A few years back I was deep in one of those classic Silicon Valley style gigs. The office had the full brochure experience: open-plan desks, standing tables, and a gleaming kitchen stocked with "free" snacks, fancy coffee machines, and enough La Croix to float a small boat.
On paper it looked generous. In reality, the kitchen became an emergency refueling station. The snacks were the same rotation of sad granola bars and trail mix that tasted like regret. After a couple of weeks, most of us gave up and started escaping for real lunch.
My personal weakness was the Subway sandwiches two blocks away. I had convinced myself it was basically health food. Whole-grain bread, vegetables, maybe a veggie patty if I was feeling virtuous. I even got one of those loyalty stamp cards. You know the one - ten stamps, one free foot-long.
I was going there for lunch. Then sometimes again on the way home because "the afternoon crash is hitting hard." Then grabbing an extra cookie or two for the desk drawer because the 3 p.m. meeting would definitely need moral support.
In a little over a week I had filled two full stamp cards.
I was still a green apprentice when the director pulled me into his office with that special "this is bad" face.
"We have a problem," he said. "One of our most important customers is completely dark. Their dedicated support engineer has been out sick for a week and... nobody else knows what he actually does."
Seven years.
For seven straight years this one guy had been the entire support relationship for a major customer. He showed up, did his thing, kept the customer happy, generated serious revenue, and quietly collected his paycheck. No one checked in. No documentation. No handoff plan. No manager who could even explain his daily work. He was invisible - until the day he wasn't.
Suddenly the customer was calling in panic. Suddenly leadership realized this one quiet engineer had become a single point of failure the size of a small country.
They threw me - the 16-year-old apprentice who still thought CRT monitors were cool - into the breach. "Go to the customer site, do what you can, buy us time until he comes back." I had no clue what I was walking into, but I went.
When the engineer finally returned, the company did the only smart thing they could: they made me his official apprentice. Not to replace him, but to make sure someone else could cover when he got sick again... or finally took a vacation, he'd apparently been negotiating directly with the customer for seven years because no internal manager even knew he existed.
TrenchOps 🐎 
