New Week

Second week started today. Surprisingly, without having gone to sleep at 10:40, I still woke up at 6:40 without that torturing feeling I had felt the last two days of last week. I felt refreshed. But today I was going to do something different: catch an earlier train so I actually will get there by 8:30.

The good news is that I made it.

But barely because in the middle of what had started as an easy walk, I felt something warm up my butt. My heart sank. I shouldn't have put a cup of hot chai I had prepared right before leaving inside the computer backpack I was carrying. No. It can't be what I thought. Maybe there was a warm draft? Sometimes human beings want to believe in the impossible, the impossible good because the possible bad was too much to bear.

I opened the bag and to my dismay, though not astonishment, the cup of chai was half open and more than half empty. So much for the bag. But what about the computer? I took the computer out and it was wet. Although it was in a separate compartment, the whole bag was soaked through, enough to reach my pants, reach through it to warm my behind. I wasn't sure what I was upset about; there was just too much to count.

Obviously, if the computer dies, I am in big trouble. It's not even my computer.

Then my lunch, all gross.

And the bag needs some serious cleaning.

And my butt was all wet and when it dries it will be sticky and possibly stinky.

And now I had to stop in the middle of walk to the station that was farther than the other one I had gone to last week, thereby risking missing the train for which I had prepared the chai; if I didn't have to catch that train in the main station that's farther away, I would have enjoyed my chai at home.

Finally, there was also the frustration with myself. What was I thinking? I had done something similar once, not as stupid. I left a glass bottle of orange juice in the same compartment as an expensive camera (before digital cameras were available to mere humans), and since I didn't always make sure the bottle was tightly capped, well, you can imagine the rest. The camera wasn't mine either. And in the end, it was broken.

I had to run, no time to inspect the damage. I put the computer back in the soaked up interior (brilliant, really), and started running, but now with the 1/4 full cup of chai in my hand.

The thread of anger concerning the disappearance of 3/4 of chai is not to be discounted.

I made it to the train. I couldn't really think or read, and forget opening the computer to write my journal documenting the stupidity of the morning. I wondered if people who work for finance would make such stupid mistake. I can imagine something similar done on millions of dollars would be just a tat more embarrassing than what I had done. Maybe I wasn't cut out for the finance world.

That thought lingered throughout the day. I attended a two-hour orientation meeting for new-hires. I met other "colleagues", as we are called. We were told what sort of trouble we would get into, and there were examples galore of how many of these troubles were done without malice or stupidity on our end. So much money is at stake, so much potential to cheat and to bring economic ruins to the company, and even to society, that many many rules were in place. There is now actually a team in financial services firms that takes care of "operational risks", which are risks associated with how the company is run, not in the business models themselves. I sat there listening to all these rules, and I wondered how suitable I was in this world.

But part of the uncertainty is the limited knowledge I have of myself. Who was I? Many people in the room, and in the building, may not know who they were (who would on this planet?), but at least they knew who they were in finance. They have worked in the industry since leaving college. They knew by now that they fit in. I don't know if I do. Sometimes I really am obsessed with rules, with rigidity of structure that brings long term gains and minimizes uncertainty against a very uncertain world. But I don't know if that necessarily means I am compatible with the firm.

Today I actually worked on real programming, besides the two hours spent on being afraid of tripping on wires I didn't intend to trip. I was tired toward the end, as I would whenever I programmed for more than two hours. I stopped typing at some point, got up with my big plastic cup, walked past the messy computer bag that was sitting on a vent that might help dry it out, and walked toward the nearest water cooler. (They don't have water coolers, actually; but fancy machines to convert tap water into yummy water without the wait associated with charcoal filters.) And the 3-minute round trip back to the desk I remember what I used to do. The lazy me. The one that checked his email all the time. The one that could take a break from programming as soon as his eyes felt tired and his brain felt heated. I wondered, too, when I would stop thinking about the past, as if I missed it because, for sure, I knew, I didn't miss it. Even in the few moments I thought about the end of this journey that had only started a week ago, I would not regret it, and would not contemplate returning to academia. As I had said before, whether I like where I am now, I know for sure I didn't like where I was before. Not just the job, but the lifestyle that it allowed.

Still, I remembered the past. The not-so-distant past. And one thing I did like about it was the ability to look into a distance, from my living room, or, if the weather was good, while I was walking on the street for whatever reason. So for lunch I didn't eat at my desk, which isn't so common here, actually. But I didn't eat with my "colleagues" either. I had a late lunch, to avoid the line in front of the single microwave I found for the entire floor. And to be alone. Alone sitting down amidst the anonymity and look into the distance. Outside one of the sides of the dining hall is the "rooftop". It's not really a roof because we are still on the sixth floor; but it is an opening to the Skype where, I was told, people ate in the open when the weather was warm. There are trees planted on this rooftop. And beyond the trees are little houses of this little town. I sat there with my pasta with creamy vegetables. I tried to savor it, but I was distracted, not by anything in particular, but merely by my being there, in this big glass building.

I remembered my weekend. It was suddenly so far away. It was very different. I could actually appreciate its function as a break between two working weeks. I didn't do much besides resting, and cleaning, continuing with my objective of simplifying my life. The weekend had disappeared into near oblivion. And in its place, trees on a rooftop with little houses in the distance behind them. I thought about the colleague that was training me, and his golf buddy. They were the two people I mentioned earlier about having had operations. Today they were talking about money, not the firm's money, but their own money. About the housing collapse that was still affecting even them, the upper-middle-class, the ones who had worked more than a decade in the industry that was mainly responsible for the housing collapse. How ironic, they admitted. Now one was having his house foreclosed, the other had five mortgages to worry about. Each had family and children, and each looked for their "weekend" in golfing.

As I swallowed my last strands of spaghetti, still half-attempting to savor it, I wondered how people always made their lives so complicated. It is as if we yearn for a complicated life even if we declare the opposite. My butt was still slightly damp by the time I got up to return to my desk with my empty bowl and dirty fork. I wondered if I had made my morning complicated. I guess I now know not to put any liquid in a backpack, but I am pretty sure that is not the real lesson to be learned here.