Love, The Zombies.

Happy New Year.

(via Wolf and Fox)

614 south 3rd 2r: A Rental Horror Film

Hello there! It's been awhile since I went into hibernation, I know. But it's been a busy sort of hibernation: I've been on the job hunt. For the right job I'll move anywhere, but Philadelphia is at the top of my list. I grew up there, it's close to New York, it's got a ton of universities and colleges, I have friends there... there are a lot of pluses. So I went on Craigslist last night to check out apartments. The below is billed as a "virtual tour" -- but I'm not fooled, and you won't be either:

614 south 3rd 2r: A RENTAL HORROR FILM

0:00 Right off the bat we’re on the express train to Creeptown: cheap hardware store letters – one dented -- slapped unevenly on an unfinished wood door that looks so flimsy you could split it with a cardboard box top. (Check out the hole on the lower left, which looks like it was made by something only slightly sturdier than a pencil tip.)

0:02 Two seconds in and we’re in CHILDREN OF THE CORN territory. Creaky door, wobbly camerawork (clearly amateur -- possibly psychotic!), apparently abandoned messes everywhere. Is that the top of a toilet tank on the sofa?* Also there appears to be an unused fireplace that is full of crap. Wow, do I want to live here.

0:13 More abandoned stuff, including what appears to be the end of breakfast. What happened in this place? Was there some kind of raid and everyone split out the bathroom window? Plus this camera work is making me nauseated. Let’s not mention breakfast again.

0:19 Look quickly or you’ll miss the foreboding shadow of Camera Man. The plot thickens!

0:22 Apparently the ceiling is an extremely important feature of this apartment. I couldn’t agree more, by the way; I for one would never consider moving into an apartment without a ceiling, and I recommend you don’t either. I used to work for a real estate company, so you can take this advice to the bank.

0:26 OMG! The door is squeaking again! Youguysyouguysyouguys, from the way Camera Guy is swinging his camera around I don’t think HE expects anyone either! I think we can best describe this POV as “terrified giraffe.”

0:35 A quick pit stop as we move quickly down the hall in search of a hiding place to point out the washer and dryer. Excellent! Washing all those bloody clothes will be a snap.

0:51 Look, this bedroom ceiling has a light in it! That is awesome. Also, I’m now blind.

1:06 Okay, we all just gave silent thanks that the toilet was empty, right?

1:09 More with the ceiling. Listen, we get it. The apartment has ceilings in every single room. Congrats! But you’re still kind of freaking me out, Camera Man.

1:13 That blue box is a case of baby wipes. There is a baby here. Could it be a killer baby who loves breakfast and ceilings? I can’t tell yet. But I’m worried. Very, very worried. Things are getting creepier by the second.

1:16 AAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!! IT’S HIM!!! IT’S HIM!!!!!! He totally slipped up and showed himself on camera, and now he has to kill you!!! You know that this is true because of the lovingly shot homage to the shower scene in PSYCHO that follows. I am telling you, prospective tenant: RUN. RUN NOW.

1:24 Whoa, was that a back flip, Camera Man? Oh, prospective tenant, getting away is going to be harder than I thought. In fact, let's face it: you’re dead.

1:28 Especially because the bathroom window leads straight into a concrete wall. Yep, sorry. You’re toast.

1:35 and 1:36 Hear those things that sound like a pile of throwing stars and a baseball bat? What? I’m just asking.

1:38 Okay, hold everything. We are now in the full glory of this video, and I think this screen shot says it all. Please note that I have not digitally altered this in any way, first, because I do not have the software to do so and second, because even if I did I wouldn’t know how to do it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Floating Muppet Heads of Death:

We LOVE it at 614 south 3rd 2r… come join us... join us... join us...

1:40 - 2:04 In a redemptive, practically touching, totally Hollywood moment, the last few moments of this "virtual tour" show the POV of someone walking down a white (well, beige, really, but who quibbles at a time like this?) hall, toward a bright light. Good night, prospective tenant, wherever you are. If I wind up moving to Philadelphia I'm sorry we won't have a chance to meet; you seemed like a nice person.

______

*Apparently not. But in this place, who can tell?

Honestly, Do I Have to Get a Restraining Order?

Hey, BigAnonymous:

STOP SENDING ME STUFF.  You laid me off on September 22, nearly eight weeks ago.  Get over me.

Seriously, you're like that boyfriend who dumps you but then keeps calling "just to say hi."  For God's sake, do us both a favor and move on.  I have a novel to write.

NaNo, Day 6: An Ergonomic Plea

Chair, I’d jump around for joy
If only you were ergie
You know if I were Josh Duhamel
I’d do you like you were Fergie*

Desk, I’m with you all day long
Trying to be word-y
And that’s all good -- so is it bad
To wish that you were ergie?

My jaw is clenched, my back’s in spasms
My neck wants to flee to Jersey
Cause the tools I have are nice and all
But let’s face it -- they’re not ergie.

So if there’s Someone Big upstairs
I know that you’ll have heard me
And answered all my fevered prayers

When you send me something ergie.

____

*or, you know, whoever.

###

My work! My luck! My work! My luck! (apologies to CHINATOWN...)

Meeting yesterday's NaNo word count goal was like pulling teeth. 1,667 teeth.  But, done!  (1704 teeth, in fact.)  So today's tidbit is in the "the harder I work, the luckier I get" vein.  Here's looking forward to the luck.

My experience is you always get lucky if you’re willful enough about it. I discovered when I was in my twenties, and I started trying to make work, that if I would spend even more hours on it, luck would kick in on some story. And then you have to be ready to throw stuff out, too. You’re making room for the better stuff that’s going to come.

    -- Ira Glass, producer/creator/host, This American Life

Read the full interview here.

###

NaNovember, NaNoCashland

Yesterday was the first day of a global writing fiesta/orgy/spasm called National Novel Writing Month  (NaNoWriMo for short, NaNo for short short). NaNo works like this: you register on their website – over 100,000 people have registered around the world this year -- and commit to writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and November 30. 50,000 words comes out to roughly 200 pages, or between 6 and 7 pages per day, which in turn translates to an average of 1667 words per day. Simple, right?

Simple. Not easy.

