Investment Banking Monkey - The All Nighter

You’re on a conference call (on mute) with Frank from Kruelberg on the other line, as you catch yourself wondering how does smugness transfer over the phone wires? It’s amazing. You would have thought that putting frank on mute would have put some sort of protective bubble, blocking the smugness before it reaches you, but no, no, no. The smug bastard is coming across loud and clear, as he dictates how Kruelberg wants to run this transaction.

Frank starts off with an apology for not being able to hold this kickoff meeting in person, but doe to his busy schedule, he has to be on a plane in half an hour so he’s doing it from the overpriced chauffeured car taking him to the airport. Like he really gives a shit about “meeting the team who will be working for Kruelberg on this very important deal”. Ha. I mean let’s face it, if it were an important deal, he wouldn’t be on his way to fly somewhere on another deal instead of focussing on this one.

He highlights that he wants to call this Project Parasol, because the target is an insurance broker. He thinks this is quite smart. It is. Actually, the name he’s picked is perfect, but only because if spoken quickly, it bears a strong resemblance to Project Asshole, which is what Frank really is.

Frank wants the firm to conduct a thorough valuation exercise, co-ordinate the other advisers like lawyers, accountants, tax consultants and so on, deal with the seller, deal with the banks… and five minutes later, it all makes sense. Frank has (smugly) agreed what the firm thought is a very nice flat fee on the deal. In exchange for his generosity, he’s offloading every single bit of work that the other advisers and he should be doing to the firm. Why? Because, given’s he’s paying us the flat five million, everything we do is for free, whereas he has to pay everyone else by the hour. Smugass pice of Kruelberg Kretin shit! You then wonder why you’re the poor fucker trying to reconcile the target’s latest management accounts to the last quarterly report they filed. You think to yourself that this is a piece of piss work that an accountant could do in no time. Indeed, but you’re the lucky dumbass sitting in the office at 4am trying to figure out accountancy 101 so you can feed Frank a response first thing tomorrow morning.

Oh, and by the way, that means it needs to reach him by first thing in the morning. He will, of course, only manage to look at it in the late afternoon, once he’s been to the gym, had coffee, gone for lunch and twiddled his fucking thumbs for long enough to realise he asked for this work in the first place. Nice guy, eh?

When he finally gets back to you, which will probably be at 6pm before he leaves the office for the day, it will be along the lines of saying that its an excellent effort but all wrong, and that you need to spend another night trying to get it right, before he sends your work to the accountants to make sure its fine. You are inclined to think “its their fucking job in the first fucking place you fucking twat so no fucking wonder you think its fucking wrong having read it whilst sipping your fucking espresso and reading the paper”, but you naturally do not, as you well know, frank works for Kruelberg which is the financial services community’s equivalent of royalty. He might be a useless, incompetent dubs shit, but he is a useless, incompetent dumb shit working for Kruelberg Kretin.

So yes sir it is, as you vow to one day come up with a trick that will catch frank fucking Johnson off his guard.