The Intern Who Got Me Fired With One Spreadsheet

I have made peace with almost all of it. The part I have not made peace with is the parking spot, and I recognize that says something about me.

His name was Trevor and he was a summer intern, one of those bright, terrifying twenty-year-olds who have never known a world without infinite information and treat every problem as something you can simply look up. He was polite. He was relentless. He said "makes sense" a lot, in a way that gradually revealed he was evaluating whether things made sense rather than agreeing that they did.

My team did reporting. Six of us, most with a decade in, and our whole value was that we knew where the bodies were buried in the data. Which numbers lied. Which report the CFO actually read versus the eleven he ignored. Which manual adjustment you made every quarter because a system from 2011 rounded wrong. It was not glamorous but it was real knowledge, the kind you cannot Google, earned by getting burned.

Trevor asked to shadow me for a week to "understand the workflow." I was flattered. I explained everything. Every workaround, every this-is-technically-wrong-but-here-is-why, every Tuesday ritual. I was generous because I genuinely liked teaching and because it did not occur to me, not for one second, that I was narrating my own replacement.

He built a dashboard. He did it quietly, over about three weeks, mostly on his own time because interns have energy that salaried people have traded away. It pulled from the sources directly, applied the corrections I had described, and produced, in real time, the reports my team spent our days assembling by hand. It was clean. It was, I will admit through my teeth, better. It did in four seconds what took us four days, and it did not need to know where the bodies were buried because Trevor had simply asked me and then written it down.