the night has a thousand saxaphones

The sheer level of relief at getting away from that horrible company is pretty incredible. I hadn’t realized quite how stressful it was, quite how much time it was taking and how completely the nastiness and office politics and uncertainty were occupying my mind. I have enough students to stay solved until school gets out, I have the temp place to go back to this summer, and I’m starting to be confident that I can get some kind of legal help and be able to tutor next year. If nothing else, I will have a few students from Andy and a little bit of under-the-radar advertising, and though that won’t be enough to live on, I can find ways to supplement it. In the meantime, it’s just a glorious glorious vacation, with late nights and lazy mornings and a minimum of commitment- fix or six students a week and a five credit class. It’s incredible.

So Kaplan fired me.  After two years working there, and after over nine months of insane office drama, of me lasting through complete office turnover every two months, finally getting paid something close to a decent amount of money, finally getting that little office into some kind of livable shape, finally getting the inventory sorted out, learning to tutor-train, organizing the hiring process… after dealing with a company that is unbelievably cheap, disorganized, short-sighted, and disloyal… actually taking some kind of responsibility, some kind of personal ownership of one little corner of it… dodging the mountains of office politics and actually making friends and finally LIKING it and thinking I had a whole good thing going for the next year…

They fire me, out of the blue, for violating their non-compete.  Fair enough- I was.  I signed a damn paper that says, basically, that I can’t do ANYTHING relating to Test-prep at any level or ANY kind of teaching at the high school level, for ANY company or independently, for a year after leaving this place.  This is after begging for students and begging- literally- to be allowed to expand, get more hours, do more, teach other subjects, somehow get more involved and do these things with them instead of on my own.  But no.  They would rather refuse to work with you and then punish you for looking elsewhere.  Despite the fact that I never turned down a student, that I took as much as any tutor (and more than the vast majority of them), despite the fact that I never once poached a student, they want to use the non-compete as a punishment.  

I’m so angry I just about can’t breathe, which is good because otherwise panic would start in.  I mean, what do I do now? I took down all my own advertising because they threatened me with a non-compete.  If they can actually enforce this, and keep me from doing tutoring with any other company and keep me from advertising on my own until next April, then I am completely sunk.  There is absolutely nothing I can do that will make enough money to let me keep living here and stay in school next year if I can’t tutor, and I will never get a job as well-paying and school-convenient and flexible as the office thing.  I have absolutely no idea what I’ll do next year, but it totally overturns all my ambitious plans about classes and I have no backup.  I am way too terrified and too depressed and embarrassed to even get any legal advice about whether this is enforceable, because I’m too scared that it is.