One of the great joys of No Cashland is that I had ZERO excuse not to participate this year, and so I’m in for the first time. I will continue to post here throughout the month, but as I’m doing most of my heavy-lifting writing over at NaNo, you might wind up seeing a lot of links. And videos. Jokes, maybe. Who knows?  In the meantime, to give you a taste of who I’ll be cheating on you with all month, here’s the first paragraph of the NaNo novel. (This is the only excerpt I’ll post, though I may post a summary or two if they seem worth reading. Or because it might be fun to write them.)

___

Chapter One: To the Mountain

The carriage rocked and swayed as it lurched up the mountain. The horses strained at their harnesses; the breeze carried intermittent flecks of sweaty foam from their backs into the compartment where Edith sat next to her seven-year-old brother Peter. It was a clear, sunny afternoon, but their parents knocked on the inside roof of the compartment and asked the driver — Timothy was their gardener for the nine months of the year they were in the city and their driver/groundskeeper/in-house naturalist when they journeyed to Cragsmoor — to close the curtains against the flecks. As the carriage trudged upward its shiny black body and thick black woolen curtains made it look more like a hearse than a family vehicle.
__

That’s right, it looked like a hearse. Foreshadowing! People might die! (Okay, people die.) A century later other people will try to find out how and why and it will put them in danger! Some other stuff will happen in between those events! At this point I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen, but when I started writing chapter one I had a very clear plan. That plan exploded on word two, which I had intended to be “car.” Being in a carriage instead of a car sent me back half a century in one fell swoop, to a time period I hadn't envisioned being in this book at all. I fought it for about 20 minutes and then gave in.  Which I expect will happen a lot between now and November 30.  Basically, I expect to spend November being smacked around by my own brain.

At least, I hope so.

Miss Fish vs.... the Calendar

It’s Friday, and though I’m not Catholic, it seems as good a day as any to take a quick peek to see how Miss Fish is getting on. (Getting it on, of course, being some people’s assessment of how Miss Fish was hired at BigAnonymous in the first place.)

Several months ago, Miss Fish and her boyfriend* were preparing to go on a trip – in this case, on safari in Africa. “How long are you going for?” I asked as she gathered up her suitcase and purse. To her credit, Miss Fish came into work the day she left, leaving the office at 4pm and heading straight for JFK.

“Uh….” She said. “Well, we come back on Sunday.” It was Thursday afternoon. “I mean, not this Sunday, next Sunday. So it’s this weekend and then next week until Sunday. It’s however many days that is.”

Check plus, Miss Fish. At least we knew you had someone with you out there.
__

*Fun fact: Miss Fish’s boyfriend’s last name is Husband. Literally. Me, I’m convinced that this is nature's little way of making sure that if they get married, she’ll always be clear on exactly who that guy in her house is.

###

And now, a vintage Beatles cartoon video even more inexplicable than Miss Fish's losing battle with the days of the week:

Money as Debt: An Animated History

It's a rainy Tuesday.  Perfect day to catch a movie (or five)!   There is clearly a point of view in Paul Grignon's Money As Debt.  It is a very well thought out, clearly articulated point of view. I happen to agree with it, but if you don't, don't just grouse about it.  Say why -- just be as articulate and well thought out as he is, please. 

Part One


 Part Two


Part Three


Part Four


Part Five



(videos via the Mailman)

Cherchez la Polenta

I’ve written plenty about Cashland, but so far there’s been nothing from No Cashland. Until now, that is. Hello! Welcome to my shiny home office; take off your tie or kick off your pumps (or both, perhaps), won’t you? No business clothes here. And yes, these are pajamas I’m wearing. I know, the comfiness is almost unbearable.*   (Oh, but…**)

There’s a lot to say about the absurdity of No Cashland, about the mountains of paperwork that has to be filled out when you’re laid off, or the number of FedExes I got from BigAnonymous in the first two weeks (especially FedExes of documents in which one sentence was updated - if they’d sent just those pages via regular mail and then sent me the cash they saved I could have eaten off the difference for a month). And there are the times, once or twice a day even, when the panic beast rears up its head and starts feeding on my brain, sucking out all the reason and replacing it with the kind of lurking hysteria that triggers a crying jag when I run out of shampoo. (Yep, shampoo. I told you it was hysteria.)

But I have also seen things that I didn’t see before. Before you go all, “Here comes the speech about how blind I was until something got taken away from me, and now I’m just grateful for what I have,” – which is true, by the way, and no less potent for being so (not to mention an indicator of how lucky I am that my crying jags are about shampoo rather than say, having to find space in a shelter, a fact of which I am acutely aware) – you should know I mean this literally. The first week I was laid off I would look through the kitchen cabinets and think, “I have nothing to eat.” And then I would actually pick up food – box of polenta, bag of rice, can of tomato paste – and move it aside, all the while thinking, “How can I have nothing to eat? My, I wish there was something to eat in this cabinet. Here, let me move this random thing that seems to be labeled with a picture of corn/tomatoes/rice on it, not that I can imagine what that is, and perhaps behind one of these things I will find something to eat, like a tuna melt.”

But I managed to come to my senses each day and cook, and as I used up my cabinet food supply I had to use my imagination more and more to figure out what to make. It’s one thing to throw some pasta in a pot, but it’s another, if your cooking muscle has atrophied like many New Yorkers, to look at a box of polenta and a half tub of cream cheese, and maybe a scallion and a dash of cayenne pepper and think, “Dinner!” (Mess around with those ingredients, by the way; that one was a win.) Each meal becomes a kind of puzzle to solve, either by looking through cookbooks and riffing on what’s there or just by trying things out—literally, following your nose. You exercise your brain and your senses, and at the end you get a delicious (probably) meal. Remember when I said earlier that Cashland has a knack for making people dumber? Turns out one of the best-kept secrets of No Cashland is that cooking is more than just tasty and economical; it actually makes you smarter.  Cherchez la polenta, and pass the wine.

###

*I was wearing pajamas when I started this entry this morning, but I was interrupted by the discovery that a van leaves from my corner every other Monday to go the 125th Street Fairway. Free ride! 10% discount on your grocery bill! I am bold in some ways, but I am not bold enough to go to the Fairway in my pajamas.

