The Perfect Plan That Just Blew Up
I’ve been obsessed with tracking my career history, especially the big gear shifts, and 2017, man, that year was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of my carefully plotted Virgo ascent. I’m talking about a full-on, laminated, color-coded, five-year plan. I didn’t just think about my next move; I diagrammed it. I had it all mapped out: the exact quarter for the senior manager promotion, the planned salary bump, the specific training courses I would need to take.
I was working in operational logistics back then. My job was to keep things moving—predictable, organized, clean. I loved it. It fed my soul. So, going into 2017, I expected to simply execute Phase III of my master plan. I visualized myself signing the new contract by Q3, then quietly hunting for a bigger house by the New Year. I did the groundwork. I prepared the presentations. I sent the feeler emails to the directors.
Then, the whole thing just crashed and burned. Literally, in the space of three months, every single variable I had calculated went haywire.
The Unexpected Turn and the Dirty Secret
The first sign of trouble was when the company announced the “synergy restructuring.” I watched as the upper management just rolled my entire department—the one I had helped build from scratch—into this huge, messy, consolidated Business Solutions unit. The whole thing was corporate nonsense. Instead of getting the promotion I was ready for, I found myself reporting to a guy who barely understood what logistics even was. He just cared about cost-cutting.
I spent weeks trying to salvage the original plan. I argued the case for my old role. I rewrote the job description five times. I pleaded with HR. Nothing stuck. They shoved me into a team that just sat in meetings all day, talking about “optimization strategies” that never actually translated into real work. I felt like I was spinning plates in a collapsing building. I was supposed to be in control, but I was completely at sea.
The real shocker came when I finally decided I couldn’t take the slow-motion car crash anymore. I pulled the trigger and left for a smaller, entirely different company doing project management, which I had only studied in theory. It felt reckless, a total violation of the plan. I remember tossing my color-coded folder in the recycling bin. I looked at the old pages, all the bold fonts and arrows, and just laughed at how naive I’d been.
But why am I sharing this ugly history now? Why drag up this old trauma?
Last month, an old colleague—the one they kept on after the massacre and who now just quit out of frustration—he messaged me. He told me the real story. He said they’d just finished an internal audit of the 2017 restructuring. He emailed me a slew of heavily redacted documents. I spent a whole Saturday cross-referencing the dates and names.
The truth was brutal. My team wasn’t “synergized.” My job wasn’t redundant. That whole unit was marked for a slow, managed closure from the start. They lied about the long-term vision. They kept us busy with fake projects while they funneled our responsibilities to an external consulting firm. The company didn’t want my organized, predictable Virgo planning; they wanted cheap, temporary chaos management, then they planned to outsource it all.
The Realization and the Aftermath
I realized that the “failure” of my 2017 career plan was never my fault. I was just a casualty of someone else’s dirty, short-sighted financial game. That realization completely shifted my perspective. It made me trust my gut over any corporate promise.
This whole episode taught me three things that I now live by:
- I stopped making plans past two quarters. Life moves too fast.
- I learned to prioritize skill acquisition over role titles. The unexpected project management job turned out to be the real career fuel.
- I refused to ever rely on corporate structure again. Everything can just disappear.
Now, I’m a fractional consultant. I bounce between three different clients. It’s the most disorganized, unpredictable setup I could have imagined back in 2017. It looks like a mess on paper, a million scattered tasks instead of one clean trajectory. But I own the process. I set the schedule. And I make way more money than Phase V of my old plan ever projected. I found stability in the chaos.
I look back at 2017 as the year my perfect plan crashed so that my real, unplanned career could finally take off. It wasn’t my fault, and the unexpected pivot was the best damn thing that ever happened to my Virgo soul.
