It's that time of the year again

It’s getting to be that time of year in banking. The time of year when downtrodden kids with nary a ray of sunlight for 12 consecutive months receive that portion of their compensation that incentivizes them to put up with being harassed, harangued, heckled and (for the sake of alliteration) horse-fucked just so the MD can get their damn pitch books on time.

It’s a universal truth that May and June are the slowest months in banking. Analysts begin to see the light at the end of tunnel and names like Ferragamo, Abboud, Pink, Zanella, Zegna and Terra, the really hot stripper at Scores, start to fill their heads. And, of course, there are those one or two Analysts who don’t give a german-engineered-damn about their 401(k) and will buy a Cayman (not a Cayman S, mind you, just a Cayman, because, hey, what’s the point when it’s underpowered anyway). Analysts start to dream big about how they will spend their hard-earned cash and the days slow to a crawl.

Here’s how it starts. In the beginning of May, the staffer lays out the timeline, which usually looks something like this:

May 5 – Provide the names of projects to which you were assigned
May 19 – Reviews are due from Senior Bankers and Associates
June 2 – Roundtable discussion
June 9 – Performance Managers give reviews to Analysts
June 30 – Bonuses paid

Analysts read this differently:

May 5 – Provide the list of projects on which you were staffed with the Associate and VP least likely to give you a bad review
May 19 –Pray that said Associate and VP are in a good mood today
June 2 – Fate decided
June 9 – Fate conferred
June 30 – Dinner at Nobu/Aqua/Koi, dessert at whichever strip club is the consensus that night

Each interminable day that passes brings each of us closer to a financial windfall. We say things like, “Fuck man, 29 more days and I’m out of this shit-hole,” or “Once I get that money in my account, I don’t give a shit anymore, this next year I’m outta here.” We reason that once we get our money, we’ve been made whole for the hair we’ve lost in the past year and there is no longer any incentive for us to stay. There are always some banks looking to hire seasoned meat at this point in the year, so if we don’t like the lay of the land after we get our bonus, we’ll just leave for greener pasture. There is no sense of, Well, I’ve worked my ass off for 3 months for a hourly rate that would make a school teacher laugh, so I might as well stick it out for the next 9 months to make it worthwhile.

That’s what we say. We talk big and dream big and look to the day we can stick it to the Firm for robbing us of girlfriends, lives, dreams, sunny days, day games and passions and replacing them with this incessant need to remind everyone not in banking that Hey, you, YOU are NOT in banking, because if you were, you wouldn’t look so fucking happy right now, you poor, ignorant douche-bag.

And then July passes quietly, August swings through with no more than a murmur and before we know it, Q3 ends and we think, well, I’ve worked my ass off for 3 months for a hourly rate that would make a school teacher laugh, so I might as well stick it out for the next 9 months to make it worthwhile.

Allowance, it's not just for the kids anymore

So, I know, I haven’t posted in over a month. I apologize. But let’s put these differences past us and get on the post, shall we? Needless to say my absence is directly correlated to a spike in work hours, so let’s talk about something that suffices to brighten my workday: the meal allowance.

It is standard, at least for any bank that actually wants to keep its workforce, for employees to receive a $30 allowance each night for dinner. Technically, this allowance is contingent on the following stipulations: 1) The meal is ordered after 7PM (ensuring that only true “team players” partake); 2) it is ordered to-go; 3) it is consumed in the office. Pretty straightforward, right? Pretty sweet, right?

Well, Analysts don’t think so. I’m sure most people, given a solid base in reality, would be perfectly happy following the rules and taking the free food. After all, $30 a night, assuming 260 work days a years, is an extra $7,800 in your bank account. Let’s say you work half your weekends, and spend $30 on dinner and $10 on lunch, now that’s $9,880 in your account. Now, it’s unfair to say that it effectively bumps your salary up $10K (unless you were going to spend $30 a night on food anyway…), but still, it’s no chump change.

