Tales from the Vault

So I haven’t done one of these for a while. Maybe it’s because, contrary to what you think, I’m actually a busy guy. Or maybe, it’s because I had my Fantasy Football Draft last week and I needed to prepare so that I didn’t get stuck with Cedric Benson again. Or, maybe, it’s because I was focusing on hammering out my 200th Random Thought by the end of August, just in time for the concept to be pilfered by some new contributor who doesn’t even need to prove himself first because he’s that talented. (Trip, I’m just kidding, buddy; you’re not talented.) Anyway, I’ve decided to bring this feature back. The first three focused on the college years. These next ones will focus on the post-collegiate years, aka the years in which a big bad bank sodomized my face, broke my ribs, and sent me tumbling down a pit of despair. Instead of starting at the beginning, let’s have some fun and start with my very last day as a full-fledged investment banking analyst, the day I had a little “accident.”

That Was Just a Fart, Right?
You know that great dream sequence in Office Space where Bill Lumbergh is nailing Peter Gibbon’s girlfriend as he drinks from his coffee mug and says, “If you could just go ahead and move a little bit to the left. That's it. Great”? Well I had that very same dream every night for a month, but instead of Jennifer Aniston on the receiving end, it was my ass. And instead of Lumbergh pounding away, it was Microsoft Excel. But unlike Lumbergh, Excel never politely asked me to cooperate. The program just jammed it in and went to town until I heard a strange buzzing sound. Then I'd wake up screaming.

(Remember Peter's nightmare? Excel was even more merciless. How, exactly, did it violate me? I'm not really sure, but I know I didn't like it one bit.)

It was May 2005 and the anniversary of my first year in banking was slowly approaching. It had been a rough ten months and my body was showing it: my skin had turned exceedingly pale, my once chiseled physique had become increasingly soft and flabby, and my eyes had developed these dark unsightly circles under them. In other words, I looked much like myself during senior week of college. And I was tired. Really tired. For the past few months I had worked 80-90 hours a week with the most execrable characters I ever had the misfortune of meeting. Simply put: these people were terrible and they made my life terrible. And then, suddenly, my life made a turn for the worse.

Without warning, I was “staffed” on a “live sell-side deal” with the one man at the firm whom everyone feared. Yoni was a 40-year Director, an unforgiving man who had spent half of his life in the Israeli army. His resemblance to Elliot Spitzer was uncanny, though he had much bigger, bluer (Hamas-hating) eyes. And his character was just as sleazy, if not worse. For instance, whenever he’d go out at night to drink and womanize, which was often, the first thing he did – and he was very vocal about this – was remove his wedding ring. He said it “made the night more fun.” Apparently his wife, who was pregnant at home with his first son, was a real bore.

(This is basically what Yoni looked like, but with bigger eyes. Terrifying, right? And I bet Yoni didn't pay for his prostitutes; he probably just went Grand Theft Auto: Gaza Strip on their asses.)

Like my fellow analysts, I met Yoni on our very first full Friday at the bank, back in 2004. At 5pm he brought us into a conference room, slowly closed the door and said in a thick Israeli accent, “Your God will not help you here.” He turned his back to us, gazing out the window at the statue of liberty. If it was his intension to intimidate us, it worked very well. All that was missing was O Fortuna and some blindfolds. A few minutes later, he turned around and stared at us with his outstretched hands pressed on the round table. Then, he started giving orders. In short, we were to spend an entire weekend doing hypothetical M&A work. I use the word “hypothetical” because this work would never be used for anything; it was simply meant to teach us what it’s like to waste an entire 48 hours at the office. Like 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire,' we were only allowed three lifelines if we got stuck on something. “If you make a mistake,” Yoni intoned, “I will find it, and I will make your life unpleasant. You don’t want to disappoint me.”

Let me recount a quick anecdote to better illustrate the type of person Yoni was. Right before Christmas, I thought it would be nice to get him a Chanukah present, you know, to get on good terms with the guy. Plus, in my naiveté, I thought I could “change” his nature, and bring out some good in an otherwise bad person. Since he often carried around a yo-yo, I thought I’d give him a Duncan, one that actually slept – unlike his cheap knockoff that constantly snapped his knuckles. While he absolutely loved the present – I even taught him how to Walk the Dog and Rock the Baby – a week later he approached me at a bar, drunk, complaining that the yo-yo was “broked.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s not much I can do.” He looked at me in disbelief. “Replace it. Get me a new one.” I laughed, thinking he was joking. But on the way back to Toys ‘R Us that night, all I could think was, Man, this guy doesn’t joke around.

