Separation
The math kept working. The job didn't.
I slept through it.
The text came at 3:04 a.m. on a Thursday. I woke at 7:00 a.m. to the alarm.
The message was four hours old: before coming to the office, check personal email.
I leaped out of bed to grab my laptop. No, no, no. I don’t remember if I said it out loud or just in my head.
Login failed. I typed it again, slower. Failed.
The machine knew before I did.
I sat down on the floor.
In a studio that exists for one reason. In a city I live in for one reason.
Pit in the stomach, and under it, a stillness.
Why. How. Now what.
I failed.
Two emails in my personal inbox.
HR: role eliminated, ninety days to find another one inside the company, then separation.
My director: role eliminated, a link to schedule time to talk, as an option.
He called it an option.
The countdown had already started. It didn’t wake me for it.
The Call
Almost an hour passed before I could call her. I never made coffee.
“I have bad news.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“I got laid off.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. The email didn’t say.”
Month six, I called her looking for permission to quit. She told me I wasn’t allowed to fail.
I had the apology ready before she finished asking.
“Just come back. We’ll figure it out.”
Firm. Fast. Something under it like relief.
Then my stepdaughter in the background, hearing my half of it.
“What’s the difference between laid off and getting fired? Are we broke now?”
I told her later that laid off means it wasn’t about you.
I’m not sure she believed me.
The Workstation
I moved my flight to that night. Then I drove to the public library.
The laptop belonged to the company. They’d taken it away without touching it.
I took a number and waited for a workstation. Sixty-minute session.
Another countdown.
I updated the resume and applied to internal roles first. Those are the ones the ninety days stop for.
Eighteen months ago I signed for $450,000 a year.
Thursday I applied for the next job from a public library workstation, watching a clock in the corner of a screen I didn’t own.
By noon the messages came in. Condolences. Offers to connect me to someone. Rumors of names and teams gone the same morning. I went looking for the pattern, the logic of who got cut.
There isn’t one I can find. It looks like weather.
The link my director sent is still sitting in my inbox. Fifteen minutes, whenever I want them.
I haven’t clicked it. I don’t know what I would ask him that the email didn’t already answer.
The Loose Ends
I called the chiropractor to cancel the standing appointments. The same receptionist who had been booking me every week for months. She asked if I wanted to reschedule.
“I got laid off.”
First time I said it out loud. We still haven’t told our families.
I texted the landlord that I would be in Phoenix for a few weeks. I didn’t say why.
If a Seattle role comes through I will need the studio. I was not going to give back a lease I might need.
I left the car at the studio and took a rideshare to the airport.
Airport parking is cheaper if you know when you are coming back.
The Whiplash
In February the stock fell.
I watched it every morning, chest tight in the split-second before the number loaded. I wrote at the time that I could feel the walls getting closer.
I stopped writing in April. I never stopped watching.
Last week I went back and ran it.
Forty percent of movement between the February low and the spring high. My Margin moved eleven hundredths. It stayed in Strong the whole way.
Not because the arrangement was solid.
Because the sign-on cash was still absorbing it.
That is what the cash is for. It buys two years of not feeling the stock, and then it stops.
Year 3, the cushion is gone and the equity is most of the pay. Year 4, the same.
Those were always the years the stock could take the corridor from me.
I wrote that down. I said I would have nothing left to absorb the fall.
Year 3 starts in February.
I separate in September.
Then a text at 3:04 a.m. made all of it irrelevant.
I spent a year afraid of the right number in the wrong year. The number that ended it was never on the screen.
The Variable I Never Modeled
There were three numbers to watch.
Corridor Compensation Floor. Local Alternative Ceiling. Travel Expense Ceiling. Three breaking points. If one of them crossed, I would see it coming. Numbers like that drift. Drift is a warning.
There was a fourth. It was never on the dashboard.
Corridor Compensation pays what it pays, right up to the morning it pays nothing. No drift. No slope. A figure, and then a past-tense verb in an email.
I built the model to watch the three numbers that move slowly and stood the whole time on the one that could go in a single morning.
I opened the calculator that night, at the gate, waiting for the flight I had moved up. My own inputs. It doesn’t know it’s me.
Strong.
I am still employed. The pay runs through September and the stock keeps vesting. The model reads the corridor as Strong, and there is nothing at the other end of it.
Then I changed one field.
Corridor Compensation: 0
Margin: below 1.00Stop.
There is no reading between those two. No drift. No slope. Strong, and then Stop, and a date on a letter deciding which.
Travel Expense is unchanged because the lease is unchanged. The studio is still mine.
The job ends in September. The lease runs through February.
The corridor’s costs did not hear about Thursday. Only the calendar did.
I named that zone myself. The screen returned it to me the way it returns it to everyone who lands under the line.
The model has a verdict on the whole arrangement, and it is not the one I expected. The Distance Premium is real. It is sitting in an account. It is the reason ninety days is a window and not a cliff.