**… I am in jeans and a tank top. Don’t bother suiting back up on my account.

The Ball Player and the Dark Pool

It’s October!  Baseball playoff season!  Which means that in Cashland, it’s time to harvest a fresh crop of those old chestnuts of a complaint: Why is it okay for baseball players to make outrageous salaries, but not okay for the Streeties?  People love this one. Remember my friend who thought 287 = 300?  He said it to me once, and I heard it again this very morning from a radio show caller responding to whether or not it was okay for the government to institute a cap on the top executive salaries at the seven companies which received bailouts (they didn’t think so).

The difference is dark pools. 

Dark pools started getting popular with traders a couple of years ago. As the name suggests, they are trading venues that exist outside traditional exchanges.  They operate via crossing networks, systems that troll around electronically looking for matches between buyers and sellers and then execute those trades, all without ever seeing the light of a public trading floor.  Some, for instance, are set up to automatically execute a trade at the midpoint between the bid and the ask – in other words, if you have a pair of shoes you want to sell for $100 bucks and I’m willing to buy them for $50, the crossing network would execute the trade automatically at $75.  (I would like them to be these shoes, by the way; if I could get these shoes for 75 bucks I’d move into the dark pool like it was Atlantis.)

Dark pools are popular because they allow investors to buy large amounts of stock without letting anyone know they’re doing it, and therefore without impacting stock price.  One way the buy and sell sides find each other – and there are probably more ways than this – is by “indication of interest” messages (remember, these are all electronic and automatic).  Here’s a quotation from a May 2009 post on the awesome Zero Hedge about co-acting director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets James Brigagliano announcing that IOI’s were becoming a “concern.”  (Zero Hedge is quoting an article from TradersMagazine.com, which has since been cached.)

"...these automated IOI messages, which usually are executable and for small size, are sent to seek liquidity from other dark pools to increase the original pool's executions. The widespread use of these 'actionable order messages could create the potential for significant private markets to develop that exclude public investors,' Brigagliano said."

In other words, while you and I and other average investors are shopping in the light and doing our best to play by the rules, crossing networks are running around in the shadows waving their IOIs at each other and making below-the-radar trades in dark pools in pretty much the same way black marketeers troll back alleys whispering “Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?” and opening their coats to flash a slew of hot Rolexes.  The streeters can split descriptive hairs all they want, but from over here the dark pool is nothing more than a black market with a good lawyer.

Which is why the comparison to baseball salaries is completely off base. Yes, star ball players make tons of money.  I’m not even arguing that they deserve that money. But Derek Jeter doesn’t take his money – and he definitely doesn’t take your money -- and disappear behind closed doors writing algorithms designed to disguise how he’s going to play the game.  He stands in the middle of a brightly lit field in full view of tens of thousands of people and does – or doesn’t do – exactly what he is paid for.  When he succeeds we know it, and when he fails we know that too.  There is not a single hidden thing about how baseball players do what they do, unless they’re using performance-enhancing drugs.  And when they get busted doing that they are vilified, their records are stripped, and they are threatened with jail time.  And after all, if that's okay for ball players, why isn't it okay for Wall Street? 


If things go well, maybe it soon will be.

Enter Miss Fish

Way back in the beginning of Cashland, I promised you characters.  And you’ve met some, certainly – you’re practically old friends with Ivy and the Mailman, and know to stay far, far away from Hapless and TWAG.  But there’s someone I’ve been wanting you to meet for a while now, because she is so completely entertaining.  Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Miss Fish.

 

Miss Fish worked across the hall from me at BigAnonymous handling something called Separately Managed Accounts.  Separately Managed Accounts are targeted at wealthier investors who want more specialized attention than they’d get if they just put their money in a mutual fund with the rest of the rabble.  With Separately Managed Accounts, you get to tell an investment professional what you want done with your money in general terms, like your portfolio’s ratio of stocks to bonds and sectors you might or might not want to invest in – you tell them no tech stocks, they don’t put you in tech stocks – and then they do the actual investing for you.  Personal attention is clearly a big part of the payoff here, and that is where Miss Fish comes in.


Because Miss Fish is hot.  In one way that’s irrelevant – it’s not as if she went around servicing the clients directly.  (What? “Servicing the clients” is an actual financial services term.)  But Miss Fish was hired about five years ago by a middle-aged male middle manager, and while she was adequate—mostly—at what she did, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was not how she filled out her application that got her the job.  She had long runner’s legs and a cascade of shiny brown hair and sashayed around the hallways in patent leather stilettos, and no one really minded because she could be fun to hang around with and wasn’t completely terrible at her job.  Mostly, though,  it was because she didn’t mind asking idiotic questions, and didn’t mind getting busted when she did.  So here, in her honor and for your entertainment, is the first installment in the occasional series Miss Fish vs…., in which Miss Fish is flummoxed by items ranging from professional credential exams to the days of the week.

Miss Fish vs….. the Color Printer

“So, the color printer… it prints in color, right?”

That’s a direct quote.  Separately Managed Accounts clients, you had no idea how lucky you were.

Let X = X: A Rant.

Today, a discussion of what I like to call Wealth Creep, the shift in perspective that can lead a person to understand the value of money less and less, the more and more of it they have. Please note that I said, “can lead,” not “leads.” I am not against money (I am all for it, in fact. Bring it ON!) and I do not think that all people who have a lot of money are heartless greedy bastards. I personally know quite a few people who are both lovely and wealthy; some are even healthy and wise. But I spent long enough in places where fantastic amounts of money were being handled to see a consistent shifting of the frame when it came to what those who handled those sums thought counted when things were counted, and I’m perfectly comfortable saying that the atmosphere on Wall Street is more than a little conducive to destroying people’s ability to do the simplest of math problems. Basically, Wall Street has a knack for making smart people dumb.

First, a personal anecdote:

Several years ago, after I finished writing school and before I started working at BigAnonymous, I was going over my personal finances with someone who worked at an extremely lucrative job in a (different) financial services firm.

“How much is your transportation?” he said. “81 bucks a month,” I said. “Food?” “$200 a month.” “Dog bills?” “$630 a year.” And so on, until we got to my student loan payment, which was $287 dollars a month. “$300,” he said.

