the work I'd done for him, and not just because of what that would have implied about his own financial situation.

The only sadness left to me from working with him is this: the passage of my last obligation to him satisfies the last promise made because I believed I could someday be everything I ever dreamed. Every tie still binding me to anything in the world either predates him completely, or was made in full knowledge that I would fall short of myself in some way.

It's a sad way to remember a decade.