Offboarding

Jasmine’s heart was working a rhythm. It wasn’t quite pounding, but she could feel the flush in her face, the warmth flooding her body. It was all so cool in her mind’s eye. The delivery of the information, the breakdown of the facts, her clinical assessment of matters, all coming off like a Swiss watch. Her rucksack sat up against the table leg to her left. She found herself adjusting its position three times before the HR manager arrived. What exactly she was adjusting she couldn’t say.

Jasmine was keenly aware of her presence and perception in the workplace: quiet, in the corner, coder, unnoticeable. She wasn’t even a coder but a junior developer. As a techie in a department of a big bank, she accepted and understood her furniture-level importance to the grand operation she found herself in. She liked the job. It didn’t set her heart on fire, but the scale of it, the money and the prestige of working for an internationally recognized bank wasn’t something she took lightly. Looking round the glossy, clean off-white interview room, a bubble of anxiety rose within her.

Her mum’s face came to mind. Mum, prouder than proud the day she told her she got this job. Rarely one to openly express a beaming warmth and celebration on Jasmine’s success, she was clearly quite chuffed with this one. It was the name, it was the status of the bank. It was being able to tell her friends at the hairdresser “My daughter works for…” Yet this was her exit interview. Just some 8 months in. She didn’t really have a story to tell her Mum. She doubted she’d understand. Neither did she have a cogent plan of what would come next. Jasmine sucked in her cheeks and pursed her lips. What was just moments away scared her.

The doubt was porous. Forget being hot and uncomfortable, she felt foolish. Had she watched too many movies? This was the right thing to do… but was it the right decision for her? Jasmine looked up at the analogue clock on the wall ahead, just a minute till the appointment, when she heard a middle-aged brogue on the other side of the door. A dull clink signaled the lowering of the door handle. Malcolm Graves entered.

***

It was a breezy work day for Malcolm, sans kerfuffle or boondoggles. The weekend was just round the corner, and he had his weekly squash game planned for 7 p.m. Margaret had booked a trip to the Lake District for the weekend, and he’d merrily scheduled annual leave for the second half of Friday and the whole of Monday. Coffee in hand and paperwork under his arm, Malcolm was enjoying the pleasant frequency of not feeling too high or too low; he remained somewhere in the middle, trouble free.

The HR department had been gifted a lighter load in recent months. There were the usual unpleasant incidents involving abusive customers from the ground floors but nothing out of the ordinary. The email inbox was not inundated, and the implementation (and creation) of new policy had slowed compared to the heady days of some 5-6 years ago. Malcolm, in truth, had never met Jasmine. He had the name on file but didn’t recall it upon being assigned the exit interview. When he looked at the job description, he couldn’t tell you exactly what Jasmine did and well, with her being a techie, he entered the room with no qualms.

“Jasmine,” Malcolm briskly stated on entrance.

“Hel—“

In a flurry of nerves, Jasmine nearly tipped the interview table upon standing to greet him.

“Oh, careful there. That desperate to leave us, are you?” Malcolm gently ribbed, reaching a hand out to shake Jasmine’s.

Jasmine let out a nervous chuckle before gripping Malcolm’s hand, only making the briefest of eye contact. Malcolm could feel the anxiety radiating off of Jasmine, and he had to resist the impulse to wipe his own hand down; Jasmine’s was wet with sweat.

“Dear God,” he heard his inner monologue proclaim.

“These IT guys really do struggle with human interaction.”

He maintained his warm, off-handed, yet smiley demeanor. He guessed Jasmine was, at most, in her early 30s. Large glassy eyes were exaggerated in rimless glasses, and she was soft-voiced and quite clearly nervous. Malcolm was endeared at the thought of this young woman being deeply engrossed by a small, flickering laptop on a desk in front of her somewhere. Once they were both seated, Malcolm leapt into the standard procedural rhythm.

“Name?”

“Jasmine Thompson.”

“Position?”

“Junior Developer.”

“Department?”

“IT & Digital.”

“Manager?”

“Sharon Coates.”

“Start date?”

“It was err… I think, yeah, um, February 17^th.”

“And leave date… is… today.” Malcolm reeled off mechanically, as he filled in the form. He looked up at Jasmine. Her face was beginning to glisten and seemed stuck in uneasy blankness.

“So Jasmine, would you like to tell me what your reasons for leaving are?” Malcolm asked, attempting the friendliest tone he could muster.

Jasmine looked down to her left and didn’t answer. Malcolm sat in silence for all of 10 seconds before it became untenable. He implored as delicately as possible.

“Look. Jasmine. If there’s something you feel HR ought to know, then now is the time to say something.”

Jasmine heaved in a large breath and gave Malcolm a brief pocket of eye contact before returning to looking at the floor. Malcolm hadn’t encountered this kind of shutdown before; he was beginning to feel an uneasy sense of gravity. He probed further, conducting his voice in a near whisper,

“… if this has anything to do with why you’re leaving, it is important that we know.”

Jasmine gave an uneasy look. She then reluctantly reached into her rucksack and pulled out a beige folder of printouts. She put them on the table silently. Malcolm glanced at the folder, then at Jasmine before picking it up to examine. Inside, he saw a log of some sort, a spreadsheet.

“Can you help me out here Jasmine? What am I looking at? Outside of what looks like some sizable transactions…”

“It’s um, it’s, from a system I’ve been working on in my pipeline.”

“… go on.”

“This is a log of the cache for AML.”

“In plain English, please, Jasmine.”

“On the left are the client numbers from the identification portal. The middle is the transaction names, and then the dates, then the transaction type, sums.”

“Right.”

“Then the column on the far right is whether transactions have been flagged.”

“Flagged? In regards to anti-money laundering?”

Jasmine nodded and leaned forward.

“Turn to page 12 and after.”

Malcolm did so. He scanned it up and down, then the next page, then the next and the one after. Jasmine cleared her throat and stated,

“It’s the same clients, same transactions, same types, but they’re no longer getting flagged.”

Malcolm sat back and studied the papers, line by line, taking his time. He glanced up at Jasmine. In return, Jasmine looked everywhere but at Malcolm. She took a deep gulp of air and told Malcolm the truth,

“That warning system is mine, under my access, exclusively; I’m the only person in tech who could remove or alter a transaction’s flagged status.”

“And you didn’t do this?” Malcolm asked unblinking.

Jasmine shook her head. The burst of silence between them was heavy. Malcolm continued to look down at the paper.

“… then… who could?”

Jasmine’s eyes held Malcolm’s. She raised her right hand from the table and from chest height made a gesture pointing up.

Malcolm looked at the paper again. He found himself in the very well of discomfort Jasmine was stewing in. Malcolm paused. He skimmed through the last pages once more. He looked at the sums and how many. These were huge amounts of money.

“Jasmine, how much of this have you—“

A dull thud hit the table, rupturing the stilted atmosphere. A huge pile of folders lay between them, spilling across the table, covering its entire surface. Jasmine zipped up her rucksack. Her voice shaking, eyes wide, she pleaded,

“You can’t tell anyone this came from me. Please– I just wanna get out of here.”