“$287,” I said.

“Same thing,” he said.

Okay, break. While you ponder what reality it is in which 287 = 300, let me explain in very broad terms the kind of money BigAnonymous deals with.

Clients come in three main categories:

Institutional: Union pension funds, company 401(k)s, philanthropic funds, things like that – large entities’ bulk amounts of money. (Though often it’s not their money; it’s your money.) In 2007, when BigAnonymous hired sales managers for retirement products in the East and West Coast regions, the press release noted that they would “focus on accounts of $500 million or more.” In other words, what constitutes a vast amount of money in the outside world is the bare minimum inside the walls of BigAnonymous. I often heard phrases like, “it’s only a fifty million dollar account, so who cares?” The “who cares” wasn’t an expression of the speaker’s personal attitude, it was an explanation of the institutional investment division’s point of view.

Retail: The average investor. This group has the largest number of members with the smallest amount of invested money per capita. It is the broadest segment of the investment client world. It also has the shallowest pockets, but even then you don’t rate a thought from BigAnonymous unless you have at least $50,000 to invest. To me, and perhaps to you, $50,000 sounds like a lot, but according to BigAnonymous you barely rate their time at that level; better off heading to your local bank and opening a savings account or a CD. Which would be fine, except that all of the marketing literature I worked on talked about how much better it was to invest your money in the markets than to keep it in a savings account. I once wrote a blurb that explained how keeping your money in the bank was a silly, silly thing and almost guaranteed you’d wind up in the poorhouse in your dotage. Do the math, and there is a whole swath of people – specifically people who don’t have $50,000 to invest -- whose existence BigAnonymous doesn’t even bother to acknowledge. In other words their average investor, isn’t.

Private Wealth Management: Rich people. Also referred to in the industry as “Global Wealth Management,” “Private Client,” things like that. The ante for entry at BigAnonymous is $500,000. There were people in this division, quite wealthy themselves, whose job included making the actual bank deposits for these clients.

The amounts of money are so staggering you’re bound to have a shift in perspective. It would be practically impossible not to. And that’s fine. It would be idiotic, and probably criminally negligent, to run a half billion dollar institutional account as if it were a fifty-thousand dollar retail account, and vice versa; you have to understand and acknowledge the scale you’re working in to provide the best service to your clients.

What bothers me is that the shift in perspective seems to only go one way. As you start dealing with bigger and bigger numbers, the smaller numbers don’t just slide down to the low end of the scale, where they can still be referenced. They fall off entirely; they are simply not included in the equation, ever. And when numbers disappear from any equation, judgments are made using inaccurate information. Using only the bigger numbers on any scale describes an incomplete reality—and an incomplete reality isn’t reality at all.

The problem is that we make moral judgments based on financial realities all the time. Financial services firms create investment vehicles and entire marketing strategies around helping the average person (see Retail, above) do the “right” thing: save for their retirement, save for their kids’ college, save to buy a house, all the usual components of what we’ve decided in this culture is a successful life. But there is something fundamentally out of place when the people who are making judgments about what the right thing is don’t even think you exist unless you have $50,000 to spend with them. If you don’t think someone exists, by definition you can’t see things from their perspective, and if you can’t see things from their perspective, it’s hard to see how you can make an accurate judgment about them at all. It may be beating a dead horse to point out once again the amount of vitriol that was thrown, at the beginning of the housing crisis, at people who got stuck in impossible mortgages. Some of them were taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders, some lied to themselves and some were probably just plain greedy. But it leaves a bad, bad taste in my mouth when the people doing the judging can afford things that the people they’re judging can’t, and that was a lot of what I heard in the halls of BigAnonymous.

So, what about the original equation, the one in which 287 equals 300?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. $287 isn’t the same as $300. I should point out here that my friend wasn’t judging me; he was simply helping me go through some numbers. But it was disconcerting to hear someone whose job is to tell people how to manage their money – even more, whose job is to manage people’s money for them – insist that $287 equals $300 without batting an eyelash. Aside from the raw fact that it just isn’t equal, the difference between $287 and $300 dollars a month is, for example, the difference between being able to go to a movie or not. Even without the popcorn, a movie a month versus no movies at all is a significant difference in quality of life, and it’s one that my friend didn’t see. It’s not because he’s a bad guy. It’s because he got so used to dropping numbers off the low end of the scale that he literally could no longer see what difference $13 a month could make. He was able to scale up, but not to scale back down. He was a victim of wealth creep.

You know who had it right? Spiky-haired avant-gardie and NASA artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson. She wrote, “Let X = X.”

Cashland Redefined

The news: on Tuesday, September 22, I was exiled from Cashland. I am laid off!

A couple of things about this:

1) It was not entirely unexpected. Partly because if you keep your eyes open in the halls of BigAnonymous you can always tell when things are brewing, as there are enough whispers and closing doors to fill a festival of French farces; and partly because my now former boss is fundamentally insane and was unable to keep from saying things a boss shouldn’t say to an employee - things like, “So have you heard anything about more layoffs coming?”

But you shouldn’t take my word for it that she’s insane (I mean, I’m a potentially disgruntled and bitter former employee, right?) I submit the following, actual conversation into evidence. It’s not about layoffs, but it is a shining example of the spinning insanity that characterized my days at BigAnonymous.


Boss Lady:
We need to find a way to distinguish when we’re talking about design process from when we’re talking about the design resources. Process and resources are two different things, so we need a way to identify when we’re talking about which thing. We need different words so we know when we mean process and when we mean resources.

Me:
How about “process” and “resources?”

Boss Lady:
I don't think you understand.

Sometimes I am convinced that my entire tenure at BigAnonymous was scripted by Groucho Marx.



1a) For the record, I’m not a disgruntled and bitter former employee. I’ve talked to friends of mine who are still on the inside, and I can tell you that they are in a position as difficult or worse than mine. They are being asked to do exponentially more work with far fewer people (I was one of eight let go that Tuesday, and I know of three more since then), and no matter how much lip service is given to understanding that that’s the case, mostly the attitude of the managers is “Yeah, well, I paid my dues, so you can too.” (Also a direct quote, by the way, though not from my boss.) Which is patently absurd, as “paying your dues” is quite different from “being required to do the work of four people who were your friends and who you watched get tossed out onto the street in the middle of the worst economic climate since the Depression while you sit and wonder a) why it wasn’t you, and b) when it will be."

