The Entropy of Significance: The One Who Failed (The Act of Hiding)
I was always the smart one. The one the others looked up to. My bosses saw me as a leader, or as a potential leader anyway. I knew it all inside out. Protocols. Processes. Procedures. Practices. I had been there longer than the rest and certainly longer than my management who seemed to come and go weekly on their way up a parallel career path. I was what was referred to as the establishment, in terms of where the bosses saw me in the employee hierarchy. An elder. Safe pair of hands. Utterly reliable. Knows the job inside out. Wrote the manual.
That sounds great, but the truth is that I was afraid of moving on. And now I know exactly why: it's because I'd be found out.
Younger colleagues arrived. I was their mentor, or their father figure. Then they left, headhunted to elsewhere by means I never understood, away to better pay and other organisations, into a career. I am not sure how they viewed me, but I doubt they left with their initial impressions intact. But they were away, and someone else new came to replace them. These ones didn't know better. They trusted what the management thought of me, and after all I was the organisational memory, which was an ongoing convenience for me.
Then they sent me on a course. Some new guy in the latest version of management wanted me to be 'updated'. It also 'sent a message' to other younger staff to show we were 'always ready to learn', which was an ongoing myth we clung to. The course date loomed over me for weeks. Then it arrived, and I had never been so afraid in my life.
At least no one from my office went with me. It was one of those homely venues, with tea in styrofoam, soft biscuits, strangers in suits, overheated rooms with the smell of new carpet, and industry bonhomie and talking shop about EBM. I was sort of known by some of the others by reputation, but I couldn't let it slip that my knowledge was nowhere near as great or as up-to-date as theirs, my office nowhere near as well-funded and my bosses nowhere near as absent. Younger people new to the industry - even from other organisations - came to speak to me, as though it was some sort of honour. I saw you speak at the breakout session. They didn't know enough to judge me at that time. I had a mask on and it always felt like it was slipping.
I tried to sit through it all quietly but I was always drawn into things - practical examples, open ended discussion and role-playing. Even the instructor did so because he knew I was an old hand at this, and was almost apologetic in doing this, like it was a personal insult to me. But I knew none of it. 'Tell them how we used to do it', the lecturer joked with me in the class. I told them, but they didn't know that it was exactly as I was still doing it. Sickeningly, they all laughed along with me. I was a man of yesterday. Maybe not even that. Did they realise it? Maybe they knew all along.
I could sit near the back and watch their relationships develop as the week rolled on, the same patrician way I was supposed to mentor my younger colleagues. I watched them joke, flirt and exchange looks and banter. They took us outside for a photograph, lining us up for smiles and memories. Then they took us to the exam.
I hope that photograph no longer exists. My face will be on it, with that absurd mask of pretence about to fall off it.
Delivered to my room on the day of departure, an envelope with the results. Inside, one sheet of paper and a letter. Through the tears in my eyes I saw the single word I dreaded the most. 'Fail'. I left the rooms without a delay and sat in dull silence on the train home. The letter said 'insufficient demonstration of applied understanding'. I tore it into small pieces and watched the shreds flitter out of the train window like an escaping bird released from its cage.
At the office: 'How was the course?' 'Did you learn much?' 'Did you teach them anything?' Harmless jokes. I told them learning was very useful and that we should always be ready for it, no matter our experience. Party line stuff. If I stick to that tack then my corporacy will deflect from the real questions. No one asked about the result anyway. No one ever did. The boss who sent me on the course had already moved on.
I stayed another three years, then resigned. I told them I was 'moving on' but was vague about where that moving might be. Bosses were sad to see me go. Colleagues thought the place would collapse without me. There was a presentation arranged. And a cake. And a photograph. I slid out of the office before any of this could happen on the pretence of taking some stuff out to my car.
Afterwards it struck me cold and hard that no one tried to call me after I had left, not even to see where I was.
Maybe they knew all along.
A playlist for the album can be found here.
Titles conceived, composed, arranged and performed by Mike Dickson
(c) 2026, Black Cat Music Factory