Confessions of a Cat-holic (210)

My Indian boss was not at all talkative. He asked me why I didn't work at Goldman, as he heard that I was also given an offer for a summer internship there. I told him I didn't want to be that big fish in the small pond. Well, that was my application essay for the SEO program, obviously they understood my metaphors to have placed me at Lehman. The hedge funds and private equity circles were known to be micro in scale, especially when compared with the gigantic insurance and annuity companies, asset managements and mutual funds, which might explain their selectivity in recruitment sometimes. Just personal preference. Some people wanted to be 大龍躉 (giant grouper). Some wanted to be slaughtered like a sheep. All industries were like an ecosystem; finance was no different. Some were just born to be preyed on. Well, in Chinese idiom, there was a phrase that said 水清則無魚: we all needed some fish on our plates to palliate our appetites to a certain extent. Who wouldn't welcome a bit of big fish for dinner?

Well, after that conversation, Sanjay never talked to me again. Yes, you might think that the trading floor was full of swearing and yelling. But the reality was that most of the guys I worked with at Lehman and Morgan Stanley, whether sales or traders, were not talkative at all. Eric Tsang only spoke to me a few times, even though we sat next to each other for the entire summer. I had only had a conversation of no more than 3 sentences with Kirk Sweeney and I already earned the reputation of sleeping with him to get my entire team fired.

Nobody was willing to teach me stuff on the job. No big brother or big sister to hand hold me in training sessions either. We were just told to observe. Eric sometimes had to travel to Beijing to meet his clients, but he rarely talked to me about the markets when he was around. Frances Wu was my associate and we chatted quite a bit during the day when the market was slow. No one was nice enough to guide me in navigating the markets, except Frances. She walked me through all the Bloomberg instructions and booking system features. Eric once showed me his archaic calculator from Solomon Brothers that was specially designed for fixed income. But Bloomberg could now do all the tricks anyways.

The junior traders at Morgan Stanley also wouldn't talk to me. I was sitting all by myself for the entire morning. As the day slowly went by, Sanjay and his juniors started to turn on their electric fans underneath the bench. That fan made me sick, like literally. I wanted to ask them to turn off the fan, but it was my first day of work and I felt bad in raising too many concerns that might cause them inconvenience. In the end, I found it intolerable so I asked if they could switch off the fan. They said they could turn it off for 15 minutes but they had to keep the fan on for the rest of the day because they said the heat on the trading floor was unbearable. I was wearing a skirt at the time and I had my period that day unfortunately. I couldn't stand the wind coming through my legs and I fell sick by late afternoon. I had very bad cramps. I couldn't even find a girl on the trading floor to help me get some painkillers. There was no duane reade or any drug stores nearby 1585 Broadway. I almost passed out on my desk. I cried in the girls' bathroom. There were so few women on the trading floor that not even a girl came in when I broke down in tears for half an hour there.

I puked in the toilet too because the cramps were so bad. I had no one to turn to because my mentors were all men. After I came back from the toilet break, my boss said that I had been gone for too long. He said that we were not allowed to have bathroom breaks for more than 5 minutes when the market opened because we could have missed some big trades. He demanded that I should report to him whenever I intended to leave the desk for more than 2 minutes. He would have to approve my short notice request before I was given the permission to leave my workstation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LQ3-P3biMQ