So what, exactly, are the gripes that Analysts have with this system? Here they are: 1) If you spend more than 50% of your time in the office, and can get out and spend 45 minutes at dinner, you’re going to do that; getting food to-go and eating in your cube every night fucking sucks; 2) after 6 months, the restaurants in the area start to suck (remember in college when we swore the chef at 592 Mayfield was the end-all-be-all of college cuisine, and then got sick of it 4 months later?); and 3) Analysts are generally disgruntled and we tend complain about things for the hell of it.

Moreover, the system is complicated by the presence of loopholes: 1) We can use this dinner allowance however we choose, including purchasing items from grocery stores; and 2) We don’t need to provide itemized receipts to show what we’ve purchased at restaurants (unfortunately we have to do this at grocery stores).

So when you combine these loopholes with the general latent frustrations of Analysts, it becomes a game of what you can slip through the system and get reimbursed by your company. Alcohol at dinner? That’s easy. Borrowing someone else’s expense code if you exceed $30? Standard. Grocery shopping to stock up the home fridge? Well, that’s potentially creative, but it depends on what you purchase; snack foods, soda and other ready consumables are no big deal; produce, poultry, meat and seafood are bit more creative but still easy to get reimbursed; toilet paper, hair gel and toothpaste – now we’re talking!

But the dinner allowance goes beyond dinner. For example, let’s say you turn in a receipt that has a time stamp for Saturday at 12:20AM for a place called Suite 181. Now, who’s to say Suite 181 isn’t the restaurant you went to after working your ass off all Friday night? Who’s to say that Suite 181 is a club? If you don’t turn in a receipt that itemizes the 6 red bull vodkas you bought, who’s to know that you didn’t feast upon a dinner of more than just carbohydrates and ethanol?

Of course, invariably the office managers who approve these receipts for reimbursement start to catch on more and more. Of course, I haven’t seen an office manager last more than 6 months here, so there’s always new blood to take advantage of.

All Things Excel

So, this is an inauspicious start to a group blog…but here’s my post. As an introduction, I’ll mostly be posting about banking and music – two things I feel moderately qualified to talk about. The posts, for the most part, will be the same as the posts on my blog, however I do foresee giving you guys updates on my life, as I assume you’re interested. If you’re not interested, then fuck you, Charles, I’m too busy to return your phone calls too.

On to the post.

I’ve definitely learned a lot in my one-and-a-half years on this job. Right up there on my list of accomplishments is an extreme proficiency for Microsoft Excel. Like, I’m really good with it. Like, remember how good Charles was at looking stressed? Or how good Will and Stoops were that one year at stacking beer cans in the shape of Richard Jeni’s face? Like, that’s how good I am at it. In banking, we refer to such abilities as “mad skillz” and usually follow-up the description with a high-five and “boo-yah”. Then we usually go home and weep. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, about three weeks ago I was sitting in my cube and thinking, how can I use my Excel skills to make me a better person? What area of my life can benefit from the ability to model and predict future performance based on a large amount of historical data. And then it hit me: Fantasy-Fucking-Baseball.

So I set about copy-and-pasting all the ESPN.com tables and historical stats and merged them with Yahoo’s Fantasy Draft template to give me a decent model to draft my team. Then I started tracking my player’s performance, by week, as well as the players I dropped, the players I want to pick to up, and the overall performance of the fantasy league. This way, I’m able to evaluate how my team is doing on a per-player basis, and see if I can track any rise or decline in the standings based on moves I made or should have made.

Plus, the best thing about this is, when I have this spreadsheet open, it is virtually indiscernible from any other spreadsheet I may be working on. So when superiors walk past and glance at my computer screen, it appears that I’m working diligently. (As an aside, for this same reason I’ve gotten very good at the Alt+Tab keystroke).

And at the end of the day, I can rest confidently knowing that all this just makes me a bigger tool. But, as I said from the start, I wanted to give you guys an idea of what banking is like, beyond the horror stories or the money driven panic panic or condescension for all things non-banking. And thus, behold the compulsive need to translate any large amount of data into something meaningful in Excel.

As a member of that crowd that doesn’t necessarily see sunlight, we try to weave what pleasure we can into our daily grind. This is not meant to be a complaint – I suspect all working stiffs do it – just an observation that some do it with “creative” lunches, still others try their hand at insider trading. I just happen to read a lot of ESPN.