As others said, you should return the company’s proprietary information (passcodes, documents, etc). Even if you’re not technically required to, it’s not right to keep their stuff, and there’s no benefit for you in being a jerk. Move on with your life, don’t get in the way of them moving on without you, or you might find yourself in a lawsuit that has actual teeth.
Regarding this part:
Don’t fire yourself. It’s never a good idea to do this when you get a message that “sounds” like a termination. The right thing is to say “This task isn’t part of my job duties and I won’t be performing it” and wait for termination paperwork. Then your status is perfectly clear if you need to file for unemployment (or heaven forbid respond to a lawsuit).
It’s great your wife was able to line up something so quickly, but next time you might need the unemployment benefits, or you might not be in a secure enough position to fight a lawsuit. Don’t make it complicated.
It’s tempting to mess with your former employer, but don’t. Make them serve you a termination notice, return their company property & proprietary info, and be professional at all times. There’s no upside in being a jerk or playing games.
I’m aware of an instance in which the Secretary of a well-known National organisation departed after the Board of Directors had lost confidence in him and his financial mismanagement.
After his departure it was realised that the association’s website, which his son had been employed to design, was not accessible to any other admin but him. Unauthorised external access to the servers had taken place shortly after his departure, and the server event log had been erased. A significant quantity of documents and files relating to his activities over the past two years could not be located. Outside specialists had to be called in to regain control of the business’s systems.
He had also forged one of the other Director’s signature on checks payable to himself, supposedly for expenses.
Clauses are either written into the contract, or they aren’t. There’s no “implied”.
Of course, if clauses are worded vaguely, then different people can interpret them in different ways, and it’s up to a judge to decide the best interpretation. But a non-compete is a pretty clear thing, it would really be hard to get that out of any clause that doesn’t explicitly say “you can’t work for a competitor.”
As a side note, most non-competes are BS and it’s hard to enforce them. Courts generally don’t want to prevent people from getting a job.
We recently had an executive who wanted three 27” 4K monitors on his desk. Fine but the USB-C docking station wasn’t capable of running that. That was just too much data to send over that pipe.
A friend of ours worked cutting/styling hair for a high end salon. She signed a non-compete agreement.
When she quit, she drove around trying to find another job that was outside the non-compete area (IIRC it was 20 miles).
She got a job and all was going well until she received notification she was being sued for violating the non-compete. She hired a lawyer but lost the suit. She measured distance using her car’s odometer, but a map showed she was two miles too close.
There’s using your car as an Uber driver or medical courier, where you’re using it constantly for business and then there’s occasional use, like picking up a co-worker at the airport or running to Staples for office supplies. I would be very much surprised if my insurance company objected to occasional use of my car for business purposes.
It’s been many years since i carefully read all the details of a standard personal auto policy, but I’d be surprised if an insurance company rejected a claim for occasional use while at work. I don’t recall them asking me if i was using it for work the last time i had a fender bender, either. They asked if i was wearing my glasses, and if i was drunk. They asked about the details of the event. They asked a lot of questions. But i don’t recall “why were you driving just then?”
Maybe they ask more questions now that ride share is a thing.
One of the first questions they asked when my wife was in an accident last year. Both our insurance company and theirs. Question about whether the car was being used for hire.
The last time I was in an accident (100% the other drivers’ fault; she ran a stop sign and “didn’t see me”) I was asked all kinds of details, and I’m pretty sure they asked the reason I was driving. (I was dropping my kid off at school, in fact the person who hit me was the aunt of another kid my daughter knew, after she’d dropped him off.) So there may have been an attempt to find out if I was driving for work.
Then again, maybe not. There was really no contest at all about who was at fault, and her insurance paid for everything. I don’t know if it would have really mattered in my case.
I have one of those, or something like it. It is so awesome.
asking lots of questions, with overlap, is a standard technique to detect lies. It’s generally much easier to tell an honest story than a made-up one, because an honest story hangs together. For a made-up one, the liar generally won’t have thought of all the implications and gets tripped up.
“The combination is 12-34-27. Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
We had a teacher who took $20k of computers off-campus even though she was terminated. When she returned them, she typed a different master password each time she emailed a response to our request.
So these were all changed when the former owner left, and so the former owner can’t help her out, huh? C’est dommage.
That was my first thought when her boss called about the security alarm going off. Call the old owner, she might remember it.
But I, at the time, wasn’t in the mood to be very helpful to her.
Because she expected me wife to open and close the office she never needed to know this information. My wife was scheduled to go on vacation 2 weeks from when this happened so my wife would have given her the information before she left. If this all went down a month from now it probably would have been a non issue.
My wife starts her new job next Monday. Hopefully a much better work environment. My wife got paid for her last week of work, no earned vacation pay yet. We will give it another week or so before asking questions.
