From here, things got so ugly I can only really laugh about it. Every day I wanted to quit, every day I was more worried about being fired. I had two million dollars to trade ,but with the new risk rules, I couldn’t even figure out a way to use it. The only way to put any risk on was to buy a bunch of options and pray, but this was clearly an unethical thing to do, the edge in our business is on the sell side. One young trader actually did do this, and lost about a third of his capital in three months, $700,000, which to his credit was an enormous amount of money to lose when absolutely nothing was going on. He had truly outdone himself.
I was truly starting to hate ACME9, when suddenly the terms “house” trader and “field” trader hit me square in the face.
Malcolm X had once said the following in a speech: Back during slavery, when Black people like me talked to the slaves, they didn’t kill ‘em, they sent some old house Negro along behind him to undo what he said. You have to read the history of slavery to understand this. There were two kinds of Negroes. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negro got too much out of line, he held them back in check. He put ‘em back on the plantation.
It suddenly made perfect sense, we all worked on a plantation. Honestly, I was a little enraged about the implications, not least of which that I was in the inferior class. Without thinking, or caring much at this point, I emailed the quote out to four people I thought I could trust under the heading, “I don’t think they thought these names out very well.”
The next morning I get an instant message from Orange. “You’re not in trouble, but I need to know who you sent that email to.” I gave Orange the names and assured him that I wasn’t implying that he and the partners were classist scum, but that I’d felt the titles weren’t very well chosen. That was a lie; I really did think that they were classist scum.
Freddie had bagged me. He had forwarded my email to Orange. When I asked him why, and a lot more politely than I felt that he deserved, he told me that the new human resources woman had pointed out the slavery context of the names, but that the partners didn’t think anyone would ever notice. Nice! They knew about the context and used it anyway. Additionally, Freddie could have just told Orange that someone had raised the issue and protected me, but instead he merely forwarded along my email as written. Thanks, pal!
It gets worse. One of the people, I had forwarded the email to was Blonde. He had been pretty sympathetic to my plight. When I considered sending a long letter to Orange about how badly I felt that I had been treated, Blonde told me that it was well written and eloquent but that I should just try to gut it out. Blonde didn’t have to deal with any of this nonsense; he’d been made manager of the firm’s new hedge fund.
After work that day, I went over to Blonde, who thought the whole imbroglio was pretty funny. As we talked, we walked past Marsellus, and Blonde asked the founding partner for a few minutes of him time.
Joking, I noted that Blonde was clearly important because usually at ACME9 people only asked for a second of your time. In fact, if your boss asked you for a second of your time, you had probably done something horrible and were about to get reamed out over it.
Marsellus laughed a fake little laugh and said the following. “That’s what I like about you, your attention to detail. I read your recent email. Our human resources director pointed those terms out to us, and I knew that if anyone recognized the context it would be you, because you’re always reading.” Yes, I’m a reader!
Orange had forwarded my email to Marsellus. It just got worse and worse. I again ingenuously tried to assure Marsellus that I wasn’t making any implications, but was just pointing it out for the health of the firm.
The “field” became soon the “arena,” and I was now more than ever labeled as an insurrectionalist.
I Fought ACME9 and ACME9 Won: Part 18 Fidel, Che, and Me!
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