Well I went into my HR department yesterday and asked them if I had ever signed a non-compete agreement. She looked through my file and said yes you signed this. I got a copy of what she gave me and turns out it was just a confidentiality agreement that basically said I would not divulge our and our customer’s trade secrets. To make matters even better the agreement is suppose to have my name on the front page and it is just left blank. It does have my signature on the last page, but seeing as how it is suppose to be an agreement between me and the company it requires the owner’s signature also – which happens to be blank.

Regardless I have no non-compete agreement and went ahead and resigned. They asked where I was going and I told them that I had not accepted an offer, but had a couple on the table, one of them being one of our customers. I was told I could not go to the customer because I had signed a non-compete. I said I just checked with HR and I have no non-compete signed, just a confidentiality agreement. My boss said they still will try to enforce the situation with the confidentiality agreement somehow, I replied that I don’t see how that is possible, but even that contract is null and void because the company never signed it so it’s an agreement between me, myself, and I. Subject was dropped and my other boss had to come in from working at home to talk to me.

Everyone was pretty nice to me and no one seemed to hold anything against me, but my other boss said I could not go to the client because our company had a signed contract with the client that said they could not hire me and that the president was calling the client to explain this to them as we spoke. They asked me to give them a $$ amount as to what it would take to keep me and left me on my merry way. I called the client and the president had indeed called them, but they were looking over all of their agreements and they were certain that nothing was signed and that the president was just blowing smoke at them.

Regardless I still have most of my other offers still on the table, I know that my sole is not sold to the devil so even if the customer is unable to hire me, I am certainly free to go to another consulting company and work at this client (with a huge raise of course) and even if that consulting company wasn’t making a whole lot on me they would be stupid not to entertain the idea as I could get them a load of business at this client. I could also go independent and make even more money, but health insurance pretty much makes it impossible to be entrepreneurial these days with a family.

Anyway I will see how today plays out as now it is just an issue between my old company and my potentially new company, but I am not stuck in the middle.