I may not always feel this way, especially when the money starts getting even tighter, which it will fairly quickly – but I will say this for now: there is a lot of upside to not wanting to kill yourself five mornings a week.


2) Obviously, “Cashland” will have to be reimagined. Introducing… No Cashland! From here on in, this blog will switch between recent-historical tales of Cashland and dispatches from No Cashland, my new home. Often these will intersect, especially as the amount of paperwork BigAnonymous has sent me since laying me off is enough to have gained me citizenship in another country.


So that’s where we go from here. There are many, many tales of Cashland waiting in the wings! No Cashland is turning out to be pretty fertile ground as well.

And we haven’t even begun to discuss Tom’s Town. You’re gonna love Tom’s Town.

###

The Dogs of Bore, Part Three: Is That A Dog?

Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war – JULIUS CAESAR

Hello again! Recaps are here:
Part One
Part Two


I let the Mailman in on the scheme from the start. When he couldn't find the silhouette among the others even though he knew what it looked like, I wondered how long it would take for the uninitiated to spot it. I didn’t have long to wait.

Or rather, I did. I watched through the glass wall as meeting after meeting took place in the conference room. No one noticed a thing. After nearly two weeks, a dozen meetings, and no results, I decided it was time to step up the game.
How could anyone miss it? The answer is they couldn’t. Again I waited.

Meanwhile, Hapless and TWAG had not been idle. After leaving my cube, they installed an identical set of 48 black blobs in an identical glass-walled conference room at the opposite end of the hallway. (That’s right, TWO sets of expensive, custom-framed black blobs in one hallway. One hallway in one financial services firm with a bottom line sinking so fast that not long after all this happened, the two other people who did exactly the same job I did were laid off. But that’s for another post. Let’s stick to the tale at hand, shall we?)

The next day’s first meeting passed uneventfully, and then Ivy showed up. In addition to her penchant for wisecracking, Ivy is an extremely observant person. About twenty minutes into a meeting in which the group’s senior management team ran through a mind-numbing series of quarter end numbers, she suddenly pushed back her chair, stood up, pointed at the wall of blobs, and, cutting the Mountie off mid-statistic, said, “Wait - is that a dog?”

Heads whipped around. I frantically dialed the Mailman. “They found it!” I shriek-whispered. “You’ve got to get over here, the whole meeting’s tanked, it’s chaos!”

It was true. The meeting had crashed to a halt. Ivy pulled the rogue frame off the shelf and yanked the backing out of it. “It’s a printout!” she yelled. “It’s a computer printout, someone did this from their desk.”

“Where’s the original?” someone else said. Ivy started opening the drawers in the gray credenzas lining the room. It didn’t take her long to find the signed, numbered original blob in the first credenza drawer below the shelves, where I’d laid it. Carefully. I was more than willing to subvert BigAnonymous’s artistic sensibility, but I wasn’t about to pay the price for destroying its art.

“Holy shit, there’s another one!” A meeting in shambles! Shrieks of laughter! Real live cursing! This was going even better than I’d hoped.

Clearly, this was the point at which innocent me would have noticed the ruckus. “What’s going on?” I asked, walking in as casually as I could. And as Ivy told me someone was replacing the blobs with homegrown silhouettes of a dog, I realized I’d made a potentially critical mistake: I had no idea how to gauge what an innocent person’s ratio of bafflement to laughter to excitement was likely to be. It’s true, I’m an actor, but being a trained actor does not necessarily make you a good bluffer.

“Ha!” I said, possibly a shade too loudly. “Wow, that’s – ha! Awesome!” From behind Ivy, the tallest of the senior managers gave me a look that said, “I’m onto you.” It took everything I had to resist the urge to wink at him.

After a few more wonderings about how long this had been going on, things settled down a bit, though the meeting never fully recovered. People were still buzzing as they left the conference room. I realized if I was going to strike again, it should be that night. And it should be the final hurrah, the doggiest of the dog silhouettes:

The next day, after the third silhouette had been discovered and the last meeting had broken up, leaving the imposters on the shelf mingling with their legitimate cousins while the team wondered aloud who the culprit was, a pair of security guards walked down the hall accompanied by none other than my old friends Hapless and TWAG. They marched straight into the now-empty conference room. TWAG’s nose was twitchier than ever. She stared at the shelves, took a step backward, started counting, stopped, took a step forward, and then looked at the security guards, shaking her head. My heart stopped. Are you kidding? Someone called security? Wait - was TWAG going to win the final battle after all? Could I lose my job over this? It couldn’t be. It could not be.

They came out of the conference room. TWAG, decked out in a shiny black dress and hair pulled back so tight it gave her a temporary facelift, had an angry-whispery conference with one of the guards, who was valiantly trying to dodge her spit. The other guard hovered by my cube.

“Um…” I said to the hoverer. “So, ah… what’s going on?” Trying again to look innocent. “Ah, nothing much,” he said. “It looks like someone’s been stealing those picture things out of the conference rooms. The uh, I don’t know what you call ‘em, those black shape pictures.” For a flash I was even more confused – how could anyone consider what I’d done stealing? I’d taken steps to make sure the real blobs were unharmed. And granted, the paper they’d been printed on was probably acid-free archival quality as opposed to 20-lb white bond, but it’s not like it was gold leaf, so I couldn’t imagine what damage might have been done.

And then I remembered the identical conference room down the hall, with the identical 48 black blobs. Someone down there, in another group entirely, had literally been stealing the blobs. Not just turning them around to face the wall, not replacing them with silhouettes of their dog, but actually picking them up and taking them home.

“You are kidding,” I said to the guard.

“Nah, can you believe people’d steal those things?” He looked at me with a little roll of his eyes, and I knew we were on the same side. “It wasn’t you, was it?” I laughed, partly out of relief, and partly because you just cannot make this stuff up.

