by David Bledin
4.Speaking of Subway, no more of those ridiculously addictive M&M’s cookies.
And finally:
5. Be positive. Enough with this self-pity bullshit. Only seventeen more months and you’re out of here. Seventeen months; it’s really nothing to get that worked up about. A phase in your life that is relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Bottom line: Don’t become as bitter as the Defeated One.
It all begins on my first day back. Hanging up my coat, my forehead pounding from my self-imposed dearth of caffeine, I do my best at bidding the Defeated One and the Star a chipper good morning. It comes out sounding forced; normally we’ve never bothered with any exchange of pleasantries. The Defeated One swivels around on instinct.
“What’s up with you, Mumbles?”
My first test of commitment: the inevitable confrontation with this beacon of negativity. I stretch my face in what should come across as a beaming, albeit unnatural, smile.
“Jesus,” the Defeated One says, grimacing, and looks away. “You’re freaking me out, dude.”
I’m still forcing a smile as I settle into the creaking swivel chair and switch on my computer. My inbox is crammed with twenty new messages from the Sycophant, all wondering where the hell I am—I reminded him about my extended weekend at least half a dozen times before I left—and requesting four sets of comps to be completed over the holidays. A rolled-up piece of paper collides with the side of my head.
“So, what’s the big deal?” asks the Defeated One. “That girl with the scarf screwed your brains out last night, didn’t she?”
I pick up the ball of paper and toss it in the recycling bin.
“No, New Year’s resolution. Trying to keep everything positive. Not end up bitter like you.”
“You’re fucking with me, right?”
“Nope.”
“Alrighty, then.”
A moment later and Outlook pings with 1 New Message:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
cc: [email protected]
OK. Here’s the deal. Mumbles just returned from his Montreal getaway with rays of sunlight bursting out of his sphincter. A New Year’s resolution, apparently—he’s trying to stay positive. I propose a little office pool: We each put in five bucks and pick the time when he’s first gonna blow his fuse. Price Is Right rules: Go over and you’re bust, closest time wins. I’ve got 11:30.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; PostalBoy@the Bank.com
cc: [email protected]
Just passed the Sycophant in the corridor. He’s looking mighty pissed. It’s risky, but I’m going for 9:45.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
cc: [email protected]
9:46 (snicker, snicker)
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; PostalBoy@the Bank.com
cc: [email protected]
Postal—you fucking bastard!!!
My phone rings: the Sycophant’s extension. Taking a deep breath, I tentatively pick up the receiver. Before I’ve even managed a New Year’s greeting, I hear, “Where the hell are those comps?”
“I, uh, I wasn’t—”
“Uh, uh,” he mocks me. “Didn’t you get my e-mails? Where were you over the weekend?”
“I was in Montreal—”
“Montreal?! Who said you could go up there?”
“You did, actually—”
“And why didn’t you check your BlackBerry?”
“I, uh, I left it at home by mistake. Work had slowed down before the holidays, so I didn’t think—”
A sharp exhalation before he snaps at me: “Who the hell said you should think!”
I’m not losing grasp on this newfound positivity so easily. Speaking evenly, I respond, “Look, I’d really appreciate it if you stopped with the cussing. I don’t think it’s necessary for making your point—”
I hold the receiver away from my ear as the Sycophant proceeds to go apeshit on me. When it sounds like his voice has calmed down somewhat, I place the receiver back on my ear. He’s speaking brusquely.
“This is being reported to HR immediately.”
“All right.”
“Do you understand the ramifications of this?”
“Yes, I do. It’s fine if you want to go sit down with them.”
“What?”
“I mean, I’m glad you’re willing to engage in some serious dialogue about this. I really think there’s something here to salvage. As long as we keep improving the ways we choose to communicate with each other—”
“What the fu—”
He’s not making sense of this at all. A few seconds of this stalemate pass, going nowhere, before finally, sighing with exasperation, he says, “God almighty, just get those comps done already.”
“I’ll have them on your desk as soon as they’re ready. You have a good day now.”
After a puzzled silence the Sycophant hangs up on me.
There’s that saying “Smile and the whole world smiles with you,” right? Perhaps it’s too simplistic for the gummy Petri dish that breeds our shark-toothed Bank managers, more fitting for rosy Saturday morning Saved by the Bell environments than the ruthless bastards lurking just down the corridor, but every saying, no matter how facile, is inherently based on a kernel of wisdom. How else to explain the recent tangible results of my positivity?
Take this afternoon, when I’ve committed myself to figuring out the basic functionality of our fax machine. I feed through my seventh page and there’s a clunking sound, a grumbling of success. Alas, my feeble hopes are quashed as the page is spit back out again. The LCD screen at front belittles me with its OPERATIONAL MODE STANDBY and the more deviously opaque ERROR CODE 36.
Error Code 36? What happened to Error Codes 1 through 35? I’d feel less stupid about it if the Utterly Incompetent Assistant wasn’t slouched at her desk, munching on some caramel corn left over from one of the Philanderer’s holiday gift baskets, staring at me with obvious amusement when she’s not engrossed in her game of solitaire.
“Need some help?”
