While I’ve been out of commission, my mother has been in contact with work and the word is just get better, take your time before coming back, make sure you are well. That’s all that matters to us. Sometimes, I wonder if they had already decided to just fire me at the first possible moment.
The next three days or so I wake up in pain, take a Vikadin, feel ok for about two hours and fall back asleep. I’m also completely panicked about how much of the orientation I was missing. I still can’t do even the education thing at home because my password still doesn’t work.
On Wednesday at about 2:00 AM I wake up and take a Vikadin. I’m used to working at places where I was allowed in the office 24-7. I figured I had about two hours before the pain started again and the office was like 2 blocks away – so I took a cab in and worked on the education stuff, which I now realize is 100 times as long as a thought it would be, for about two hours before my side hurts too much to continue.
I take a cab home and fall asleep. Later that day I passed the stone and I was back at work on Thursday, I missed 6 days. I missed the whole orientation, which has luckily been taped for posterity. On Friday, I am given about 35 hours of camcorder tapes and a camcorder.
That weekend I for the life of me spent about two hours trying to figure out how to hook it up to my television, and couldn’t do it. There was some weird secret panel you needed to take off and I never did find it. So I didn’t catch up at all on the weekend.
Mr. Blonde razzes me about missing work. “I was here four years before I took a sick day!” Great!
I don’t catch up Monday morning because they don’t have a television for me to watch the tapes on. So I take a taxi home and get my television and start watching the 35 hours of tapes, which corresponds to about 100 pages of additional text that they had handed out during the classes.
It was tough to watch these tapes.
1. What was filmed was always the projection of the computer screen. So at best the computer screen changed and often this only happened every ten minutes or so.
2. The sound is horrible. I can barely hear a thing no matter how loud I listen to it.
3. Spivey – dude is constantly asking questions – and with the accent, the stutter and the bad sound – now I don’t even know what it is he’s asking about 80% of the times. Eventually, I’d just fast forward through him; because I knew there was a zero chance he’d ever ask anything relevant or important. I’d go forward about five minutes and he would still be discussing the same thing.
Meanwhile, all the other new guys are meeting people at the firm and seeing how things run. Basically, for the next week I watch about three hours of video and take a break and try to say hello to people. How’s the trading day going? Stuff like that, which I later find out is interpreted as me goofing off. I was literally just trying not to be forgotten.
After about two days of this, Mr. Orange calls me into his office. They’ve seen that I logged in that night at 2 AM and worked on the education stuff, and want to know why I didn’t come to work that day.
I then do my best to convey the superhuman effort it took to work those two hours, but despite being impressed by how much I got done in those two hours, Mr. Orange doesn’t seem to understand any of it. C’mon coach I swear, I was playing hurt. I thought I deserved a purple heart he seemed to think that I was insane.
Nevertheless, I am really behind. I have 35 hours of videotape to get through, about seven more hours of the education section, I’m trying to meet people and I’m terrible with names.
Additionally, I have two human resources people asking me to do stuff. One is Alabama’s (I’ve never negotiated with anyone as easy as you) mother who wants the receipts from my move.
Receipts?
No one ever said anything about receipts! She offered me $2000 dollars and I said thank you. Why was there a negotiation, if I had to justify my expenditures?
I didn’t keep any receipts, and no one ever told me I needed to. I tell her I have no receipts, but that I would do my best to try and get some. To me this doesn’t seem very important; I have 35 hours of videotape to watch!
Another human resources guy wants a letter from a doctor that I was sick, which again I prioritize as not very important. They all saw me pale as a sheet stumble into a cab going to the hospital. My mother gave them updates on me every single day I was recuperating. I honestly figured I could get them that in a week or so when I was caught up with everything else.
So I make it through the unbelievably boring 35 hours of badly recorded tapes, and get to sit with some traders the next day. At this point, I still don’t have a desk or a computer of my own; I’m not even sure who my boss is.
That day, I’m called into a meeting with Alabama and Mr. Blonde. They tell me that I’ve done some stuff to tick them off and make them worry about my future success. Ouch!
1. I hear about the 2 AM visit again. I am then told that I am not allowed in the building after 8 PM or before 6 AM. So much for playing hurt.
2. Apparently the two human resource tasks that I thought were the least of my concerns were in reality the things they cared about the most! I am told that they eventually called the hospital and found out that I wasn’t lying about staying there for about 36 hours.
I remind Alabama about how she said I was so wonderful negotiating my moving bonus. Why are we suddenly going insane over receipts?
3. People think I’ve been goofing around due to the five minute breaks I was taking every three hours of video or so to try and meet people. I say – sorry I was trying to meet people. Mr. Orange looks embarrassed that we’re even discussing these things.
4. I sat with a guy named Marvin for two hours and once he was explaining something and I asked another question before he finished.
