This past weekend was pretty pleasant. My father turned 60, and we had a big surprise party for him. He was caught totally off guard.

When I returned home and started looking through the mail, I was surprised to find a letter from the law firm of Wyrick Robbins Yates & Ponton LLP. They represent Strategic Technologies, the company I used to work for before I came to Predictive.

It seems that Strategic is threatening to sue me.

Now I don’t like getting letters from lawyers, unless it’s about long, lost Uncle Bernie’s estate, so I was a little upset about getting this one. See, when I joined Strategic, I signed an Employee Agreement that stated a lot of things that I wasn’t allowed to do once I left the company. One of those was recruiting people from their company.

One of their employees, who I’ll call David, decided to come and work for us. He joined Strategic to work with me, and I guess once I left Strategic the job didn’t turn out to be what he expected.

Since this is my diary, I don’t want to get too deep into David’s business, so let me sum it up by saying after a rather long process, David accepted a position with our company. I was very happy, because I get to work with David again, and I was glad he made the decision he did. What’s funny is that I had almost no involvement with this process.

Strategic, however, felt that I had actively recruited him in violation of my agreement. Thus I received a letter with words like “engaged in a course of action” and “injunctive relief” and “monetary damages” and finally, “litigation in a court of law”.

I was pissed. What really pissed me off was that I gave three years of my life to this company, was an outstanding performer based upon sales I helped generate and “service awards” I received, and they decide to threaten me personally over something I didn’t do?

Check out the letterhead on this puppy. It takes up one-third of the page:

If you click on it for detail, you can see that it looks like they even put a dead person on it: John C. Bryce (1954-1992). What does he do? Estates? I wonder if he is still billable?

On Monday, when David was at lunch, Strategic swiped the laptop off of his desk to search for “incriminating e-mail”. They didn’t even have the cojones to do it while he was there. Some company. While Strategic does own the laptop and its contents, they need to be careful about controlling that information. Handing it over to the IT department, where any personal e-mail David might have sent will almost surely become public, was an amazing example of incompetence. I wonder how the Senior Management at Strategic would feel if their personal e-mail became known, such as how much money they had in their trading accounts.

They also suggested that there was a chance that Predictive would revoke their offer of employment. Bah! (I always wanted to say “bah!”) Predictive is not a “touchy-feely, we are family” kind of place, but we look after our own.

On Tuesday, David met with the CEO for an exit interview. David restated once again that he made his decision on his own, and if management at Strategic was mad about it, they should take it out on him, not others. The CEO replied that the letter was only a “shot across the bow” to remind me about the agreement I signed.

Pisses me off. The letter claims that they had evidence that I solicited David. If so, why did they need his laptop? All they were doing was hiding behind the corporate name in order to bully me for leaving.

What did it get them? They alienated me, they alienated David, David is still gone. Rumour of their actions will spread, and everyone will get to know exactly what kind of company Strategic Technologies is: built on the blood of its employees for the vanity of its founders.

And what about the letter? The lawyers asked that I give assurances that I will honor my agreement (well, the actual words were “cease and desist”), so I am sending the following reply:

This is in response to your letter dated November 19, 1999.

David Hustace made his decision to leave Strategic on his own.

You have my assurance that I will abide by the agreement.

Still pisses me off.