Offboarded, Not Forgotten
THE CRUNCH · EP 18
TAP TO PAUSE
PAUSED — TAP TO RESUME
Every IT department has them: devices from departed employees sitting in 'hold' status months after the offboarding ticket closed. Maybe legal asked for a hold and never released it; maybe it was a redeploy candidate that aged out; maybe nobody decided anything at all.
Limbo devices are the worst of every world. They carry the departed employee's data with no active monitoring, they depreciate past redeployment value, they clutter the inventory with open items, and when an audit samples your asset list, 'hold since March' with no documented reason is a finding waiting to be written.
The fix is a policy, not a product: every departure device gets an owner, an explicit state — legal hold with a review date, redeploy with a deadline, or retire into the disposition pipeline — and a clock. Devices that hit their date move automatically. Limbo stops being a state.
The guide's scoping section covers disposition states; we handle the retire path with serialized evidence.