Investment Banking Monkey - The All Nighter

It’s the weekend, and by some stroke of luck, you have managed to get your Sunday afternoon free. Nobody’s called you and no emails popped up on your blackberry for a full three hours (you actually called IT and got them to make sure that everything was ok with the company server and that all that important email traffic from your associate wasn’t getting clogged up somewhere between his blackberry and yours only to find that everything was a-ok). You are a free man for the evening. After making a few calls to your intern buddies, only to find out that they are stuck at the office, you sit on your couch and stare at the TV. You switch to Bloomberg out of sheer guilt – even though your presence is obviously not required at the office, you can make productive use of your time by keeping up to speed with what’s going on in the markets. No luck here either. Bloomberg is doing a show on how traders spend their bonuses. Flash cars, helicopters and lots of blingedy-bling-bling-bling.

Shit. What are you going to do? You’ve been an intern for a week and you don’t know how to productively use all this spare time. After surfing channels in search of something to stimulate your financially minded braincells, you decide that the TV is not the solution. You decide that the best way to serve the greater i-banking good is to use this time to build your network. You dial a few numbers and get a group of fellow interns to meet for a few drinks at the Eclipse on Walton Street. The dude from Lemming Brothers actually had the nerve to suggest meeting at his (upmarket) corner pub instead – a suggestion which was quickly shot down as no self respecting i-banker can be seen in a pub! Your two other buddies from Moron Stanley beat you to the gun on that one, leaving no doubt that Eclipse was the place to be seen.

You have a shower, gel back your hair in true American Psycho style, put on a crisp starched Polo shirt, beige Polo chinos, brown Church’s laceups, and a light blue Polo jumper (with a perfectly colour co-ordinated soft green polo player) and you’re good to go. You strap your Swiss Army watch to your wrist and wipe the drool off your face as you imagine the way everyone’s jaws will drop when you replace it with your very own Patek Philippe. You are ready to go. You walk outside, hail a cab for the three and a half minute journey to Eclipse and walk in to find the banker boys at a cushy table and a drink waiting for you.

There’s the Moron Stanley IB boys, the Italian from Lemming Brothers fixed income and his Lemming flatmate. The flatmate looks completely harmless. He’s wearing the standard Polo dominated outfit and thick rimmed glasses. He comes across as the rocket scientist that every graduating class has a specimen of. A truly odd species, who has traded in his chequered short sleeved shirt and calculator holster for a pair of miu miu pants, Prada loafers and a Polo shirt and jumper. Nonetheless, you can’t imagine him harming a fly. You can picture him diligently tapping at a discounted cash flow model, trying to make right the $0.0001 by which the balance sheet is of in 2015. Your image is shattered as you pick up a fragment of the conversation, where the Lemming flatmate, with steam almost coming out of his ears says ”…so then I told my associate to fuck off!”, after which he almost downs the remaining half of his Long Island Iced Tea. You slip back into your thoughts and go over what this harmless looking creature is living through. A person who could not harm a fly, flapping about how he told a superior to fuck off. One glance and you wouldn’t have imagined that he ever even had the nerve to complain about anything, and here he is shootin’ his shotgun like this was his daddy’s ranch in Texas. You realize that you are not all that different. You think about this for a second and conclude that you “used to be a nice guy, and now you are an i-banker”.