By its own math, the corridor worked. It paid. It cleared the floor. It built the runway I am standing on.
The model is satisfied with the arrangement.
The Seat
They upgraded me to 1F.
Sunday departures and Friday returns had built the status, and the system moved me to the front of the cabin the way it had a dozen times before. It had no way of knowing.
The flight attendant greeted me by name. She thanked me for my loyalty.
I said thank you.
I earned that seat by leaving my family every week. It was delivering me back to them.
The status runs through next year. The job ran through Thursday.
I don’t know when I fly again.
The List
I came through the door in Phoenix that night and for a second she looked almost glad.
We planned the house that weekend. Every project shelved since I took the job came out with a plan already attached.
The deferred plumbing issues. The backyard work. A playroom for our son. Her office. Her studio. The home gym.
One after another, fully drawn, like they had been waiting somewhere I couldn’t see.
None of it needed money. The money was always there. The money was the entire point of the arrangement.
What the plans needed was somebody else in the house.
The Mornings
Tuesday I woke at 7:00 a.m. Up and ready before I remembered there was nowhere to be.
The body keeps the schedule the schedule quit.
Some nights the hand still goes for the phone in the dark. There is no 3:00 a.m. inbox left to be afraid of.
Sunday I refilled the pill organizer. Same count as every other Sunday.
The job ended. The cocktail didn’t.
My son noticed I was still there Tuesday morning. Wednesday morning he noticed again.
He was two months old when the flying started.
When I said “Da-Da is going to work” and picked up the bag, he waved bye-bye.
He was good at it. He never cried.
Thursday I told him I was going to the store. He cried and reached for me.
The Evenings
Sunday night, no suitcase by the door. It had sat in that spot every Sunday since I took the job, and I resented every one of them.
I stood there and looked at the floor.
After the kids go down we eat dessert and put the medical drama back on. The one we started when the flying started and never finished. Her feet are still freezing. She still puts them under me.
Every night now.
Then we work. Laptops open at the dining table, late. I apply to jobs. She works on the business she never started.
Different laptop. Same hours. She is across the table now.
I take the nights now. Our son sleeps next to me. She sleeps until morning.
She did two hundred bedtimes the first year. I did forty.
The countdown doesn’t tick. It doesn’t ring. It subtracts one at midnight whether the day held three interviews or none.
A good day costs the same as a wasted one.
I am still employed. I am not expected to report or perform any work. The pay runs through September 23.
These have been good days.
Seventy-three days to separation.
The Scenarios
A week in, the phone screens started. Panels are booking.
The internal panels are with the company that eliminated me. Same standard. Same badge system. I am applying to be let back into the building I was locked out of on Thursday.
Every night I run the model. The inputs are jobs I don’t have.
Phoenix. The flying ends. I stay in the house we just made plans for.
Seattle. The flying starts again. Same corridor, same rented studio.
Austin. A new corridor. No state tax, same as now. A route I’d have to learn.
San Francisco. Bigger on paper. California takes its share first.
A recruiter called this week about a local role. We talked salary expectations. He walked me to the middle of the band, not the top, because nobody pays the top.
Then he told me to wait until after my next vest and call him back. He said they could not put together enough to make me leave.
He was bidding against equity that stops vesting on September 23.
Nobody has told the market yet.
Four scenarios. The math is warm again. It was never really off.
I chose the distance once. I’m not choosing now.
Ninety days is a soft place to fall. A window. A severance. Recruiters who call back inside a week. Most of the people who got the same email are not deciding which corridor makes sense.
I didn’t fall out of the trap. I landed higher up in it. Close enough to see the people I’ve been writing about.
The Questions
My stepdaughter asked if I am going to be in Phoenix from now on.
She stopped asking whether I would be at things a year ago. She started again this week.
I didn’t have an answer.
On Friday my fiancée told me to apply everywhere. Not just Phoenix. Everywhere.
She has never told me to stop. Not in the hospital room. Not at month six, when I called her looking for permission. Not Thursday morning.
Not now, with the plans drawn and the suitcase in the garage.
I don’t know which door opens. I don’t know if the suitcase stays there.
The math says the corridor worked.
It has never once had to answer to her. She hasn’t said what it cost. I haven’t asked.
The documentation continues.
If you’re in the trap too, I’d rather hear from you directly: hello@1100mileworkday.com
Disclaimer: I’m documenting this in real-time, with the understanding that the math working doesn’t mean it’s working. These are not recommendations. They’re field notes from an unsustainable arrangement that shouldn’t have to exist. The content in this newsletter reflects one person’s experience and should not be construed as financial, tax, legal, or career advice. Individual circumstances vary significantly. Consult qualified professionals before making decisions affecting your employment, taxes, or family situation. The author is not a financial advisor, attorney, or tax professional.