The Utterly Incompetent Assistant shoves a fistful of caramel corn in her mouth and ambles over. I step aside.
“If you’d be so kind.”
She spends the next ten seconds demonstrating the correct sequence of buttons. Apparently I’d been overlooking a tiny blue switch tucked away on the side. She hovers over me as I repeat the sequence, licking the excess caramel from her fingers.
“It’s ridiculous,” I say, chuckling wearily. “All us guys with college degrees, and none of us knows how to work the fax machine, huh?”
She shrugs.
“This model isn’t the most straightforward. I’ve been known to have a few problems with it myself.”
“Thanks again.”
“No problem.”
She gives me a fleeting smile before she returns to her desk. Etch this in stone, record this in the annals of history: It’s the first time since I started at the Bank that the two of us have engaged in a remotely pleasant exchange of words. And stranger still: After grabbing another fistful of caramel corn, she actually gets down to completing a stack of invoices.
I’m beckoned into the Philandering Managing Director’s office and take a seat on one of the comfy chairs before the desk. It’s staggeringly unfair that he who spends the vast majority of the workday in the backseat of his Lexus is entitled to such velour plushness, while we lowly monkeys, tethered to our desks for twenty-hour stretches at a time, have only rickety pieces of junk from IKEA.
The Philanderer gets up and shuts the door behind me. It’s an ominous omen. The Philanderer never, ever closes his door, no doubt to assuage the rampant rumors circulating that he’s getting up to no good with the assistants instead of producing any real work. He probably figures that as long as he keeps it contained to the
parking garage, nobody will bother calling him on it.
Looking around, I’m again amazed by how much mess one man can make. Piles of pizza boxes and coffee-smeared pitch books and the flashy edibles of five-hundred-dollar gift baskets from Williams-Sonoma; all this despite the daily scrub-down by the cleaning lady with the golden caps on her teeth. The Philanderer leafs through a Maxim before pausing to ogle a skimpily clad Jessica Alba.
I’m struggling to remain positive while simultaneously trying to determine what trouble I’ve gotten myself into. Perhaps the Sycophant ratted me out after our telephone conversation the other day? Or another stern lecture for taking off the New Year’s weekend? It could be just about anything. Finally, the Philanderer puts down the Maxim and leans back in the chair.
“Do you know why I’ve called you in here?”
I decide to be preemptive. “I’m sorry about leaving for Montreal when there was so much work left behind—”
The Philanderer interrupts me. “Sorry? What the hell do you have to be sorry about? We all deserve a weekend out of the office every now and again. Actually, I wanted to discuss the Nikon pitch.”
Nikon. Nikon. I can’t even remember that one. It’s probably something I pulled together while half asleep at three in the morning. I flash a nervous smile, and the Philanderer nods knowingly.
And then it dawns on me: This is the moment I’ve been dreading since I first arrived at the Bank. My first big fuckup that got detected by a Client. Isn’t Nikon a Japanese company? I probably forgot the yen-to-dollar exchange-rate conversion. Classic analyst mistake.
Predictably, the Philanderer continues:
“We didn’t get the mandate—”
I brace myself for the scimitar about to swing down and lop off my head.
“—but I’d like to commend you on an excellent job. Everybody on the team was very impressed with your attention to detail.”
A delayed reaction—a full minute passes before I’m able to convert my frightened expression into one of stark disbelief. The Philanderer winks at my obvious discomfort.
“I know we don’t usually pay you guys enough compliments, but this time it was especially warranted.”
He reaches across the desk and shakes my hand.
“Excellent job, Clyde. I’ll be sure to file this with HR.”
“I, uh, thanks. But it’s not Cl—”
There’s no point in correcting him. The switch has already turned off, the Philanderer having strayed too far over his threshold of decency and unable to trespass any further. He picks up the Maxim and I know that’s my cue to leave.
Even though she’s blatantly ignoring me by this point, I’m not admitting defeat so easily:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
A somewhat belated Happy New Year—any interesting resolutions to speak of? Come on, write back, already. All right. Fine. A quick update regarding my life: Basically, everything is going really well right now (except you not writing, of course). I have no explanation for it but it’s the truth. Hope you’re facing something similar. One of my resolutions is to be better at balancing work & play; difficult for an investment banker but I’m really going to try. Write back.
Postal Boy and Clyde are procrastinating in our office after dinner. I have a double-meat turkey six-incher from Subway again, though I’m still resisting the buttery allure of those M&M’s cookies. We’re ranting away on the same old subject matter—how much we hate the Sycophant, how much we hate the Prodigal Son, how everybody’s stock portfolio is really in the pits despite the bullish market—and I see my healthy mental state has extended to the rest of the Gang of Four: Postal Boy is faring a lot better after a couple good nights of sleep, and Clyde is behaving himself after we saved his ass from the auction fiasco. It almost harkens back to the glory days when we first arrived at the Bank, freshly scrubbed and ruddy-cheeked, before our youthful naïveté was obliterated under the brutality of this corporate regime.
Clyde rolls up his wrapper and lobs it into the trash can.
“Hey, are we still trying to get the Prodigal Son fired?”
“Missed opportunity,” the Defeated One says.
