Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I am in Manhattan for the entire day.  It is a nice chance to get out and see the city some, get some exercise and do something interesting.  Helps to kill some time while waiting for news and decisions.  Handy that I am home all of the time now and have nothing to do.

I drove down to Croton-Harmon Station early in the morning and caught the commuter line into the city.  It is somewhat cold and very drizzly today, just how I like the city.  I went into Grand Central Terminal and then walked down to 22nd which is a great hike in the city.  Lots of exercise but not so long that it is exhausting.

I ended up spending the entire day in the city.  Mark took me out for a light dinner at a pub around the corner.  A friend of his joined us.  We had a nice time hanging out.

It was probably eight or nine when I got back to the train terminal and an hour later that I was home with the family.  It was a nice change of pace going into the city today.  Of course, it sucks, because tomorrow Dominica and I are bringing the kids into the city but there was no way to combine the two trips.  If we had been able to find someone to hang out with her today and help with the kids they would have come in but being on her own all day with two kids in Manhattan was going to be too much for her.

Today is Friday.  I got into the office this morning and decided that in order to do the “right thing” according to how the company operates that I should talk to my lead and pull myself out of the active access systems at work.  Not a permanent thing, just following best procedures and practices until we’ve had a chance for everyone to sit down and discuss the situation.  We had a long talk about it but, in the end, he agreed and watched me decline my own access so that there would be no question of me attempting to have access when maybe I should not.

When we did so we noticed that my access has already been revoked.  So my judgement call was good in that, without knowing it, I was agreeing with decisions already made.

Once we had a chance to have a meeting with my lead and my boss it was determined that I had done exactly the right thing, as weird as it felt at the time and as much as people on the outside are likely to second guess my judgement on it.  It was a calm and collected decision based on company policies and practices.  I had really felt that I was doing what I was supposed to do given the situation and that turned out to be correct.  A bold move, I suppose.

The decision was made that I was not needed in the office, at least for now, and that I should head home and we will discuss the situation on Monday or Tuesday.  For now, I am getting a long weekend (paid, of course) to relax until we have time to get everything worked out.

Obviously this move comes with plenty of stress of its own.  While it is not the end of my career at Bridgewater, the unspoken understanding is that it is, of course.  I have already put in my notice and am just working out my notice period right now.  So this is not a big surprise.  The events from last night were a pretty big shock and pretty much make the long term potential of staying at Bridgewater a non-option from my point of view.  But in the big picture, while that is disappointing, it does not fundamentally change how things are going to happen going forward.  The process of me leaving Bridgewater is already fully underway and not stopping now.  Now we just have to figure out the transition plan.

Dominica and the girls were pretty surprised when I arrived home around noon.  I had grabbed a tuna melt at Dunkin Donuts on my way home since I had missed lunch at the office.  So we just spent the afternoon together as a family and relaxed for a bit.  My final denial has not come through yet so the only thing that we can do at this point is sit and wait and hope that everything works out.  It is going to be at least a week like this, maybe more.  We will know something more early next week, but very little.  End of the week, we hope, we will have much more solid information.

Feeling stressed, but also feeling confident in having maintained cool composure and solid decision making.  It was the right and proper response.  Anything less would have been some awkward combination of begging to stay in the office (even if unspoken) or being told I had to give up access rather than acknowledging it from the outset.  I really did think it through for a long time before making the decision and it was in no way a heat of the moment thing or anything of the sort.  It was principled and logical.

Now the waiting begins.

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.

Mostly a normal day at work.  This was actually, in hindsight, my last normal day at work.  Today would be the last full day at Bridgewater.  The last day when everything went as expected and nothing abnormal happened.

No real news today.  Played some video games with the kids after work.  The events that will happen tomorrow caused SGL to get disrupted for a while.  This is one of the days that was mostly lost as not be memorable enough to, well, to remember.

Right now our main thing is just waiting for Bridgewater to process the non-compete request internally so that I can set my start date with Barclays.

After work today, which was already very dark when I got home, we immediately settled in for family fun night as Liesl has been requesting. Both girls asked that we continue playing Space Quest 2 tonight to which I agreed. We have the game set up upstairs in Dominica and my bedroom so Dominica got an iPad and just hung out on the bed and did her own thing while Liesl, Luciana and I played Space Quest 2.

We had a good time and make it through the last 80% of the game. The girls loved it which is amazing considering what horrible graphics and sound that game has. It is like playing something on an eight bit machine which for all intents and purposes we are. But we have a great time. Liesl has gotten really good at figuring out puzzles too. She knew when to knock over a tree to climb across a chasm or when to throw a rock to knock out a guard. She is really good at these kinds of games.

It took us until after ten thirty to complete the game but I did not want to stop short of actually beating it after we put in such a long evening. Luciana is now begging to play King’s Quest 2. But that is for another day.

We got the girls to bed and went to bed immediately ourselves. It was only fifteen minutes, though, until I got called in because there was a gnat flying around their room and landing on them and they could not take it. So we allowed them to come in and sleep in our room. Luciana was asleep in minutes and Liesl in under thirty.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud sound. It was a massive downpour and the rain was coming in our windows in our bedroom pretty heavily. I had no idea that it was going to rain tonight and this was truly torrential. Completely took me by surprise.