The Last Line of Defense

I know I said the next post would be post-Thanksgiving, but sometimes, like nature, blogging calls. So my birthday...good times. First trip to Sammy's Rumanian....check. Last trip to Sammy's Rumanian...check. I'm not sure my body can handle that again, at least not for another few years. Between the heart-attack inducing foods and the copious amounts of vodka (which I don't even like), in celebrating another year of life I most certainly lopped off another two on the other side. The next morning, as I sat on the N Train on my way down to Union Square I noticed that someone near me smelled like sweat, garlic, and onions only to realize that that holy trinity of olfactory nastiness had embedded itself quite nicely in the material of my Patagonia jacket. Suffice to say I let that bad boy air out over the course of the next few days.

But getting into the details of my birthday is not why I'm here. I'm here to single-handedly keep the financial system on its axis. I'm here to make sure that on Monday we all have jobs, and we all can go take out money at the ATM, and we all have someone for Main Street to yell out when bonuses are paid out this year.

Everyone in my group is out on Friday. In fact, it was just me and the other associate in for part of the day on Wednesday and it was incredibly quiet as one can imagine. But on Friday, it'll be just me. Originally it was going to be cool if I took the day off as well, however, Tuesday afternoon it was determined that I should be there "in case things blow up". Sounds promising. I understand that it's not a bad idea for someone to hold it down and I'm local for Thanksgiving and I'm the new guy so I guess it falls to me. So while nobody really expects anything to happen on Friday, I, the eternal optimist, am thinking of every possible doomsday scenario that could happen tomorrow. For something serious to happen tomorrow my phone would have to ring, and let me tell you, I can count on two hands the number of calls I've received in the past two months and I can count on one hand the number of times the call was actually for me and not a wrong number.

Once that phone rings I'm assuming the powers that be will be calling on me to avert total and utter destruction of the world's financial system as we know it. If my phone rings, well shoot, it's time to run to your local supermarket to stock up on water and your local gun shop to stock up on guns. If my phone rings tomorrow, oh boy, that's bad news for everyone. Tomorrow I will truly be the last line of defense. The same man who was unsuccessful in growing a respectable mustache not once, but twice this year...the same man who successfully fixed a school bus by watching other more competent people fix a school bus...the same man who proposed the idea of milk-smellers...the same man who once contemplated adding the skills of Air Drying, Watching the Discovery Channel, and Not Wearing Underwear to his resume...yes...it is this man who will be the last line of defense on Friday, the proverbial backstop to a global financial catastrophe. Do you even understand how difficult it was for me to get two different colored highlighters when I started? It's been two months and I can't even get a thumbtack. Not a one. I tape shit to the walls in my cube with scotch tape. My cubicle walls look like the bunch of first graders grabbed a bunch of papers off the printer and played Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You want me to forward your call onto someone else. Oops. I hung up. Why? Because I don't know how to forward calls. My phone is not a phone, but some evil Transformer. One time during my first week I literally flipped the display on my computer screen upside down and had no idea how to fix it. I knew better than to take this issue to the VP in my group so I went around the office introducing myself, and then following it up with the question "So I flipped my screen upside down, do you know how to fix it?". That was an awesome twenty minutes of my life. So when I get the call from some panicked corporate voice tomorrow this is how it'll go down..

Me: Hello this is John.
Voice: Is this John Finger? The man in charge on Friday November 27th? The man who can save us?
Me: Yes, this is he.
Voice: We need the 2045 through 2050 total assets under management estimates for our base case and adverse scenarios and we need them in ten minutes.
Me: Sure, the kitchen is over around the corner by the emergency exit.
Voice: What?
Me: The kitchen. It's over by the emergency exits right around the corner. Just about 20 feet down the hall.
Voice: What are you talking about. The financial system is minutes from collapsing. We need these numbers.
Me: Hello? Hello. You're breaking up. You know what, I'm just going to forward your call on to my manager.

Oops. I hung up.

It's a steep learning curve, but I'm doing the damn thing one day at a time. I may have once flipped my screen upside down, but at the end of the day you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall because I WILL ORDER THAT CODE RED.



Yeah, maybe I sold my unborn first child to the black market for a pink and a yellow highlighter, and maybe excel has made me her bitch from time to time, but come tomorrow, I'll be there, in my cubicle, taking tacos to the FACE, while I wait for that red phone to ring so I can pick it up and say, "Hello Mr. President, I'm here to save the financial system today, thumbtacks or not".

A Marginal Birthday? I Hope Not.

