Working for the Man

Yeah. I worked on Wall Street this summer. At an investment bank. That’s a company that deals with money. What did I do? Eh… I’d try to explain it to you, but you just wouldn’t understand. It’s very complicated. I spent a whole ten weeks learning about it, and men of my expert status don’t waste time hobnobbing with the uninitiated hoi polloi. Just know that I did something so hardcore that not only was I in possession of extremely sensitive and confidential information, I actually often read and understood it. Occasionally I was also responsible for delivering said information to various members of our and other firms. Once I even spell-checked a Powerpoint presentation that was being given to the CFO of a Fortune 500 corporation. The CFO! I considered changing the order of the bullet-points in favor of the transaction so that the lines starting with my initials read sequentially, but the risk of being found out was just too great. After all, there are four layers of employees between me and the guy who will eventually give the presentation.

I was so hardcore, in fact, that I didn’t have time for basic maintenance or hygiene. I went three days without changing my shirt. I kept a toothbrush in my desk. I had Q-tips hidden behind my monitor. I once sat in my cloth swivel chair, hyped on free Coke and stuffed with the dinner I bought with my green corporate card, for the amount of time it took one of the senior guys in my office to fly back from his golf outing in Iceland. I’ll bet your employer didn’t even like you enough to pay for your brown bag lunch, but my firm bought me seared ahi lunch and fire grilled dinner. My bosses even bought me breakfast on the days that I brought them coffee, a bagel, and the Journal in a timely fashion.

I don’t even use the mouse in Excel anymore. It’s a waste of my time. I know all the keystroke shortcuts, anyway, and to take my hands off the keyboard and my eyes off the screen would be unthinkable. Those valuable seconds could make the difference between a winning and a losing transaction. You think that’s a joke? This is a place for the big boys. The floor is for adults. This is Wall Street. This is what we do!