October 9, 2014: Denial

The day started off pretty normal but the events that would unfold today would prove to be pretty pivotal in the story of our family.  I am writing this post in December when it is almost Christmas.  Most of the posts before and after this one, except for tomorrow’s, were written roughly when they happened but these two were not, for obvious reasons (we were incredibly caught up in dealing with the situation) and I went back in late December while on Christmas break down in Houston to fill in the missing details of the last two and a half crazy months.

At the end of the day today my boss called me into a meeting to discuss the non-compete situation and my application to go to work at Barclays and SquarePoint.  This is not an official decision but the recommendation that was passed up, and will almost certainly be followed without further investigation, is that I should be denied the request to be able to work at Barclays.  This is pretty upsetting, as you can imagine.  I was told my Barclays that this was, in no way, competitive in nature and would not even be covered by the non-compete since it is going to a different type of organization.

This is a very complex situation and one in which I have no experience.  I don’t really know how you determine who is and who isn’t competitive, what legal protections I have or what to do next.  At this point, though, the situation is that I have to just sit tight because this is not the official decision but just letting me know about the recommendation that is going up the stack.  It could be a week or more before an actual decision is rendered and even that is not final as the official process is to get a decision then appeal it.  So the actual final decision could be some point beyond that.

So it was a somber night when I went home.  We have been sure for a month that we were going to Barclays and have been apartment hunting already and sure that this was what we were going to be doing.  This came as a complete surprise.  We had absolutely no idea that this was a real possibility given that I was not going to a hedge fund and not going someplace local either!  Now we are really trying to figure out what to do, what to think, how to react, etc.  And while it has been a month, almost, of feeling that Barclays was a sure thing it has been longer that we knew that it was a real possibility and we, more or less, were thinking that this was our game plan for nearly two months!  So this is a huge shock.