It wasn’t so much the fact that the job made me feel stupid, or that the phone calls were tedious, or that the only thing worse than the Southbound 405 is the return trip on the Northbound 405, which made me doubt that I belonged at the hedge fund. Really, it all came down to the dead ferns.
People think that Southern California is always balmy. But during the winter months, it can be quite cool. Not cold, I won’t go that far. I did live in Boston for a while, after all. But Los Angeles is a desert climate, and desert climates can get very cool when the sun goes down. It’s even cooler on the coast. And really quite cool at 6am when you’re standing on a downtown Santa Monica street, waiting for someone to unlock the door of the hedge fund.
The office was in an old and pretty building on a pretty street. And the building was very quiet. And though I didn’t ever really feel cold when I was there, I always felt rather cool. I think maybe my toes were actually cold. But it was hard to tell. In the winter months, even a mere two blocks from the beach, tedium can have quite a cooling effect. In any case, there was little to warm the place.
The office consisted of one Big Room with three big glass tables, each of which boasted several big computer monitors. The walls of the Big Room were exposed antique brick, and the high ceiling far above boasted huge wooden beams. Everyone who worked for the hedge fund sat in the Big Room. The Head Hedger usually did not arrive in the office until after the sun rose, while the rest of us were there, warming up our computers in the dark before dawn. But when he arrived, the Head Hedger worked in the Big Room with us.
There was a kitchen, of sorts, tucked into the corner of the big room. It was only a kitchen of sorts, because it lacked most of the things that make a kitchen a kitchen. Namely, food, and the things used to prepare it. There was a sink, but bathrooms have sinks. There was a fridge, but there was nothing to keep cool in it. There was no coffee pot, no microwave, no stove or oven. My first day on the job, I brought a microwaveable lunch. Halfway through the day I realized that I had no way of heating it up, and, furthermore, that no one else stopped working to eat. Occasionally, one of the traders would step out to buy a cup of coffee. But no one ever took a lunch break, and no one ever told me I could have one. While I’m not sad to collect an hour of overtime, I am generally a sad not to eat.
There was only one other room in the office, which served as a conference room. It was only a normal-sized room, reachable by a staircase, but it overlooked the big room the way a screened in porch would sit above a big back yard. From our glass tables below, we could look up at the blank windows of the dark conference room and see a row of potted ferns on a shelf below the windows.
The woman training me told me that the Plant Guy was an entertaining weekly event. He was far from entertaining, but he still drew the gaze of everyone in the Big Room every time he came as he clattered in with his tall ladder. He was everything the hedgers were not. While they sat sober, peaked and pale over their computers, the Plant Guy was tanned and jovial, and perhaps a little stoned. But he was stymied by the ferns, which were dead and drying in the cool afternoon light that shone through the opposite window high in the brick wall of the Big Room.
The Head Hedger asked the Plant Guy the first week of my employ to do something about the dead ferns. But when he came back the next week, nothing had changed. The Plant Guy had not talked to his boss about getting new plants, and had no remedy for the dead ones that sat looking over our heads. So the Head Hedger asked him to take the dead plants away. Better to have a blank space, he said, than to have dead plants in a place of business. And then he said it again, as if the dead ferns intended to do his hedge fund harm, “it’s a bad idea to have dead plants where you do business.”
We were all quiet after this, even the Plant Guy. And while work never stopped for lunch, it stopped long enough for everyone to watch the Plant Guy take down the dead ferns. He climbed his tall ladder and took them down from the shelf, one by one. They were so dead and dry that their brittle leaves broke and crumbled at his touch, and the pitiful dead fronds drifted through the watery winter light from the window to the settle on the concrete floor.
The Head Hedger, I knew, could teach me a couple things, if I wanted to learn. About music, about money, and about the dangers of allowing a living thing to wither in a place of business.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Futures, Phones, Finance, and Philistines
My job at the hedge fund consisted of two things: data entry and answering the phone. I had done both of these before, but this was by far the worst way to experience either one.
I used to like data entry. In the fall of 2003, when I was fresh out of college, I had a temp job at a title insurance company. They needed extra help because everyone and their mother was taking advantage of the reduced interest rates and refinancing their homes, and all the lawyers in Massachusetts were sending them brand new title insurance policies that had to be processed. My job was to look at the check that the lawyers had sent to the insurance company, look at total amount of the policy attached to that check, and derive what kind of policy it was from the way the two numbers related. Then I would enter the policy into their software system and endorse the check with a stamp. I did the same thing all day, every day, and I didn’t mind it. Each check and policy was like a little puzzle, and I liked figuring it out.
Not surprisingly, data entry is a lot less interesting when you don’t understand the data you are entering. I entered some very complex stuff into spreadsheets at the hedge fund, and I had no idea what any of it meant. The woman training me told me to look at a website called investopedia.com to help me figure out what was going on. This was enormously disappointing. I read the definition of a future and an option over and over again and I still had no idea what they were. This was the first time I had ever really come up against a concept that my brain simply did not get. It was as though the synapses refused to fire, refused to communicate such abhorrent and base concepts. I admit it; I found the whole thing a little distasteful. Even in the face of certain unemployment (or at least certain underemployment in a retail setting) I regarded the world of finance like a sophomore English major regards econ classes: strictly for philistines.
In short, no job has ever before made me realize that I am, in fact, a creative person. This was, in many ways, a positive thing. It buoyed me up. Justified to some degree all the choices I had made in my life so far. And, I thought, justified those disdainful thoughts I had towards econ classes when I was a sophomore English major.