“Nope,” I said. “It sure wasn’t. It was decidedly not me.” A few feet away, TWAG was still haranguing the other security guard about the stolen blobs.

She never noticed the dogs.

###

Das Midas Touch

The next installment of the Dogs of Bore is on its way. In the meantime, I've got a great idea -- let's fill a vending machine with gold and stick it right in the middle of the airport!

No, really.

The Dogs of Bore, Part Two: Rorschach's Revenge

(Ed. note: Welcome back! It has been six weeks since I last posted, which is an eternity in blog years. I got caught up in being a rental property manager there for a bit, which turned out fantastically well but took A LOT of time. But stick with me, won’t you? I won’t be this neglectful again.)


When we left the action, Hapless Carpenter and TwitchyWitch Arts Girl had vacated my cube in a sawdusty huff, threatening to return in two hours to inflict art in an undisclosed location. I spent those two hours collating colorful charts and graphs which indicated how many out of a list of 30,000 financial advisors had actually opened each of the mass informational emails BigAnonymous sent them every month for a year. (The emails included links to various documents that were available on our website and told advisors via punchy little blurbs it was my job to write that the documents were, in fact, available on our website.) The answer: not that many. Then I went to my meeting.

When I returned to my cube after the meeting and lunch, about three hours later, virtually all traces of Hapless and TWAG were gone. No more shelves, no power tools, no rubble—just a hint of sawdust on my chair. Huh, I thought. What had they done? More to the point, where had they done it? To understand the answer, you’ll need to know the lay of the land in question:

Take note of the glass wall in the conference room across from my cube. I could see about 85% of what happened in there. Because people often either a) talked really loudly, or b) left the door ajar, I could also hear about 85% of what happened in there. There was no newly installed art in my cube (leaving unanswered the question of why Hapless had chosen to dump the narrow shelves in it) and none on the walls anywhere around me. I was about to walk down the hall looking for—well, for something, I wasn’t sure what—when a small knot of people came out of the conference room all a-chatter.

“But what is it?” said Ivy, a petite brunette with glasses, a fabulous wardrobe and the most sarcastic sense of humor I'd encountered in my wanderings at BigAnonymous. I was a fan of Ivy, not least because as a rule in corporate America I have found that those who crack the wisest tend to be the wisest.

“I have no idea,” said the Mountie. The Mountie was our boss. (For the record, he’s not actually, and never has been, a Mountie; I’ll leave it to you to decide why it’s an appropriate nickname. It could be, for instance, that I think it would be fantastic if he were a Mountie on the side, like a volunteer fireman. Because I do.)

“It just looked like a bunch of Rorschach blots,” said someone else. Their conversation faded as they walked down the hall, shaking their heads. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t hear the rest; they could only be talking about one thing. I ran into the conference room. There, along the solid wall just beyond the glass, were the missing shelves:






They’d been hung in four rows, each about eight feet long. Spaced evenly across the rows was a series of 4x6 inch black frames. In each frame was a black blob printed on a white background. Hapless and TWAG had barged into my cube at nine in the morning, unannounced and in a big important hurry, because they were on a mission to install forty-eight framed black blobs on a conference room wall. Because the blobs were presumably expensive and copyrighted (I know they were numbered, because I checked), I can’t show you a real one. But let’s approximate:








Depending on your budget, you are looking either at a very expensive corporate art installation or at a black blob made in 45 seconds for free on my laptop. For the former, multiply by 48, place in custom-ordered plain black metal frames and line up in rows in a conference room.

Over the next few days we played some spirited rounds of Name That Blob, a game won decisively by a colleague I’ll call the Mailman, for reasons you are again invited to infer. (Like the Mountie, the Mailman is not, in fact, a mailman.) “They all look like pints to me,” he said. We imagined the blobs morphing into 48 silhouettes of cold, foamy beer steins and let out a collective sigh. “Mmmmmm, piiiiiiiiiiints,” we thought. Then we retired the Mailman’s number and hung it from the rafters.

But we got bored with the game, and I got restless. Like Poe's telltale heart, the blobs cried to me through the glass conference room wall, demanding attention. (I wasn’t the only one who found them irresistible. Someone was sneaking into the conference room and turning two or three of the frames around to face the wall; I admired the impulse, but I wanted something with a little more ooomph.) One day, after eight solid hours of taking screenshots of the BigAnonymous web content management system and marking them up with red ovals and arrows and things for a technical guide I was writing--work that is both extremely detailed and excruciatingly boring, the double crucifix of much corporate activity--this picture caught my eye from its position on the interior wall of my cube:








That is a picture of my dog, and as soon as I saw it I knew what to do. Because it doesn’t take a lot of Photoshop skill to turn that into this:







You see where this is going, right? Of course you do.

That night after everyone left I slipped into the conference room and brought one of the frames back to my desk. I slid out the cardboard backing and lifted the blob off the small sheet of glass. I printed out the Rosie silhouette, centered the outline of her giant ears against the glass, slid the whole thing back into the frame and slipped back into the conference room, where I placed it smack dab in the middle of the second shelf down—eye level for most people—hiding, in all its glory, like Poe’s purloined letter this time, in plain sight.

And then I waited.

###

Next up: Part Three: Is That a Dog?
Coming much, much sooner than Part Two.

The Babe in Cashland Dictionary.

Or, as it shall be know from here on in, the BICtionary.

From Twitter: Stock Twits n. an investment idea and information service.

...or, assorted members of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Dogs of Bore

Part One: The Rubble, The Witch, and The Carpenter

A couple of months after I started working at BigAnonymous I went to see Michael Clayton. Remember, in which George Clooney plays a fixer for a law firm whose client makes a pesticide that poisons people? (I’m not sure why this shocks anyone, as pesticide is poison by definition. My favorite recent iteration of the “No – that’s bad for you?” trope is when someone came out with a study a few months ago that Botox has potentially adverse effects on the brain. This just in: injecting BOTULISM into your FACE could be detrimental to your health! Next up in The Genius’s Handbook: “Razor Blades—Good for Juggling?”)

