They wanted the laptop back. The badge. The parking pass. The keys.
They did not want back: the institutional knowledge, the relationships, the history of how things actually work, the memory of what was promised versus what was delivered.
Those things have no return policy. They live in the person they fired. The person they fired walks out with years of context that no onboarding document can replace, no knowledge transfer can capture, no exit interview can extract.
The company recovers the hardware. The software walks out the door. And six months later, someone new asks “why does this process work this way?” and nobody in the room can answer.