Investment Banking Monkey - The All Nighter

You’re in the bathroom splashing water on your face and you look at yourself in the mirror and cannot believe what you see. You’re looking at this strange, tired creature that looks five years older, five kilos fatter and way more than five hairs greyer than what you remember from the holiday photo of you and your buddies from your beach holiday before you joined the firm that you constantly look at as the background shot on your computer.

You can’t believe how this transformation happened overnight. You are puzzled by how your perception of how good you looked could have been so off the mark. What happened?

You splash another handful of water on your face and try to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to this. You scratch your head and think through what you’ve been doing lately that led to this. Sure, it all starts coming back, the late hours, the work, the pitches, the meetings, the presentation, the models, all of it! But no! It can’t be all that! That’s the run of the mill – “I eat shit like this for breakfast” – stuff that a master of the universe does eat for breakfast. It cannot be just that.

You splash yourself with some more water, attempting to jig your memory once more and as if by magic, it works. It all starts coming back to you. The answer is Frank Johnson. What an asshole. Frank fucking Johnson. Frank fucking principal at a private equity shop Johnson. Frank fucking principal at the fucking private equity house that is your client fucking Johnson. Frank fucking “these numbers don’t make sense” and “I know because I used to be a banker” wiseass fucking asshole private equity fucking principal Johnson. Yes, that’s the right Frank Johnson.

Frank is a principal at Kruelberg Kretin Capital Partners. Frank thinks he’s some kind of uberhot shit, working for kruelberg, one of the hottest private equity shops on the street. They do the biggest, baddest, sexiest LBOs on the street and are probable the only form of financial life form that is more BSD that the i-banker BSDs. They are truly the hot shit. The problem is, that even hot shit stinks, and as far as stinking goes, Frank is truly the hottest piece of shit on the street.

He thinks he’s some kind of hot shot, just because he made it into private equity. He used to be an associate at Goldmen, before making the move. He used to be just like you. He used to change decimal places on comps, and say that he updated them. He used to back-solve for the valuation he knew the client wanted to achieve and then put his fantastic modelling skills to make the model come up to that valuation (or just ever so slightly below so that the client would not be suspicious). He used to pull all nighters working on models, and when the balance sheet wouldn’t balance 5 minutes before the book needed to be printed, he manually plugged numbers he knew nobody would check to make it balance. You can say, he’d been there, done that, and gotten a whole load of fucking T-shirts. The problem was, now every time you tried to pull a fast one on him, he’s look at each of these T-shirts on his wall and remember the same trick that he used to pull on his clients, and you didn’t have a chance.

Asshole. Smartass Frank fucking Johnson. Fucking Frank Kruelberg Kretin fucking capital fucking Partners Johnson. I will pull a fast one on you. Don’t know how, don’t know when, but I’ll come up with a trick you haven’t seen before you freaking asshole.