(This is a sleek Duncan yo-yo, much like the one I got Yoni for Chanukah. Unfortunately, it somehow got "broked" and then I had to buy him a new one. It was probably my fault.)

One of my first responsibilities on the “live deal” was to put together the Working Group List (“WGL”), which is basically a glorified contact list of all the deal participants. Sounds easy, right? Not with Yoni. He called me early one Sunday morning, extremely agitated. He claimed he had found “a major mistake” in the WGL and that I must go into the office immediately, find the error and correct it before sunset. Like the good little submissive banker that I had become, I went in and spent the entire day there, hoping to find a spelling mistake, an incorrect phone number, or an outdated title. Unfortunately, all I found was a long hyphen instead of a dash in some secretary’s fax number. Right as the sun dipped below the city skyline, my office phone rang. It was Yoni. “Did you find it, yet?” “No,” I answered, “but I looked everywhere and I…” He cut me off. “I am very disappointed in you. On page five, instead of a little dash in Justyna’s fax number, there is a big dash. If I can’t trust you on this, how can I trust you on anything?” Before I had time to respond, he hung up. I couldn’t believe it.

To lift my mood, I thought about hitting up the Killarney Rose on Pearl Street to forget about yet another wasted Sunday. Unfortunately, the head of my broader group had just implemented a weekly Sunday night call that was mandatory for all analysts (much like the mandatory Monday morning meeting that would be taking place in twelve hours). So, instead of drowning my sorrows in booze, I did the next best thing: I went to the handicap stall and rubbed one out. I spent the rest of my Sunday night in my cube, listening on the phone to my bosses discuss what new and exciting projects awaited us analysts next week.

(The Killarney Rose is one sweet, old school dive bar. If you haven't been, I recommend you do. They have great drink specials and their lunch buffet is to die for. Denzel Washington even referenced the place in Inside Man.)

As I mentioned, I was having nightmares in which I kept getting reamed. Personally, I think Yoni had something to do with it. Another reason may have been that most of the deal team worked in Poland, which is six hours ahead of New York time. The head of that team, a Managing Director with an unintelligible Polish accent and a complete disregard for the health of his subordinates, liked scheduling 10am calls most mornings. For me, that meant waking up before 4am, which may have been feasible had I been going to sleep at a reasonable hour. But I wasn’t; I was getting home around 1am because, in addition to my responsibilities on other projects, of which there were many, I was in charge of managing the “data room” for this deal, which meant I had to spend innumerable hours sifting through thousands of pages of environmental documents (sometimes written in Polish), organizing them and summarizing the notes in case investors had any questions about the assets we were trying to sell. Since I was only sleeping three hours a night, when my alarm went off at 3:57am I was always mid-dream, and this dream was always a bad one involving a rapacious Excel program. I’d scream, then join the call.

(Wait, this is the program that violated me in my sleep? Yes, but there were like 20 tabs of intense financial modelling, and no lube. I don't really understand it either, so please stop asking.)

Anyway, it was 4:15am, the Monday morning after the WGL mishap, and we were in the middle of a call about God knows what. I was half sleeping, half paying attention when all a sudden I heard my name and my ears perked up. Yoni said I would be leading an important call at 10am and would be providing an overview of all the environmental docs I had read. This was a shock to me, which of course triggered my Irritable Bowel Syndrome (“IBS”), a devastating condition that had afflicted me since high school. I ran to the bathroom and took the rest of the call perched atop my throne. Fortunately, I remembered to hit the mute button on my phone, sparing the group the din of the carnage that was taking place beneath me. The call ended fifteen minutes later, which meant I had approximately five hours to throw together a presentation. Could I do it? I really had no choice. So I put on my work clothes, which were lying in a wrinkled pile in the corner of my bedroom, grabbed my folders and headed to the subway. It was still dark out.

(Ah, IBS. The worst ever? I had never even heard of 'Digestive Advantage' until I started writing this post and needed some images. I bet I could take a bunch of those and as soon as someone says "GMAT" I'd make the medication seem like a placebo.)

I got to the office around 5am and spent the next five hours chugging shitty coffee, skimming documents and writing notes for what I’d say. Before I knew it, it was 10am. I put on my headset, dialed in and tried to calm myself. I was the first one on. Quickly, the London team joined, then the Poland team, then the M&A team in New York, and finally, Yoni. There must have been twenty people on the call. Yoni opened, “Thank you all for joining. Let’s let have our NY analyst, who’s doing a great job, kick things off. Scos, before you tell us about the environmental liabilities, give us the 30,000 foot view of the deal. Remind us what each group is working on, what they’ve read, and then outline the deal timeline.” I nearly shit myself. What the hell was Yoni talking about? I was a first-year analyst, this was my first deal of this sort, and I had only been focusing on what I was told to do.

