New York is Leaking

That was a lot of rain earlier this week. Walking to work became more of a mission to not step in a big puddle than anything else, and because I have cat-like quickness I was able to make it to work without getting too wet on Monday and Tuesday. I think it probably would make sense to keep an extra pair of socks at my desk for those rainy days. On Tuesday it was raining pretty hard and I went to pick up some food to bring back and eat at my desk, which is what I do every day. On my way back I was thinking about two things: avoiding stepping in puddles and how good my veggie soup would taste. Well I got a taste. A taste of about a gallon of puddle water splashing up from the street into my face/mouth. Luckily I had a full length trenchcoat on but NY puddle water to the dome was still demoralizing. I'm sure I drank a gallon of swine flu, and on top of that I smelled like wet dog. The rain never lasts forever though. Rain gives way to sun, and sun in turns gives way to grease.

Yes, grease.

It was Friday, moderately slow at work, and two friends from my program suggested that I join them for a sit down lunch. "Like sit down somewhere that's not my desk?" I ask incredulously. Scandalous, sure, but eating a Chicken TBM at Cosi would surely be better than eating at my desk, with my thumb on ALT and my index finger on TAB, toggling between the NYTimes and some spreadsheet that gives me heartburn. Cosi was great and I even grabbed a couple of those excellent, warm, salty, flatbread samples they put out while you wait in line. Ah, life was good, and then I get to the corner of 46th and Park, right across from my office and I'm looking at the ground and there are a hundred little specks of black, so I look up and from high above I see little droplets of oil raining down. I inspect my black Patagonia jacket and lo and behold I'm covered in grease and I smell not like a wet dog, but perhaps a wet dog who is a mechanic. The white shirt I had on as well...ruined. I love Patagonia, and all their products and their customer service and their eco-friendliness, but when the technological geniuses who designed my jacket picked the materials, they weren't thinking about whether their materials would be grease-repellent.

Over the next half hour I contacted the Helmsley building management company who put me in touch with the construction company, who then put me in touch with a guy who texted me quote "Can you meet me downstairs. I work for the mgmt company. I am wearing a black leather jacket". I figured this guy would either make my problems disappear or fit me for a new pair of concrete boots and make me disappear. Instead, with a cigarette hanging from his lips while he spoke, this fellow apologized like I imagine many NY construction workers do, peppering in four-lettered expletives amongst sympathetic sentiments. He said he'd get a check cut for me "for my troubles". All told, my damaged goods probably would run me about $300, but this guy emails his assistant to cut me a $400 check. Not bad. So Monday, hopefully, I'll have a $400 check in my hand. And hopefully at some point in the next week I'll have a new white buttondown and a new Patagonia jacket and an extra $100 worth of tacos.

I'm sick of the rain. Regular and of the grease variety. It's Halloween tonight. This week has already been strange enough, but I'm ready for the weirdness to continue I suppose. Bring it on. But first a nap.

Being an Apple

I've been eating a lot of apples at work. Certainly at least one a day and often between the hours of 8p and 11p. Why so late you ask. I can't even go there right now, but I will say this, at 11p on Wednesday I took my eyes off my computer and grabbed an apple. I looked at it, bit it, admired it, bit it again, and thought, what if I was an apple. Then I thought to myself, if I was this apple I wouldn't be building this model right now, and I took a deep breath and buried my face in my computer and continued working. Existentialism has no place at the workplace though. In fact it's downright dangerous at 11pm on a weekday, especially on an empty stomach.

Today I got an email postcard (there's an app for that, apparently) from a friend who was back in Ann Arbor for the Penn State game. It was a blurry picture of a muddy patch of grass with maize and blue-clad students drinking from red Solo cups in the rain, and it was beautiful. Next week Michigan students will come to New York for their Wall Street Week and various other "professional treks". I chronicled this weird event back in 2007. This year I've been asked to speak to current MBA1s about the program, the process, the economy, the whatever. It's almost comical how different my world is now as compared to October 2007. So all these wide-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears students are going to come in and ask all kinds of questions so as to seem intelligent, interested, and smart, and all I'm going to want to say to them is, "Please have fun, please for the love of God enjoy yourselves, and appreciate those lazy Fridays where you wake up late, read or not read cases for a few hours, watch The Office and 30 Rock from the night before, change out of your pajamas, head to the gym, grab No Thai, and then go out with your friends". But really what I'll end up saying is something like prepare for your interviews blah blah blah, and then the MBA1s will look at me and see the tired look on my face and will say to themselves what I said to myself two years earlier which was, "whoa, it must suck to be this dude right now". As much as I hated standing in those godforsaken circles of chit-chat for all those months of recruiting, nodding my head at a bunch of guys I know would rather be doing anything else than talking to me, I would trade places with a first year MBA in half a second.

Today, Sunday, I'm actually "on call". I was asked to be ready to possibly come in and work today. So today I wait, with an imaginary guillotine over my head, and every time my phone rings a little piece of me dies, but so far the calls have only been good calls, ie friends and family. It's the first time, but I'm sure certainly not the last I'll be in this situation. I suppose in situations like this the question is whether it's better to know working on Sunday is a possibility or is it better to be surprised and have to come in on short notice. Is it better to be told on Friday that you might get punched in the mustache on Sunday and have to think about it all weekend, or is it just better to be sucker punched on Sunday out of nowhere. I'm not sure which is worse but I am sure that if I was an apple these aren't things I'd have to worry about. Enjoy the week.