I keep a notepad by my bed. I always have. You never know what kind of things you'll think about when you dream or when you are trying to fall asleep. At Michigan I'd often wake up in the middle of the night and scrawl some ideas down on paper in the dark and then wake up to realize I'd half written on my notepad and half on my nightstand, but at least I had the idea documented. Sometimes it was an errand I needed to run, or an idea for a blog, or just the name of a song I wanted to download.

The other night I woke up at some godforsaken hour and in a half-sleep turned to my notepad and wrote, "check the 06-09 pre-tax margins". When I woke up the next morning and looked at what I'd written I simply shook my head and muttered to myself, "Finger, you sandbaggin' son of a bitch". Finally when pencils are down for the day and I can think about anything anything anything under the sun I can't help but think about pre-tax margins? As the Germans say, "uber depressing".

Tomorrow is my birthday and I can vividly remember what I did last year for it. In fact a good portion was documented on facebook, so perhaps that's why I can recall it so vividly. I don't know what day it was exactly, because every day was Friday, but I had a bunch of people over to my apartment, or the Traphouse, as we liked to call it. Michigan was playing UCLA in a pre-season tournament. I had made a batch of Trapjuice, which is simply a delicious combination of Jim Beam and orange Gatorade (shake and pour over ice) and had a fridge stocked with Miller Lites. Ah college. We drank, hung out out in my super sparse apartment, and then took the party to Rick's where we celebrated a Michigan upset and partied the night away. It was exactly a year ago, but it feels like just yesterday. Tomorrow there will be no Trapjuice, no crew at the Traphouse, no Rick's. I'm simply hoping I get out of work by 9pm. That's really it. That's all I want. And if it doesn't work out, well, I have the weekend I suppose. I'll have the weekend. All weekend to have visions of pre-tax margins dancing in my head.

Bring on Thanksgiving I say. I won't be blogging again until the long weekend, so let's make it through this next week together loyal followers. Me, you, and The Man.

Safe travels to your Thanksgiving destinations and not to be preachy, but be thankful, even you jaded New Yorkers. Yes, I'm talking to you (and me).

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th by the way

I went into this week thinking it would be a full week, but on Monday someone told me I had off for Veterans Day. Of course I didn't believe it until I received confirmation from about twenty people, but if you don't want me in the office I'm happy to oblige. With my Wednesday free I set out to do what I'm guessing a lot of unemployed people/people who don't work for big corporations do. After easily sleeping until 9am I went to the gym, and then headed down to Tebaya for a meal that I've been meaning to have for a long time. A totally unassuming Korean establishment on a totally unassuming block, Tebaya's acclaimed chicken wings definitely lived up to the hype. I'm kind of a little sick of people using the wording "cloyingly" because every Tom Dick and Harry uses it in every food review I've read as of late, but the wings were perfectly cooked, crisp on the outside, moist on the inside, with a bit of garlic, some sesame seeds and what I think was a teriyaki glaze that was sweet, but yes, not cloyingly sweet. Damn it. I was the first one in at around noon, but when I left it was pretty busy. A testament to the wings no doubt.

I then roamed around Union Square and because it was cold I went into Barnes & Noble where I read the first chapter of a book called Fordlandia about Henry Ford's attempt to build a utopian, rubber-producing, midwestern society right in the middle of the Amazon. I didn't make it to chapter two but I'm guessing Fordlandia ended up running as smoothly as the Detroit Lions. Zing. By the way, I was shocked at the number of people who had literally just found a couple feet of carpet and curled up with a book they surely had no intention to buy. I'm fine with that, but knowing that, the next time I buy a book at B&N I'm going to make sure that I grab a book from the back of the stack. I don't need any weirdo cooties on my brand new book, and believe me, there were some weirdo cooties up in B&N at 2:30 on a Wednesday. After meeting a friend for coffee and having dinner with my family it was off to see a New York Knicks team that had less chemistry than a New York City public high school. These guys are elite players. Don't get me wrong. But guys making that much money have no reason to look as horrible out there on the court as they did. The Knicks playing like they played...a shanda I tell you.

Wednesday left me fulfilled, but also exhausted, which is great because I'm sitting here waiting to head out to Chelsea Piers for a 10:15 basketball game. That's way too late, and if it were earlier in the week it probably would be something that could throw off my sleep for the rest of the work week. So I'm sitting here, trying to eat half a dinner, which I can't do because I'm an all or nothing kind of guy. I went "all" unfortunately, and I'm literally sitting here dunking cookies in milk and blogging, which is how I imagine much of middle America spends their evenings these days.

