The People Who Once Knew Exactly What You Dealt With

There is a man I spoke to every day for four years. I could not tell you which city he lives in now.

Nothing happened. No falling out. One of us changed jobs, and that was the whole of it.

I have done this five or six times over a career, and it goes the same way each time. For a few years somebody is the first person you call when something goes wrong. They know the players, the history, what a particular email actually means. You do not have to explain any of it. Then the job changes, and within a few months it is a contact in your phone and a message on a birthday.

I used to think that was a failure of effort on my part. I do not think that any more. Those relationships were real while they lasted. They were just held up by the work, and when the work went there was nothing underneath.

By the middle of a career you have a long list of people who once knew exactly what you were dealing with. Not one of them knows now.

So when something goes wrong, the people who would have understood it fastest are the ones you have not spoken to in years. And explaining it from the beginning to anybody else is hard enough work that most of the time you decide it is not worth it.

That is a good part of what Candid Offload is for. Somewhere to say it without doing the explaining first.