What? Are you serious? My guess is that I thought he was done talking. I stepped on the conversation once in two hours and I’m a liability?
5. A package came for the general partner and I didn’t know what to do with it. Who knows it could have been a subpoena for Marsellus for all I knew – so I said “Hey can someone help me?” I was told that this made me look clueless and helpless to the other partners.
The sixth thing was actually ugly and my fault. I left O’Connor in 1993. Three friends of mine offered me a partnership with them if I moved to Chicago. I got there and after about two months I realized that the deal was structured badly and that I could be more successful on my own back in San Francisco. So I was never out of work. I just pulled out of one job and decided to take another when I got more information about the deal. I was a partner and I quit after two months. I didn’t put this on my resume, because it would be hard to explain and I figured they’d assume I had done something horrible. So:
6. Alabama says “We were told you traded on the CBOE for one day and quit.” So apparently, they’ve been calling people besides my doctors.
I said “no it was three weeks” and explained the situation and why I didn’t feel it needed to be on my resume. Mr. Orange seems to understand. Alabama says, ‘I know all of these things seem silly, and they are, but when you add them all up it makes us worry. I wouldn’t panic, but treat this as a “Red Alert.”
Red Alert? I’ve been here 9 days, I haven’t even gotten a desk or a phone yet, and I’m in Red Alert? How the hell did this happen?
Not only that, but I’m told that instead of just making my start date a week later, my kidney stones count as four sick days!
I have gone from the top of the new hire class to practically under the cement in less than two weeks, and I haven’t even traded an option yet! That has to be some kind of a record.
Despite all this, I take the test on all the speeches only about a day or so late and get 90%, which was about what everyone else got, but from that point on it’s assumed that, since I was out, I have no idea how to use any of their tools, which is unforgivable because they love their tools here.
They love their tools so much that they eventually made me sign a non-compete form which said that if I quit, I couldn’t trade options for anyone else for six months.
At some point I meet the co-owner of the firm, Marsellus, who also was once an O’Connor employee. I introduce myself to him and tell him that I used to work there too. I ask him if he knew a couple people that I worked with there.
He answers and asks me if I knew Scott and Ali, who were his really good friends at the firm. He keeps saying how much he loved Scott and Ali.
Well, Scott and Ali were two of my three partners on the gig I bailed from after two months. It’s either an incredible coincidence (that firm has like 100 traders) or he’s making a not so subtle dig at my resume. Really, could this possibly get worse?
I finally get placed. The firm has four business units run by Mr. Blonde, a quiet guy named Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, and Skagnetti. Mr. Brown overlooks and risk manages everything. I wind up working for Skagnetti, who I had chatted with for about three minutes up to that point.
I don’t exactly remember what went on in those three minutes, but after about an hour I come to realize that Skagnetti, who turns out to be right wing, anal, and more than a little like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr.Hyde, already hates my guts. Every time, I wonder how he could already hate me, he does something else to show that he totally hates me. Not only that but I sit between him and an aisle.
At one point that day, I asked him what the traders used to keep track of the news. The answer from anyone else would have been that the firm had a research group, and subscribed to a number of web sites.
His answer was “I DON’T TRADE ON NEWS, I TRADE OUT OF LINE OPTIONS!” Which I took as
1. Surprisingly rude and,
2. About the stupidest thing I’d ever heard in my life
For the next two weeks of training, all the other new guys seem to be sitting at their desks chatting and laughing, while this Skagnetti dude is making my life a living hell. One second he is all jovial, the next he is irate because I misspelled something in a text message I sent him. The message would be completely understandable, he was just that anal.
Spivey? He seemingly spends all day, every day, having little debates and discussions like he was Gore Vidal or something. They love this guy for some reason. I now hate him even more.
After about a week or so, I came to work, which was dress business casual, wearing a vintage Bob Feller Cleveland Indians baseball jersey. It was a 200 dollar shirt. On my way out to get a bagel, I pass Mr. Brown, who I sort of felt was a friend.
We started together why wouldn’t he treat me as a peer? We both have been in this business about 15 years after all. I say, “Hello” to Mr. Brown and he wishes me well in kind. When I get back, Skagnetti calls me in his office.
Mr. Brown has instructed Skagnetti to tell me that I am not allowed to wear a baseball jersey at work. That’s fine, my bad, but why didn’t Mr. Brown, my friend, just tell me that when we said hello to each other earlier that morning?
How hard would it have been to say, “Hey, Brad, we don’t dress that casually here!” Instead he let it boil up inside of him and added it to my Red Alert files.
That was when I realized that I was in fact nowhere near considered a peer by him, which wasn’t a very good feeling. When Brooks Brothers opened a half hour later I bought another shirt, even though I didn’t really have to. Three months later, someone else wore a $20 dollar baseball jersey and no one said a word to her about it.
Part 3: Monstrous Early Losses!
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