Besides having the best creepy murder ever (lethal injection under the toenail) and amazing super-androgyne Tilda Swinton at her icy-façade-cracking best, for me one of the movie’s biggest gooses was that the BigAnonymous Building stood in as the law firm’s headquarters, ext- and interior. (I may have yelped slightly when I saw George Clooney walk through the same electronic barrier I walk through every morning.) On the American version of The Office, whenever someone goes to "Corporate," my building is where they go. Apparently—and I haven’t confirmed this, but I found this fun little site while trying—it figures prominently in SPIDER-MAN 2. It’s the width of a city block. The outside is vertical gray metal beams alternating with dark tinted glass, the interior is clad in tan marble accented with narrow slabs of slightly darker marble arranged in geometric patterns, it’s 50 stories high, and Hollywood has decided that, of all the locations they have to choose from, the building I work in every day is the perfect embodiment of nameless, faceless, possibly evil Corporate America. Swell!

In the front lobby is a four-foot high black granite wall from behind which five security guards direct visitors to various tenant firms. Despite two giant planters filled with identical sets of flora (smallish tree surrounded by grassy plants and assorted flowers) on either side, the ambience is best described as “5-star hotel lobby renovated by a prison warden.” The weird thing is, they’re obsessed with having art on the walls. (They’re not alone in this. Corporate America seems to be on a constant mission to prove they have a soul; another firm I worked at, a global real estate company, cleaned out its basement one year and found four huge signed Andy Warhol line drawings just lying around. Apparently someone knew enough to buy them but couldn’t figure out what to do next.)

About six months ago I came into work to find a pile of rubble in my cube: long narrow shelving pieces, a power drill, bags of screws, and some cardboard boxes. At the time I sat in the corner of a hallway across from a glass-walled conference room. As I avoided stepping on the hammer under my desk while I sat down, a harried-looking guy with sawdust in his hair and a toolbelt around his waist came down the hall, followed by a tense-looking woman with long dark hair. The dark-haired woman was youngish and dressed as if she'd just stepped out of a Chelsea art gallery. Her dress was a flashy floral print and she wore thick black eyeliner and super-dark red lipstick; it was the kind of cliché I’d be embarrassed to make up, but here it stood in front of me. “Hi,” she said, in as supercilious a voice as I have ever heard at nine in the morning. “We’re installing a new piece in the conference room, and we need to work here now.”

“Here, like, in my cube here?” I asked.

And she rolled her eyes. She literally rolled her eyes at me. Bear in mind, I had just walked in the door, I had not had my coffee yet, and there was a pile of rubble in my cube—actually, at first there was a pile of rubble in my cube. Then there was a pile of rubble and two extra people, one shedding sawdust on my keyboard and one with an attitude which seemed to convey that a poll was taken amongst those in the know, and that I had been designated a harebrained nitwit who cannot understand art.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but no one said anything to me and I have to put something together for a meeting in two hours. Could you come back later?”

“Okay, sure,” said the carpenter. He unloaded more shelving into my cube. The dark-haired woman glared at me. I swear her nose twitched a little.

“And listen…” I said. “Is there somewhere else you could put this stuff? I need to be able to move in here.”

“Uh, where?” the carpenter asked. He wasn’t rude about it. She was rude; he was fine. He just didn’t seem all that bright. Or maybe, like me, he just didn’t give a damn about his job.

“How about there?” I said, pointing to the obviously unoccupied cube to my right. He looked at me for a split second with a kind of resignation. I felt bad making him move all his supplies, but it was true—I couldn’t get into my chair without knocking into a pile of hardware, let alone move once I was in it. He set to work ferrying the various pieces of equipment from my cube to the cube next door, resembling nothing so much as a worker ant. The dark haired woman watched him for a minute and turned to me, eyes glittering.

“Two hours,” she said. “We’ll be back.”

###

Tune in for Part Two: Rohrshach's Revenge! Coming... you know, soon. In the meantime, wretched video. But great song:

Badass. Period.

Just ran across this, which pretty much obliterates every shred of ambivalence I had (and I had a lot of them) about Hilary Clinton. This is AWESOME.

The Road to Hellville: A Job History.

Ask the people who work at BigAnonymous how they wound up working in financial services and a surprising number of them say, "I don't know, it just kind of happened." I always thought that in an industry like this, with its very expensive, difficult-to-get-into graduate programs, you had to work hard for a long time to break in. But when I asked someone who used to have the job I have now (they still work at BigAnonymous, just in a different department) why they went into financial services, my predecessor gave me the "it just kind of happened" response. Surprised, I asked if there was something else they wanted to do. They got a little wistful. "Marine biology," Predecessor said. "I'd do that, if I could." And a lot of other people I work with have said the same thing. (No, not the marine biologist part. That'd be kind of awesome, though, if tucked inside the DNA of BigAnonymous was an underground community of marine biologists just waiting to find each other and bust out. I would love that.)

I, too, am one of those people (again, not a pining would-be marine biologist. I have never, in fact, longed to be a marine biologist. I do like to swim, though). I fell into this line of work via an internship at BiggerAndEvenMoreAnonymousFinancialServicesFirm, which I got through a friend of a friend that I met at a Christmas party. It just kind of happened. And since, now that I'm entrenched, I'm going to have to work very hard to leave in a smart way (though, as mentioned at the bottom of my very first post, "leaving" in a stupid way and with some alacrity is possible, though not desirable), I thought it would be useful to look back at my job history; to retrace my steps, and find out how I got here.

Introducing The Road to Hellville, an occasional series, often broken into parts, examining my employment history. As I think you'll see from the very first paragraph of today's inaugural installment, this will be much less boring than it sounds.

UPDATE: After careful consideration I've decided that the inaugural installment of RTH was so not boring that it could not-boring me right out of a job. (Remember, razor-thin line.) So for now, I've pulled it. For the record, I'm working on bringing you the story of the second job description I was going to regale you with, which has now been--wait for it--promoted to the first slot. (Did I mention puns in my original ground rules? I should have. I'm a fan.)

I'll probably post something about self-censorship at some point, because I frankly really hate having had to pull this piece down. But for now, I'm confident that this is, in fact, the smart thing to do. But I'll leave you with a clue. See if you can guess from this clip what my job was! Or maybe it's a red herring! If anyone--that's ANYONE--leaves a guess in the comments that's correct, I'll buy you a drink. (Quite possibly on Tuesday, April 28th. If you know what that means, you know who you are.)