Worse than the data entry were the phone calls, and not just because they were phone calls and I don’t like phones. It always started with Bloomberg TV. Someone would interview the hedge fund’s famous stock Savant, also a famous author of texts that would, presumably, make my brain hemorrhage if I ever attempted to read them, and this Someone would go on and on about how clever the Savant was and how his hedge fund was the best. What this Someone on Bloomberg TV didn’t mention was that the Savant’s hedge fund only invested for “institutions,” and rarely for individuals. (Although, when I did get a look at one of the funds, it looked like a whole bunch of individuals to me. But what did I know. I was above it all, anyway.)
That’s when the phone would start to ring. Always an individual, never an institution on the line. Always someone claiming to be a Qualified Investor. Always someone wanting to know the minimum investment. My job was simply to take down the contact information of the person calling and forward it on to the person who worked in investor relations. I was never to tell them anything about the company, so I couldn’t tell them that they were not nearly as qualified as they thought, since they weren’t an institution, and I also couldn’t tell them that no one would ever call them back, because they weren’t an institution. This was an incredibly tedious process. Because just about everyone who left their name and number with me expected a phone call, and when they didn’t get one, they would call a second time. The second round phone calls were generally less polite than the first round calls. And I had to answer those, as well, and take down the contact info a second time. And lie, again, and tell them someone would call back eventually.
At some point, people would give up and stop calling. And then, Someone Else would interview the Savant on Bloomberg TV and start the whole process over again.
When I asked why we couldn’t just tell people up front that they weren’t going to hear from us, I was told that they wanted to make sure they got contact info from everyone who called in case an actual billionaire called one day. Evidently, individuals become institutions as soon as they have a billion dollars.
While I hated the work, I didn’t mind my coworkers. In fact, I liked a couple of them. The Head Hedger, for example, was quite a likeable fellow. And he made me reconsider my secret conviction that finance was for philistines. When we weren’t watching our Savant on Bloomberg TV, he often played classical music in the office, and once pointed out to me that we were listening to a famous aria from Tristan and Isolde. He asked me if I knew anything about opera. I admitted that I didn’t.
I used to like data entry. In the fall of 2003, when I was fresh out of college, I had a temp job at a title insurance company. They needed extra help because everyone and their mother was taking advantage of the reduced interest rates and refinancing their homes, and all the lawyers in Massachusetts were sending them brand new title insurance policies that had to be processed. My job was to look at the check that the lawyers had sent to the insurance company, look at total amount of the policy attached to that check, and derive what kind of policy it was from the way the two numbers related. Then I would enter the policy into their software system and endorse the check with a stamp. I did the same thing all day, every day, and I didn’t mind it. Each check and policy was like a little puzzle, and I liked figuring it out.
Not surprisingly, data entry is a lot less interesting when you don’t understand the data you are entering. I entered some very complex stuff into spreadsheets at the hedge fund, and I had no idea what any of it meant. The woman training me told me to look at a website called investopedia.com to help me figure out what was going on. This was enormously disappointing. I read the definition of a future and an option over and over again and I still had no idea what they were. This was the first time I had ever really come up against a concept that my brain simply did not get. It was as though the synapses refused to fire, refused to communicate such abhorrent and base concepts. I admit it; I found the whole thing a little distasteful. Even in the face of certain unemployment (or at least certain underemployment in a retail setting) I regarded the world of finance like a sophomore English major regards econ classes: strictly for philistines.
In short, no job has ever before made me realize that I am, in fact, a creative person. This was, in many ways, a positive thing. It buoyed me up. Justified to some degree all the choices I had made in my life so far. And, I thought, justified those disdainful thoughts I had towards econ classes when I was a sophomore English major.
Worse than the data entry were the phone calls, and not just because they were phone calls and I don’t like phones. It always started with Bloomberg TV. Someone would interview the hedge fund’s famous stock Savant, also a famous author of texts that would, presumably, make my brain hemorrhage if I ever attempted to read them, and this Someone would go on and on about how clever the Savant was and how his hedge fund was the best. What this Someone on Bloomberg TV didn’t mention was that the Savant’s hedge fund only invested for “institutions,” and rarely for individuals. (Although, when I did get a look at one of the funds, it looked like a whole bunch of individuals to me. But what did I know. I was above it all, anyway.)
That’s when the phone would start to ring. Always an individual, never an institution on the line. Always someone claiming to be a Qualified Investor. Always someone wanting to know the minimum investment. My job was simply to take down the contact information of the person calling and forward it on to the person who worked in investor relations. I was never to tell them anything about the company, so I couldn’t tell them that they were not nearly as qualified as they thought, since they weren’t an institution, and I also couldn’t tell them that no one would ever call them back, because they weren’t an institution. This was an incredibly tedious process. Because just about everyone who left their name and number with me expected a phone call, and when they didn’t get one, they would call a second time. The second round phone calls were generally less polite than the first round calls. And I had to answer those, as well, and take down the contact info a second time. And lie, again, and tell them someone would call back eventually.
At some point, people would give up and stop calling. And then, Someone Else would interview the Savant on Bloomberg TV and start the whole process over again.
When I asked why we couldn’t just tell people up front that they weren’t going to hear from us, I was told that they wanted to make sure they got contact info from everyone who called in case an actual billionaire called one day. Evidently, individuals become institutions as soon as they have a billion dollars.
While I hated the work, I didn’t mind my coworkers. In fact, I liked a couple of them. The Head Hedger, for example, was quite a likeable fellow. And he made me reconsider my secret conviction that finance was for philistines. When we weren’t watching our Savant on Bloomberg TV, he often played classical music in the office, and once pointed out to me that we were listening to a famous aria from Tristan and Isolde. He asked me if I knew anything about opera. I admitted that I didn’t.
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