I Was Fired for an Intern — Karma Hit Fast
Companies love to talk about loyalty — right up until the moment they decide you’re too expensive to keep. Our reader learned that firsthand when he was replaced by an intern who spoke in buzzwords and confidence. What happened next? Let’s just say karma didn’t need much time.
The letter of our reader:
I spent 12 years at my company. I wasn’t a superstar — I was the glue. The person who knew every weird workaround, every client quirk, every system patched together from decisions made before half the team had finished high school.
I basically ran the backend with muscle memory.
But management kept hinting that I was “falling behind the AI curve.”
Translation: we want someone younger and cheaper.
Then came Liam — a 21-year-old intern with a spotless laptop and a buzzword for every breath. He talked about “automation pipelines” and “AI efficiencies” like he’d invented oxygen. I answered his questions politely, even when he spoke to me like I was the intern.
Six weeks later, HR called me in.
“We’re restructuring,” they said.
“We’re moving toward AI integration,” they said.
“You’ve been wonderful,” they said.
Then they handed me a box.
By Friday, Liam — the intern — was promoted to “AI Workflow Coordinator,” a title that doesn’t mean anything except “doing my job but cheaper.” He smiled at me on the way out like he was sending me into early retirement.
Two weeks later, my phone rang at 6:40 a.m.
It was my old coworker whispering like he was in a hostage situation.
“Please tell me you can help. Everything is breaking.”
Here’s what happened:
Liam had plugged an AI tool into three legacy systems I’d warned everyone never to connect directly. The AI wasn’t deleting data — worse, it was reorganizing it. Randomly. Client profiles mismatched. Billing histories scrambled. Order logs merging.
Everything technically existed… just not where it belonged.
Clients were being billed for the wrong projects.
Old invoices got resent.
New ones disappeared.
The CEO’s mother got charged late fees on a service she’d never used.
Chaos. Absolute, professional, lawsuit-level chaos.
The company begged me to return “temporarily.”
I said my schedule was “tight.”
They asked my rate.
I doubled it.
They agreed in four minutes.
I returned as a consultant earning more per week than I made per month. Liam avoided eye contact the entire time. The COO shook my hand like it was attached to a life raft.
It took me three days to unwind the AI disaster — because, shocker, AI doesn’t magically understand a decade of messy human decisions.
When they asked if I’d consider coming back full-time, I told them:
“I’m embracing the future — I work for myself now.”
I now consult for two companies that compete with.
Liam still works there.
But now he has a supervisor… and a checklist I wrote.