I got to thinking how a) at camp we had milk and cookies when we were younger, and b) how I'm pretty sure adult wannabes such as myself don't drink enough milk anymore. I do have a bowl of cereal each morning, and grew up drinking milk with dinner which surprisingly a lot of people find strange. Maybe I was subconsciously inspired to drink milk tonight because of this article in the NYTimes about the health benefits of drinking chocolate milk.

Somewhere in America a fat boy is crying out at the dinner table "I want my flavanoid-rich chocolate milk". And would you blame him? I know I'd rather give my kid chocolate milk for dinner than soda, which I've more or less sworn off since my junior year of college. Hell, Momofuku even has s Milk Bar, in which they charge exorbitant prices for flavor infused milk. If I want Froot Loops flavored milk I'll pour myself a bowl and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours to soak. I never looked at milk and cookies at camp as a way to get the youngins to get some calcium and flavanoids in their lives. I just remember it being a reason to have to climb down from the top bunk and freeze my ass off brushing my teeth for a second time. Anyway, I'm sure there was a good reason they didn't give us milk and cookies and then send us out to play basketball, because anyone who would do that is surely a moron.

A Shuffle. A Chortle. A Knock.

I write this blog, and even I'm getting a little sick of reading about the working world in this space. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the workplace is fascinating, and often times for unpleasant reasons. Truth be told, several weeks ago I had consecutive midnight nights...to which the Investment Bankers out there say "boo freaking-hoo" and/or "FingerTheBlog is a candy ass"...but for me that was the first time I'd put in hours like that. On the morning of day three I was a bit on edge, a bit shell shocked perhaps. The sound of footsteps in the vicinity of my cube elicited a physiological reaction that wasn't particularly pleasant. In order to keep sane I realized I need to focus a little harder on the sounds at the office. I was going to have to learn to like be an office ornithologist of sorts.

I sit in a pretty highly trafficked area, but since paying closer attention to sounds I can sense when my manager is coming over to talk to me. I hear him walking and I know the sounds his shoes make against the carpet as they come to a halt just shy of the boundary to my cube. I'm beginning to understand what it's like to be SpiderMan. It sure is a lot of responsibility, but I can't wait until I can shoot webbing out of my hands. That'll definitely be a separate blog post. As of late there's been a bowl of candy that's been parked on the executive assistants' desk which resides right behind my cube. There's been an inordinate amount of foot traffic so basically my Spidey Sense has been tingling like whoa since Halloween and I still get those nasty mini-physiological reactions from time to time.

There's another fellow, who is from my best guess from a southern region of the midwest. I don't know for sure, nor will I ever ask, but he clears his throat in a eerily similar fashion to my manager who sits out of my earshot. For a while, the midwestern throat clearing really threw me for a loop because I thought that my manager was constantly near my cube, lurking, circling, waiting to swoop in for a kill. I jest of course. And if my manager was close at all times it's not like it would be an issue, because I'm doing anything illegal or illicit at my desk. I'm just working. I guess what it comes down to is the desire to not be snuck up on. A friend told me once that the partner at his hedge fund wears only socks all day, and has been known to sneak up on unsuspecting employees. Hopefully not on purpose. Sounds like a living nightmare to me.

I, like any mammal or otherwise, who has ever lived on this planet desires to have a maximum handle on his/her environment, and until humans evolve to develop eyes in the back of our heads (it's coming, oh yes, it's coming) we'll just have to rely on what we currently have in order to help us survive. I urge you to try it for yourself at the workplace, or even if you are just sitting at home or in the park or where ever. Not the car though. Close your eyes and just listen. I don't think we as a people listen enough. If you're at work though don't do this for too long because I've actually walked past someone who literally had their eyes closed and I don't think it was because she had read this blog. I think she had mastered sitting upright and sleeping, to which I earnestly say, "brava". Not everyone can do that.

I cannot wait for the sweet sweet sounds of Friday tomorrow. A little more laughter, a little less typing on the keypads, and hopefully the zipping of zippers and shuffling of papers around 6:30p as people pack up for the weekend. Back in the day TGIF meant Steve Urkel, but now I truly Thank God It's Friday.
Oddly enough I just bought a shirt just like that because plaid shirts just like that are very much in style these days. Upon closer look, the tortoise-shell aviator-style specs, the uptown fade, the plaid shirt...I think sans suspenders and an unbuttoning of the top button Steve Urkel would be the hippest dude in Williamsburg with that outfit on. Too bad he was fifteen years ahead of his time. Seriously, let that thought just simmer until it blows your mind. Boom.