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.)