Swag On

Wow. I guess you really don't appreciate free time until it's been snatched from you and thrown into some bottomless pit. It doesn't seem right to measure the time in days it's been since I blogged last. I shall measure it in spreadsheets. One, two, a million-ish.

At school, and I know I've written this and said it a lot, but every day was Saturday. Now, every day is not Saturday, but doing small things during the week, or as I like to call it, "being a person" during the week, really makes things exponentially better. I guess it's the little things that keep me going all day, like when they have a Cuban food buffet in the cafeteria. Eating chicharrones while stealing glances at NYTimes.com during lunch, or grabbing a fruit shake with a buddy at a food truck at 4pm like I used to do last summer, or crawling under my desk for a thirty minute power nap. These are the luxuries of my life now. And no I don't nap, although I heard some bankers do that when they are pulling all-nighters.

There's this song that I have on my workout mix right now called "Swag On" by Souja Boy. Swag basically is short for swagger. You can do the extra research if you want a better definition. The song is a remix and there are about five or six guys on the track. I think it's Jeezy's who says this, but he has a few lines, and they go like this

"...tell them lames to lose my number/
until they find some money/
being joke is a broke, so that's why I find em funny/
They say life's a bitch but you couldn't take her from me/
Now won't you quit making blogs and try to make some money...."

I really do agree with this, at least the last part. But when I'm not sure Jeezy, or whoever it was that said this, was pointing said "lames" in the direction of finance. Anyway, when you listen to a song a couple times a week for a few weeks you start to think about it a little bit. I'm not saying it's time to quit making blogs, but perhaps it's time to start pursuing writing in other avenues. Unfortunately there's this whole lack of time thing I'm dealing with now, which brings me to my next question. How in God's name does anyone do this and have time for kids? Bless the parents out there, or at least the ones that don't go locking their kids up in cages in the basement.

Before I literally fall asleep at the keyboard here I'll leave you with the chorus to the aforementioned song. Suffice to say, when I get out of bed in the morning I look in the mirror and do my best Nancy Kerrigan impression and say "Whhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyy!?!???" (see ~ 2:00).



Soulja Boy, how'd you get out of bed this morning?
Quote... "hopped up out tha bed, turn ma swag on, took a look in tha mirror said wassup, yeeeeea im gettin money (ohh)".

Compliance

There's a mandatory online compliance training class that all new employees have to take. It's short and sweet, and the contents are pretty obvious. Although given the shenanigans we've seen as of late in the world of finance, perhaps people have a difficult time knowing right and wrong. Anyway, in this compliance training class there's mention of blogs and disseminating sensitive info. Basically, you can't say anything about work to anyone outside of work. In fact you can'teven say the word "work" outside of wo...that was close. The first rule of compliance club is that there is no such thing as compliance club. I think the moral of the story here is that I'm going to be super careful of what I write in regards to work. For example, I work between the Equator and about said place where I go five times a week between 8:30am and 8:00pm.

Last Thursday night I played in my basketball league and after a late game (a win), a post-game beer, and a trek all the way uptown it was coming on midnight by the time I started to settle in at home. I needed to get in early the next morning to finish up some work for a midday deadline, so I simply didn't get a whole lot of sleep. The next morning I walked into work with my bacon egg and cheese sandwich and got into the elevator. I got out of the elevator, turned a couple corners and went to my cube to start the day, and lo and behold there's someone sitting in my cube, sitting in my chair, eating my goddamn porridge. I thought to myself, "wow, I haven't even been here a month and I've already been replaced, that sure was quick". And then I looked around and realized that it wasn't my floor, and it was this crazy moment where I wasn't sure if I was in The Matrix or The Matrix was in me. Red pill, blue pill, red pill, blue pill. There I was, with a bacon egg and cheese in hand and a dumbfounded look on my face, a passive observer in this world that was exactly the same as my world, just one floor below me and yet completely different. It was like an out of body experience where I was looking at myself eating breakfast and just thinking that on every floor in this building at that very moment there was some bizarro Finger at the same cube eating his bizarro bacon egg and cheese, and I felt mighty mighty insignificant. I think it's probably best not to think of such things at work though. That was by far one of the strangest ways I've started a Friday in a long time.

Today there was an article about the FTC's new rules regarding bloggers and compliance. Jeez. Why won't everyone just get off my back. Here's a recap from the New York Times:

"The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement."

I can't even begin to count the number of products I've mentioned/reviewed/lambasted in the last two years. I've never received so much as a penny, a Mallomar, or even a hug for any of my writings. In fact, I've only ever gotten a product for something I've written once, and this was when FingerTheBlog was just a twinkle in my eye. One time back in college I wrote to Chipwich telling them how awesome I thought Chipwiches were and how since 7-11 was only a half a block from my fraternity house we would eat them all the time, and how I would be truly honored if they'd send me a Chipwich t-shirt so I could spread Chipwich love across the world. A few days later I get this email from Chipwich saying how great my email was and how they wanted to use it on their website as a testimonial. I literally had absolutely no clue what the hell they were talking about so I went back to my "Sent Items" in Outlook to see what email they were talking about and found an email I'd written to them at like 3am on a Thursday night. Interesting. I thought to myself, this is why computers should come equipped with breathalyzers. So I wrote back that they could use my email on one condition...they send me a Chipwich t-shirt. A week later I got my t-shirt, which I still have. It reads "Chipwich...a miracle in your mouth". So FTC, eat your heart out, I had a torrid love affair with Chipwich back in 2002 and I'm shilling for them right now. Chipwich chipwich chipwich. Eat 'em while their cold and delicious.