Now normally, I’m pretty good at bullshitting people. But here, in my exhausted state and under immense pressure (whether real or just imagined), my mind stopped working. I tried being smooth but all that came out was, “Thanks. Um… so we’ve got a pretty good deal here. A lot of people are working on it. The data room, it's pretty big. A lot of docs in there! [Uneasy laugh.] And… uh, and… uh, ” And I hung up. I swear: I hung up the phone. Then, I put my head, facedown, on the keyboard and tried my best to disappear.

(Unlike this hilarious cartoon character, I wasn't trying to sleep; I was simply trying to disappear. But as much as I tried, every time I opened my eyes I was still at my cube. And then, the phone started ringing...)

A minute later, my phone started ringing. (See?) It was Yoni. Do I pick up or not? I picked up. “What the hell just happened out there?” Yoni bellowed. “I don’t know,” I stammered. “I got disconnected. Why don’t you loop me back in?” He did. And there I was, in the hot seat again, with nothing to say. Fortunately, by the grace of (a benevolent Christian) God, an associate in London sensed my plight and intervened. “Welcome back, Scos. Let me actually start here, beginning with the modeling that you helped me with on Saturday.” She then talked for a good fifteen minutes about the deal. She had been in the business for seven years and unlike me, knew exactly what was going on. Then, the Poland team talked for a while, followed by a few others. I’m not sure what they said; I was too nervous about my upcoming presentation to concern myself with such things. Finally, about 45 minutes later, it was my turn to talk about the environmental liabilities. I don’t know if I did well or not; my headset was giving me all this negative feedback and all I could hear was my echoed voice when I spoke. Before I knew it, I was done.

Yoni wrapped up the call. “Thanks all for joining us today. My analyst will be sending around the detailed meeting minutes by noon. If you have any questions, please contact him directly.” What? Detailed meeting minutes? I looked at my notebook. Not a single note on the page, except for “Somebody help me,” scrawled in chicken scratch. Not surprisingly, the IBS struck again. Hard. Frustrated with this condition – and everything else – I effectively told myself, “No! This is just psychological. It will pass.” My intestines, however, disagreed, and they contracted even harder. As a compromise, I decide to cut a fart, to relieve the pressure. So I lifted a cheek, and let one go. But something happened. Something bad. Something hot. That was just a fart, right? I asked myself. I slowly stood up and realized I was sorely mistaken. I had shit myself. We’re not talking an innocent little squirt or some light spraying; we’re talking the real deal, mom-and-pop, main course meat loaf platter. I had shit myself, and I was 23 years old.

(While true, I think for my case, it's more accurate to label this: Fear + Stress + Exhaustion + IBS + 7 Cups of Coffee + An Ill-Conceived Fart = Shit Your Pants.)

Clenching my cheeks, I waddled to the bathroom to assess the damage. Suffice it to say, it was pretty grim. And there, in the very same handicap stall that I had used hours earlier, with soiled briefs in hand, I looked at myself in the mirror and made a decision: I’m not doing this anymore. I hated this job. I hated these people. And I hated my life. But where could I go? What could I do? I didn’t know, so I cleaned myself, tossed out the briefs and trudged to the firm’s infirmary.

I guess I looked pretty ill because the woman at the front desk, without prompting, looked at me and said, “Oh my gosh! Please sit down. Don’t worry – we’ll have someone look at you right away.” I don’t remember much about the discussion with the nurse or what I told him. I just recall lying down, him giving me a card and saying, “You need to talk to someone. I know this social worker.” So I left the building and headed to the address on the card, which was up a couple blocks on Broadway.

On the way there, I bumped into an old boss. Now let’s be clear: I despised this woman; she had effectively ruined my life every day from January to April and was heavily responsible for my current state. But she saw that something wasn’t right with me. And she decided to help. She said, “Go home. I’ll tell Yoni and his boss that you need some rest.” I thanked her, but then added that I didn’t know when – or if – I’d be back. She nodded.

As I opened the door to the social worker’s office, my cell phone starting ringing. It was Yoni. I sent it right to voicemail. A few weeks later, I finally listened to it. He wanted to make sure I was okay. I wasn’t, nor would I be for a long time. Believe it or not, although I had shit myself, I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet. And until I did, I wouldn’t get better.