Confessions of a Cat-holic (222)

At some point towards the second half of the internship, I received an email from Goldman asking me to attend an interview there. They sent it to my personal email. I made sure I didn't open it in my corporate computer.

At the weekly intern meeting, I was late for 5 minutes because I was very strained from work and it was just an internal meeting. I hated the job a lot because of the hours. Also, who the hell would want to dig through the internet to find out the box office revenues in the past twenty years? But all the interns were there on time. I was the only one who was kind of late.

Vic Garber openly made a comment about my late arrival. He didn't say anything mean but it was something like yeah you could totally be late, you could totally dress down for work, yea it was okay to slack off, etc. I knew he didn't mean it like that. He was making me feel bad about being late for the intern meeting.

By this time, I was already very tired. I felt like I had to be perfect every minute, especially on the trading floor, since there were trades coming in every second. DCM was straining too, for all the preparation and data searching. I felt like I had to be on the ball every minute at this internship. I couldn't phase out during work. There was no downtime. I could see why people had to take bathroom breaks to smoke weed in the office. Of course, I didn't smoke weed at work. I just had a cigarette or so a day. I was not addicted to it, I didn't even know why I did that. I didn't like the smell of cigarette. Smoking didn't bring me any pleasure at all.

I felt very lonely when I worked at Morgan Stanley. I was living in Water Street by myself. My roommate moved out already. I couldn't meet up with Natalie or Kelly because I didn't have the time. I occasionally met up with Eddie but he didn't seem to see the stress I was enduring for this job. I really regretted moving in the Water Street dorm. There was no light even in the room, and I had no time to buy a freaking light so whenever I was back in my dorm, everything was dark. I started to have some hallucinations at night. I could hear people talking and turning on the shower in the bathroom. I thought I was haunted, but then I guessed maybe I was overthinking. I felt that I was slowing driving myself to insanity for this internship.

My "friends" Vicki and Yvonne called me all the way from Australia and Hong Kong. They talked to me on the phone for three hours. Vicki even sent me a post card that was about 2000 word long, yeah on a postcard, talking about nonsense. I didn't even know what she was trying to say and her handwriting was so packed with 7 different color pens; sometimes I thought that she had a mental problem.

I really didn't want to go back to Asia to face my "friends". I really couldn't see myself getting happily married with a guy I loved. Even if I got married, my friends would all offer to sleep with my husband. And that was not the worst part of it all. One of them told me she was infected with gynecological diseases because she had unprotected sex with an Italian during her trip in Europe. I wouldn't disclose the name here. I felt very unsafe. I would not want to see or date anyone desirable because he would cheat on me eventually anyways; but I wouldn't want to kiss or have sex with an ugly guy either; the best scenario would be to stay single forever, earning minimum wage less than a Filipino. What an enviable life those domestic helpers had in Hong Kong.

Back to the intern meeting, Vic Garber said openly that he had a list of all the interns who were invited to Goldman's interview. He said he had his ways of obtaining such confidential information. He warned us that we should never attend the interview, even if we couldn't get a return offer. He was so serious about it that I thought I had a heart attack. He said that we would be forever blacklisted by the company if we ever stepped into Goldman's office with a very strict face. Given that he was the COO, he said he knew as soon as we received calls from headhunters.