32. Trash Talking
The second associate X leaves our bullpen one of my cubemates immediately throws a pen where X was standing and curses him out as if he was still there. Of course my fellow analyst is not stupid enough to talk back to the associate and tell him that he is a useless lowlife. Instead he opts for the safer route of talking sh*t once the associate leaves the area and letting all of us know how dumb and demeaning the X is towards him.
While in sports athletes like Chad Johnson and Sam Cassell will talk trash to your face in the middle of the game, investment bankers are not quite as tough. At every level of the food chain, bankers know better than to talk trash directly to the people above them. Yes, this may be true in every workplace, but investment banks fill themselves with employees who finished at the top of their class in school so think they are smarter and more deserving than the next guy. The egos are huge, the testosterone is at Barry Bonds level, and the trash talking in prevalent in whispers. You can cut the tension with a knife!
With a job like investment banking where more than 50% of the compensation is from the bonus, employees rely on getting good reviews from their bosses and peers. That means taking it in the rear from your bosses and always seeming like you’re working hard and happy to be doing so. The truth is, once the boss turns his head you are flicking him off and mocking his voice to your confidants in your group. Not the ideal environment but investment banking is a dog-eat-dog world where a lot of money hungry people are fighting for an even smaller pie of bonuses. While you are talking smack about your boss or peers, they are probably doing the same thing about you, except their word actually means something. Gotta love a true hierarchy….
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Back in the day when I was an analyst, I worked for a crazy director who liked to go hunting. I have no objection to gun ownership or hunting for food, but dude was gun-crazy with a VAST collection of guns, and wound a bit too tight.
Normally, he'd saunter in during the later part of the morning, after analysts had already been cranking away for hours (or possibly, were still around having pulled an all-nighter). He'd be fresh as a daisy, just showered, from the gym.
But on this one day, he came in, looking quite glum and wearing an eye-patch. I went to give him the printout of this model I was working on and asked, faux-solicitously what happened with his eye.
He told me that he was crawling around in the underbrush, trying to hunt something, and he'd pushed this thorn-covered branch out of the way, but when he let go, it bounced back and hit him in the face, scratching his eye.
Now this was such a dumbass thing to do, I could barely contain myself when he told me. But hey, we analysts distinguished ourselves with our willpower, which keeps us working on those fucking 32-tab excel spreadsheets and powerpoint (even though the stupid CEOs never seem to really look at the presentations...)...so I didn't laugh out loud.
I made some obligatory murmur of sympathy and went back to my cube to grind out more stuff. My fellow analysts asked me what happened, and when I told them, we were all laughing hysterically. The 3rd-yr analyst asked me what the Director had been hunting, and I said: WABBITS. More hysterical laughter. But of course, we wouldn't have said that to the director's face, for fear of firing (as well as fear of being fired at-- dude really enjoyed killing for the sake of killing.)
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