Confessions of a Cat-holic (202)

An athlete's training was drastically different from the mind of, say, musicians. A well trained athlete should be physically fit while maintaining a good balance of diet. They should have reasonable resilience and endurance in adverse conditions. Musicians on the other hand were usually trained to harmonise their voice to the vocal by memorizing every note with accuracy. A choir singer, for example, could lose his ability to “think outside the box” after a prolonged period of following the instructor on stage, like Jesus's shepherd. A choir member usually liked to follow, not lead, the crowd. These musicians could turn out to be great mathematicians because both professions required meticulous practice up to perfection. A musician could perform jobs with great precision, especially if that was a task that required repetition. The downside would be that they could be easily replaceable by artificial intelligence. Musicians also had a higher rate of substance abuse and behavioural addictions, if you studied music history closely enough. A musician's head could be somewhat similar to that of a robot, very much like those AI pianos that could play by itself with a token in the McDonald's at Pacific Place back in the 90s. (I grew up in Admiralty, right next to Pacific Place.)

I was not saying that musicians' training was useless. It was just that they were good for jobs like accounting or data entry, but not for Wall Street. You would rarely see a musician on the trading floor. Same for the Ivy League colleges. They liked to recruit athletes for a good reason. Statistics and historical data had shown that athletes tended to do well in the long run, whether it was managing time and stress or outlasting their rivals in a competitive environment. Perhaps this could explain a little why my high school SPCC failed to send many of its top scorers to top private colleges in the states, compared with schools like St Joseph or my alma mater for example. Hey, half of my pre med class in SPCC were qualified to get into medical schools in Hong Kong. By all means they were smart and competitive, score-wise. But there were certain qualities lacking in their mental development, which could not be ignored by the American curriculum. They would do fairly well in professions such as civil engineers or accounting clerk, but their lack of business acumen would make them very bad bankers. One good example was Wilfred Yiu; he was totally relentless and hopelessly overrun by greed without any concepts of risk management. Another would be Muse Kwong, a senior manager at Lehman when I interned there. She basically told everybody that I slept with the CEO to get my entire team fired. Now, it sounded ridiculous, especially for those who knew me. But this rumor got many innocent minds bamboozled. The rest was history. And you would see that market usually could correct itself, so could karma. As time went by, I could be the biggest beneficiary of this scam. All my rivals and enemies were half dead by now. Thank you, rumor mills.

Okay, so after we received our placement of our internship, we went through a week of orientation, which was also known as the bootcamp. It was named that way and known to us at the time but I was insensitive enough to ignore its rigor. We went through a series of videos that talked us through the history of Wall Street and where we stood at the time. Apparently, the trading floor was also known as "the boiler room" or 熱廚房. People could die from the pressure by exposure over a prolonged period of time. I knew none of these when I worked at Lehman, and to be honest, I found my workplace kind of cold, metaphorically speaking. So really, the Morgan Stanley internship was very much like rewinding my previous summer as the movie "La vita e Bella". Lehman was like my Jewish father Guido Orefice, who sheltered me like the war didn't exist. My summer internship at Lehman was just a holiday filled with collegiate moments and pleasurable memories.

The Lehman trading floor was a fair split between men and women. The sales department was actually dominated by women. There was no yelling on the trading floor because the treasury traders were all based in Tokyo. I picked up phone calls for the entire team. It was dynamic, but not stressful at all, and everyone I worked with was understanding.