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.

Very Superstitious, or A History of Stupidity on the Street: Scene One.

So the NYSE was closed today for Good Friday. When I first started working at Big Anonymous Financial Services Firm, I was kind of floored by this: the one religious holiday the market follows is Good Friday? It made no sense. So I asked a bunch of people, and as it turns out, it has nothing to do with religion. Instead it’s pure superstition: in what became known as the Panic of 1907, the market fell by roughly 30% on Good Friday that year. And in their calm, rational way, the Financial Powers That Were decided then and there that the way to prevent another market crash was NEVER TO OPEN ON GOOD FRIDAY AGAIN.

Which is, essentially, financial management by Boy Scout manual -- as in “Screw regulations. All we have to do is play dead that day! Don’t you see? If we pretend like we’re dead, the bear will NEVER SEE US! Get it? It’s perfect!”

As far as I can tell, Wall Street still makes its decisions pretty much this way.

Hello. Welcome to a chronicle of what happens when a soul is sold.

Some ground rules:

1) Please do not expect prissy, shocked observations like, “Corporate people are greedy, my goodness!” or “But I thought HR was there to help the employees, not to run interference for the company.” I am idealistic, but I am not naïve. After flinging my soul at the acting world and getting an encouraging-but-not-encouraging-enough-for-me response (six years after I stopped it remains unclear if I quit the acting business or the acting business quit me) and two productive but poverty-expanding years at writing school, I was very clear that I wanted to be somewhere where my hard work would bring home a wheelbarrowful of shekels. I fantasized about soothing the ontological pain of my increasingly shriveled soul by slathering my earthly skin in expensive moisturizers made from extract of lavender stamen and pulverized seal testicles. You will not find disillusionment here, because there wasn't any illusionment to dis.

2) What you will find as much of as I can bring you is the inside dope on some the inside-iest dopes in my particular office (and who knows? There may be a future guest appearance or two from other offices, down the road). If you're looking for shock--not to mention Class A highjinks committed by people who wouldn't know what a highjink was if it bit them in their chauffeur's ass--that's really where it lies in the financial services arena. Some of the people I work with are extraordinarily smart, highly educated, hardworking people who love what they do and believe in it the way I believe in art and literature and music and architecture, which is to say they believe their work can save people's lives. And they have a point. But some are just shockingly stupid -- like, I-don't-know-how-you-lived-past-the-age-of-twelve stupid -- and in their stupidity they have provided some of the brightest moments of my last 18 months. These, I will do my best to pass on to you. Please understand these stories must walk the razor-thin line between enough disclosure to be worth telling and enough obfuscation to keep me employed. (See #4 below.) It may take some time to figure out how to do this, so posting may be a little slow at first. In the next couple of weeks I'll introduce you to the characters--it'll be like a play! You'll get to know them, and with luck they'll jump right into being as stupid as you and I both know they can be. Highjinks to follow.

3) Dispatches from the Belly of the Beast: You might have read there's an economic crisis. On the flip side of the highjinks are stories I would never have known about, from the epicenter of the industry whose collapse has precipitated some of the most devastating consequences we have experienced as a nation in decades. There's been plenty of talk about all kinds of stuff that I have no interest in repeating; the stories I'm interested in are the ones where odd little details you didn't know existed suddenly become critical and things get weird. Take, for instance, the Tale of Person 4:

In a round of layoffs in my group last October, three people were let go on a Wednesday. A fourth person was going to be let go, but was out sick until the following Monday. There is a rule at my company--maybe a company policy, maybe a state or federal labor law--that prohibits laying someone off unless they've worked the full day prior. Which meant that upon returning to work, Person 4 was the only person on the entire floor who was unaware they were going to lose their job the next day. The rest of us lurked around like vultures, wondering if Person 4 hadn't noticed that everyone who had the same function was gone, or if they noticed and figured they were going to do the work previously done by three. "Jeeeeesus," I said to someone else who knew after I ran into Person 4 in the hallway. "I had no idea what to say, it was SO AWKWARD!"-- fully aware that if I were a character in a book I was reading I would loathe me for saying that. It was one of the strangest and most uncomfortable days I have spent at a job, and when Person 4 was finally let go the next morning, the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief that it was over. Then we felt evil for feeling relieved.

4) Regarding the razor-thin line between being employed and not: as a general observation, I have written a ridiculous number of things in my work email that could possibly have gotten me fired. As an ongoing feature, every so often I'll post one here and explain what the issue was, if it's not already blindingly obvious. Then we can run an over-under on how long it might take for this blog to go from “regular old posts” to “cautionary tale told by someone who once had a job.” Or something. The point is, it'll be fun! And it might involve mayhem, which is always exciting.

So that's basically what to expect. Stick around, won't you? (Or, given that this is my first blog entry ever, come around, won't you?)