aren’t a lot of girls to talk to in this place!” she said as she hugged me.
The redheaded leprechaun surveyed me and said, “Chick, yours is cute, but mine is better.” He snorted as he walked away, the girl trotting off quickly behind him. I wondered if he took the train to work, or if he just slid down a rainbow into the lobby.
I held my breath. Chick started walking again and said, “That was Keith Georgalis, more commonly known on the floor as Darth Vader. He’s a prick. He runs the high-yield desk. His sidekick is his analyst, Hannah. She’s a freaking moron, but she’s a treat to look at so we keep her. She doesn’t work for me, so what do I care? If you make even half the mistakes that idiot has made, I’ll bounce you out on your ass so fast your head will spin.”
Before I could say a word Chick stopped in front of a group of people and waved his arm in a sweeping motion as he proudly announced, “This is the desk.”
A “desk” was the Wall Street term for the team of people who worked in a specific product area. My desk, the government bond sales desk, was composed of forty people sitting in three long rows like diner counters—covered with papers, phones, and flat screen monitors. Each person sat in an aerodynamic chair, his specific workspace segregated from the person sitting next to him only by a thin black line of grout, the same way tiles are connected on a bathroom floor. The workstations were so close together that if you extended both your arms you would touch your neighbors. The concept of “personal space” didn’t seem to exist here, and I realized that if I ended up sitting next to an asshole—or worse, in between two—my days were going to be miserable.
I stared at the wall of computer monitors looming in front of everyone. Every single employee on the floor had at least three monitors at his workstation. Some traders had as many as six. In order to view them all, some were elevated above others on stacked reams of printer paper. It was hard to believe that there was enough information to look at on a daily basis to warrant multiple computer monitors, and I quickly began to worry that I wasn’t going to be able to follow everything the way the other guys could. At the time I didn’t realize that someone could sit directly behind you and you could be so busy you’d go months without ever actually speaking to that person, or even know his name. You could. I would.
I was nervous, adrenaline making me so jittery it was hard to stand still. I scanned the men sitting in the rows. They were all on their phones, some of them with their feet up, mindlessly tossing small rubber balls into the air while they spoke. The phones rang incessantly, multicolored lights blinking on an enormous switchboard. The desk was covered with coffee cups, soda cans, bottles of water, and newspapers. The place smelled like the short-order cook station at a diner—a combination of grease, sweat, strong coffee, and burned bacon. I gave a quick glance around and saw a huge box filled with bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches lying on the floor. As I scanned the group, I noticed the one other woman on the desk. I made a mental note to introduce myself to her sooner rather than later.
Chick grabbed my shoulders and began to turn me in ten-degree clips as he pointed to other long counterlike rows filled with people conducting business. “Here’s a brief layout of the floor.” He spun me to the left and pointed to a square configuration in the corner of the room. “That’s the emerging markets desk. They sell bonds issued by developing countries. Brazil, Mexico, Chile. Most of Latin America.” He turned me another ten degrees so that I was facing the middle of the room. “Over to the left we have high yield, bonds issued by companies with lower credit ratings. That means the debt has a higher risk than say a high-grade bond, which is debt sold by larger, more well-established companies. Your Ford, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and most other big-name companies you can think of are traded off the high-grade desk, which sits directly to their left. Past them you have mortgages, which should be self-explanatory, and at the end of the room you have the money market team. They sell bonds that mature in one year or less. There’s also some structured product teams over there,” he said as he rotated me again and pointed to a bunch of nerdy-looking guys in the right far corner. “They do highly complicated structured trades that most people don’t understand, and that includes a majority of the people in this room. You’ll learn what they do eventually, because I’m training you and I don’t have idiots working for me. Finally, around the corner is the foreign exchange desk. They trade global currencies. If you ever travel to Europe and have to change your dollars for sterling or euros, you’ll have to know where those rates are trading. That’s their job. Capiche? There are economists and strategists scattered all over the place. You won’t have much cause to interact with anyone who doesn’t work in rates to start off.”
I tried to process everything he was saying, but my brain shut down somewhere around the time he mentioned Brazil. I was so screwed.
“Now, these rows over here,” he said as he pointed to long rows that faced each other, the elevated monitors forming a wall in between the guys so they didn’t have to stare at each other all day, “is the trading desk. These guys actually price and trade the bonds that we, the sales desk, buy and sell for our clients. It’s our job as salespeople to solicit business and keep our clients informed and happy. Clients can pick up the phone and call any shop on the street to do trades; we need to make sure that they call us. How do we do that? By being good fucking salespeople, that’s how. That’s what we are going to teach you. How to be a good fucking salesperson. Capiche?” My head was spinning, and I could swear that I just heard one of the trader’s computers cluck like a chicken for no apparent reason. What the hell was going on here?
“What’s that noise?” I asked, afraid if I hadn’t really just heard a clucking chicken I was about two minutes away from a stroke.
“What, the chicken?” he asked.
I was relieved he heard it, too, and yet startled that he didn’t seem to think random barnyard animal noises needed explanation. I nodded. “Yes, the chicken.”
“Some of the traders programmed their systems to make farm animal noises when they do a trade. They can’t possibly keep their eyes on everything all the time so the sound effects help let them know where their positions are. So don’t be surprised when you hear something moo, or bark, or oink. The junior guy’s system rings a cowbell, but it’s annoying so I might make him change it. I hear that fucking thing in my sleep.”
Unless you saw it for yourself, you couldn’t accurately imagine this scene if you took three tabs of acid and locked yourself in closet. I gulped.
“So are you ready to start?” Chick asked as he walked toward his chair on the desk, where he apparently spent most of his time, despite having a private office.
Ready to start? I couldn’t remember anything he just said. I needed a map. And a finance-to-English dictionary. Pronto.
Before I could ask him to clarify a few things, he called everyone to attention.
“Listen up, team; this is Alex. She’s our new analyst. Introduce yourselves and make her feel at home.” A few people nodded; some of them raised their hands and waved. One guy actually got up and shook my hand, though he was on the phone when he did it so he didn’t actually speak to me. I looked around and noticed that there were no empty workstations. I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit on someone’s lap, so I was sincerely hoping that Chick was going to tell me where I’d be sitting. When he sat down and started typing into a massive Excel sheet, I realized he wasn’t.
I had no choice but to ask him, or else stand in the aisle all day like the team mascot.
“Excuse me, Chick. Where should I sit?” I asked, nervously.
“Here you go.” Without taking his eyes off his spreadsheet, he reached behind him and grabbed a tiny metal folding chair that was leaning against