Clyde grins mischievously and says, “Not necessarily. I think we might have another shot at greatness.”
“We’re not going to catch them at it again. Trust me; I took a couple trips up to the boardroom and checked.”
Clyde shakes his head. “No, this is something completely different.”
He reaches into a pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a clear vial.
“What’s that?” Postal Boy draws near.
Clyde swats his hand away.
“Damn, Postal, this is expensive stuff. Liquid MDMA. Have any of you guys taken Ecstasy before?”
Surprisingly, Postal Boy nods. “Yeah, I took a pill once.”
The Defeated One slaps his knee. “Postal wigged out on Ecstasy? Tweaking his nipples to techno music? I’d have to see it to believe it.”
Postal Boy pouts, “I wasn’t always like this, you know. The eye twitch, for instance; I only got it after I started working here. I’m learning to control it, though.”
In demonstration of this, he speeds up the twitching to a blur, then slows it down to a light flapping motion.
The Defeated One grimaces. “Postal, that’s fucking disgusting.”
“Anybody else?” Clyde asks.
“Yeah, I tried it once with the girlfriend,” the Defeated One admits, “but the problem is, you’re all horned up but you can’t get it hard. Hands down, one of the most frustrating experiences of my life.”
“I feel your pain, man, though there are ways to get around that.” Turning to me, he asks, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ever tried the stuff?”
All right. The truth is, I’ve taken it once. Sophomore year of college. It was more ridiculous than anything else, really, a bunch of us stroking our forearms, strands of drool dangling from our lower lips, going I love you, man, no, seriously, I soooo love you, man the whole night and then refusing to acknowledge it the next morning.
“Nah, not my scene.”
“Well, anyway, this liquid MDMA is much stronger than the pills you’d get on the street. It also doesn’t taste like anything much. So this is the plan. We wait for the right opportunity and then slip this in the Prodigal Son’s coffee, get him all fucked up before a pitch or something. Masturbating in front of a client could technically undo all the hobnobbing he’s been getting up to on the squash courts, right, gentlemen?”
The Defeated One is skeptical.
“I don’t know about this, Clyde. Too many external factors beyond our control. At least the video was fairly straightforward.”
“Straightforward and it failed.”
Clyde pauses for dramatic effect.
“Look, let’s not settle into complacency just because we had one little setback. We’ve got to trudge ahead with this. What are we, a bunch of pussies?”
“I’m in,” I reply.
The Defeated One cocks an eyebrow.
“What?” I shrug. “It’s less complicated than the first plan, anyway.”
The Defeated One ponders this for a few moments and finally nods augustly.
“All right, comrades. Plan number two is in effect.”
By the end of the week, my positivity has taken on a life of its own. It crackles from office to office, little jolts of static yanking up into precarious smiles lips that have never done anything but sneer, forcing boisterous laughter from the mucus-ridden trachea of the mummified seventy-year-old receptionist, prompting girlish squeals of delight from the frosty lair of the Ice Queen. More than that: it diffuses through the walls, crawling up the elevator shafts, until it pervades the inner sanctum of the Bank, the cedar-paneled penthouse suites of the Coldest Fish In The Pond and his executive circle of acrimonious Yes-Men.
How else do you explain this? I’m he
ading past the Sycophant’s office, trying to steady a wobbling tower of seventy investor presentations, and I do a double-take—the whole room is starkly empty, a sterile wasteland of carpet and plaster. No computer monitor, no file folders, none of the framed pictures of his egghead son cluttering the desk. I speed-walk into our office and drop the investor presentations in a messy heap on the floor. The Defeated One swivels around with a huge grin.
“Mumbles, you are such a lucky bastard.”
“What’s going on?”
The Defeated One snaps his fingers. “Poof. Gone.”
I slump down in my chair, dizzy with disbelief.
“You’re kidding me? He got the boot?”
“Nah, you ain’t that lucky, dude. He got transferred to the Biotech group. The kiss of death, really. That group of techno-dorks hasn’t led a deal in two years. And they’re all tucked away on the floor above us, so there’ll be minimal awkward run-ins in the corridor.”
“I just don’t believe it.”
I guess it’s like winning the lottery: too overwhelming to comprehend all at once, your entire universe rearranged in the course of a few colored balls falling into their respective slots. If I concentrate really hard, I can appreciate certain isolated aspects of it—I probably won’t need to get those comps done before the end of the day, for instance—but that’s about it. I feel no holistic appreciation, only the occasional burst of elation bubbling up to the surface before it’s drowned out again by the shock value.
I’m actually kind of miffed about something.
“It’s crazy. You work with the guy for more hours than you see anybody else in this world and he doesn’t even think about dropping by to tell you he’s off.”
“That’s the way things work around here,” the Defeated One says, “on a need-to-know basis. And according to the senior guys, us analysts don’t need to know shit. Anyway, he’s probably embarrassed about it. It’s not the most prestigious of moves, I’ll tell you that. And now he’s a foreigner in a new group, so it’ll take a couple years for him to prove himself. Meaning he’s back at square one when it comes to promotions. Look, what the hell do you care? You should be ecstatic.”