This Is Just To Say: asset management edition.

The background: William Carlos Williams wrote a famous poem called "This Is Just To Say," that goes a little something like this:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


I knew this poem. What I didn't know until this weekend is that a favorite sport of writers is to spoof it. (Again, a nod to This American Life. I swear I'm cooking up posts that DO NOT MENTION This American Life, reallyreallyreally I am.) The relevant segment starts at 49:25 in the audiofile, though the whole show is worth listening to.

And let me tell you, it is addictive. I spent waaaayyyy too much time this afternoon at my desk slapping out This Is Just To Say variations. Try it! But make sure you have A LOT of time on your hands, and that a piece of your brain's just been sitting around waiting for something to do, because I'm saying again: ADDICTIVE. If it isn't there already, I'm calling this as the next national meme.

This Is Just To Say

I have lost the money
that you gave me to invest
For your child’s
college fund

and which
I* sank entirely into
mortgage-backed securities.

Forgive me**
they were criminally*** tempting
so easy
and so cheap.



*In this instance, "I" may not actually refer to "me."
**Or "anyone I work with."
***Or, "anyone I've ever met in my entire life." Who are you again?

My love for both This American Life and NPR is boundless. But they insist on earning it anyway.

Working at BigAnonymous, I've read A LOT of material written by financial professionals attempting to explain the financial crisis. None of it holds a candle to This American Life and NPR's jaw-droppingly revelatory collaboration The Giant Pool of Money, which recently won a Peabody Award for its analysis of the housing collapse that started it all.

Get Real

For the record, I'd heard of the economy before I started working at Big Anonymous Financial Services Firm. You too, no? Yes, of course! It was the economy got Bill Clinton elected, remember? (If you don't, go watch this, it's fun.) Obviously there are subsets of the economy created by different industries (the stock market is probably the most well known, but there's a ton of them -- diamond markets and coal markets, bird markets and possibly bee markets) but they basically they all feed into the Economy, with a capital E.

At least, this is how I understood things to be. But once I wound up on the inside, I learned that that is not how financial services people think about it. For them, there is not one Economy with sub-industries. There are a bunch of distinct economies, among them the Housing Economy and the Financial Economy (whose little duet is part of what's causing us so much angst these days) and then, in a completely different bucket, what they call the Real Economy.

The Real Economy is the one we live in, the one with jobs and schools and groceries and car payments, with movies and basketball games and CDs (music CDs, that is) and train tickets. The one that got Clinton elected. The one that--by financial service people's own nomenclature--EXISTS. When I first started at BAFSF, the mortgage crisis had just begun to unravel. In trying to explain to investors what was going on, someone created a graphic to show how current events in the housing and financial economies intersected at certain points with the real economy and what the results were. It showed a pair concentric circles that shifted from purple to blue and back again, as if the colors were moving around the rim of the circles. The outer circle had a label that said "Real Economy," and the inner circle had labels for "housing economy" and "financial economy;" spaced around them were four jagged double lines that spanned the concentric circles (they lay across from the outer to the inner circle like little bridges), representing the jolts each economy felt from the effect of the other. Imagine a purple double halo with lightning bolts coming out of it. That's how much sense it made.

And all I could think was, "Listen, you guys, just listen for a sec, because this is why your graphic makes no sense. Are you ready? It's because the economy is ALL REAL. Do you not understand? This is ALL. REAL. And every time you try to create a complicated financial instrument that will make you rich without putting you at risk, it has REAL EFFECTS, because that is REAL PEOPLE'S REAL MONEY you are dealing with. There is ONE Real Economy, and collectively you have screwed it up almost beyond measure, and it is going to take more than a purple halo with lightning coming out of it to explain what you've done."

The scary thing is, they genuinely do not get this. They don't. And if they read this, they would have explanations that make sense if you just follow it through and if you only understood what they were talking about. On an individual basis they could probably make a case; I'm far from understanding everything about investments and asset management, though I've learned a lot in the past nineteen months. But as I see it, it's the mindset that's the problem. Language matters, and when you call things separate that aren't, you're in for a world of trouble. By separating them in language you think of them as actually, completely separate things, and you free yourself to make rash choices in one place without connecting the possible consequences of those choices to the other place. You will never be able to successfully anticipate the consequences of their intersection; you'll never even see it coming.

Amazon: So dumb, it could be a financial services firm!

So I know I said this would be a financial services-themed blog, but Amazon blew that out of the water when, two days ago, it removed sales rankings from a whole passel – and by “whole passel” we’re talking HUNDREDS -- of books with gay and lesbian themes. Quick and dirty explanation: searchability on Amazon is determined by sales ranking. If you don’t have a rank, you can’t be found.* It’s Blacklist, Capitalist Style.

A couple of things:

1) Please note I said, “gay and lesbian themes.” What I didn’t say is “gay and lesbian content.” In a response to Mark Probst, a Young Adult fiction author who wrote to ask why his book The Filly was deranked, Amazon claimed that:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.


Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.


Best regards,


Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage


Mark’s LiveJournal post earlier today has the dirt, straight from the horse’s mouth.

You might think I’m quibbling between “themes” and “content,” but think again: deranked books include the fabulously sexy The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students (because the only thing scarier than gay people is EDUCATED gay people) and Nathaniel Frank’s Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. But really, who DOESN’T get all lathered up by the military?:



Clearly, this is not about too-hot-to-handle content. There have apparently been some straight-themed books whose ranks were stripped (so to speak), but this is still listed. And for the record, so is this. So this is pure, unadulterated (no pun intended) homophobia. If you have any doubt, the very helpful Meta Writer is aggregating delisted book information here.


2) In light of all this, a new phrase has entered the lexicon. Spread the Word!


3) Fun Fact!: Spread the Word was the original tag line for this – which, clearly, you can still find on Amazon.

And by the way? The above links are the last times I'm ever linking to Amazon. Ahhhh -- that felt so good, it might just get me delisted.


*To clarify: you won't pop up in general searches. If you don't have a sales rank you can be found only by having someone search specifically for you or your title.