It’s been almost a month now since thousands of other employees and I discovered that we had lost our jobs with the former independent mobile phone retailer Phones 4U.

It’s a strange time to be alive, isn’t it? At what other point in the history of humans have you been able to learn that you no longer have a job due to no fault of your own via an article shared on Facebook, on a Sunday evening, whilst you prepared your tuna sandwiches for lunch the next day?

The next morning we all arrived at Phones 4U’s head office in Newcastle-under-Lyme expecting the worst but not really knowing what might happen. At 9:30am everybody was summoned down to the bottom floor of the building to be told, in a speech given by the company’s chief executive, that Phones 4u had been forced into administration and that meant redundancy for thousands of people.

As I gathered my stuff, said my goodbyes and left the office I recall thinking, rather naively, that I never thought this type of thing would happen to me and – given the circumstances – it’s fair to admit that nobody, at least people not inside the higher echelons of Phones 4U, had anticipated the speed of which the collapse occurred.

I’d been holidaying in Thailand a week before when I received a message from a colleague informing me that everybody at head office had been sent an email from the directors after news had broken that Vodafone were not going to extend their contract with Phones 4U.

Finding these things out via various media sources and then receiving emails from directors after the news had already been broken to the general public was starting to become normality.

As I now look back over that message and the other updates sent from the hierarchy before the final blow was delivered by EE; it makes me wonder just how much of the writing that was evidently on the wall had already been read by those in more lofty positions.

One message sent after the Vodafone withdrawal announcement from somebody within a very senior position actually emphasised the ‘strength’ of the then current (and only) relationship with EE.

That’s kind of ironic considering a week later, EE announced they were not continuing to work with Phones 4U and the chain of events which led us towards administration unravelled.

Many different people have many different theories over what happened to the company I used to work for, but what is hard to forget is that in the end Phones 4U were unable to match Carphone Warehouse when negotiating new business contracts with individual networks because Phones 4u needed twice as much money as its rival.

Why? Phones 4U needed to service an astronomical amount of debt - debt that was put there by private equity arm BC Partners - which originally acquired the company in 2011 for a deal estimated to be worth £700 million.

I wasn’t employed by Phones 4U when BC Partners made that purchase but after speaking to those who were; they can’t seem to remember a big song and dance being made about it or even being given an overt amount of information on who these individuals were and what plans they actually had. I wonder why?

You can frankly dress the whole Phones 4U debacle up how you like. You can claim the networks all worked together like a gang of bullies in the school playground and suggest they schemed a plan to pull Phones 4u’s pants down in front of everybody.

Some folk like to speak of bad management and others state an outdated business model was to blame, but the facts are that Phones 4U seemed to be in a healthy position before any involvement of BC Partners. Now it’s dead and a very small group of already hideously wealthy people have made a lot of money from its demise.

In fact it has since been reported that those at BC Partners walked away with nearly £20m million after the Phones 4U collapse and, frankly, that probably explains why none of them were there on my final day to wish me and the great people I had the pleasure of working with good luck in the future.

In fact, they didn’t even say goodbye.

Adam Partington was an employee in the marketing department at Phones 4U's offices in Staffordshire.