Fern Coolly

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.