Job Drama

There was drama at work today.

I was tired from sleep deprivation, again. Sunday night I stayed behind to help with the cleanup. I am not sure why. I mean, the person who organizes the milonga, the person who asked me to help, is the French girl's guy. I prefer to never talk to him again, but then at the same time, I couldn't say no. It wasn't about saving $12 on the entrance fee that he waived in exchange for my help. He knows I can afford it. In a way, I understood that he wanted to connect with me by offering this interchange. That, perhaps, above all, was the reason I couldn't refuse.

Of course, taking the subway very likely would have brought me home the same time anyway.

Anyway, that's not the drama. There was no drama with him. The drama started when I couldn't sit still in my chair without deliberately shaking my body in a pathetic attempt to keep myself awake. But by 9:30, I couldn't do it anymore. So I went to the bathroom, sat in the corner over a toilet seat sanitary cover, and took a nap. It was probably a 15-minute nap. I even dreamed. That was how tired I was.

The bank has suffered the second worst loss of any financial institution this first half of the year. The CEO last week announced the firm would have to cut 2,000 jobs. That was the context, the pretext, to what happened next.

I woke up from my dream and went back down to my office. I noticed that the Korean guy, my Asian boy in the little group, wasn't there. He is usually sitting there; he doesn't go around taking breaks, sleeping in the bathroom, or whatever else his Asian buddy does. That's not to say he's diligent. He is one of those people who care about appearance, the appearance of working hard, the appearance of a good worker. But he complains a lot about his work, about the manager of the group (though like me he doesn't report to him directly). He left on Friday earlier than everyone else and didn't feel too weird about it, as long as the manager was not there. But more to the point, he isn't very good at what he is expected to do. He has no training in programming, and he wastes a lot of our supervisor's time in trying to learn what he needs. (He sometimes wastes mine.) I have seen his code and it's terrible. No structure, no foresight. It's true that even our supervisor has written many scripts that are hacked together to get a job done. But still, they were done with certain purpose, calculation, whereas this guy's code shows aimless wandering and random shots until something worked.

He wasn't there, and I didn't think more about it. Two seconds after I sat down, I heard our manager speak. He wanted us to have a quick team meeting. As you can guess by now the purpose of the meeting was to say that the guy was let go. It was very abrupt. He and I were working just an hour ago, getting something fixed. Now he vanished, from the firm, and likely from my life. Probably while I was dreaming, someone from human resources came up and escorted him down, the same way they escorted that woman down, the one who supposedly sent to her personal email address source code she had done for the firm. No one saw it, apparently, because everyone was surprised. The group was quiet. No one knew what to say.

That was just half of the agenda. The other half I already knew last week. MY own supervisor had decided to accept a job offer at another group in the firm. He sent me and the Asian guy an email last week. The latter was very depressed at the news. He didn't want to work directly for our manager anymore. He thought about leaving the group. Well, now he got his wish. Unless he wanted to stay with the firm in another group. So the subgroup I had joined in January now has just one person: me.

I had thought about the possibility that one day I would have to take over all the responsibilities of the entire group. It was scary. I was hoping it wouldn't happen. I was hoping I would be in the group, intact, until next year when I sell my house and get a job in New York City. Already, the plan is shaking in its foundations. I didn't think the group would break up or shrink so soon.

Yes, I should be grateful that I still have a job.

Yes, I should be grateful I have a lot to do now. This morning, in my desperate struggle against sleep-deprivation, I was complaining quietly that there wasn't any work for me to do. If I had work I wouldn't be shaking my knees to keep myself awake the way people shake themselves to keep themselves warm in winter. Now I got my wish: I have three times the work.

Yes, I should be grateful that not only do I still have a job, but also I am not so easily fired. I am the only one in the subgroup, an entity that is not easily dispensable. One of the the supervisor's buddy, the one I have mentioned sometimes that complains a lot with him about his life and career, told me I should now ask for a raise. Sounds reasonable since I am doing three people's job now. But not yet. I need to prove myself for a month or so. I need to get a raise before I go to the next job. The next job will ask me what I make now.

Yes, there is a lot to be grateful for. I probably won't have to do the thing I dread the most about working here: "late night". That's when one of us goes home earlier just to stay online all night waiting for complaints from our users. Sometimes the phone might ring at 3 in the morning. That would seriously impinge on my tango life, my NYC life. Now that I have so much responsibility, it's unlikely they will make me do late night, even though the Asian guy was one of the people doing late night.

But I am concerned. I am afraid this will take a huge toll, even without late night, on my NYC life. I might not be able to leave work at 6PM as I usually do. That would affect kung fu, that would affect some tango, and whatever else I need to do. Forget about dating. I would need the weekend to sleep, alone.

And the pressure will be high. I have no backup. I don't know how I will take vacation when I am the only player. I joined this group partly because I wanted to be in a team, not only for backup reasons, but also to learn. Now I am back to being alone, just like at Yale, or even before, at NYU Medical. I am not here to learn more programming, of course. I have in these seven months learned nearly everything I need to learn about programming for this job. I need to learn more finance. And the two people who were in this group never really taught me any finance (especially not the Asian guy). I hope the tripling of responsibilities doesn't impede my learning finance.

So we left the meeting glum and quiet. Later the manager came to me and briefly confirmed that I would be sailing the ship alone, captain, skipper, passenger, and everything else. (That's my metaphor; don't expect people in finance to know poetry.) I responded with great and sincere enthusiasm. I have been becoming apprehensive that I would start to get bored because the projects weren't challenging enough. Now I got what I wished for.

I am also apprehensive about working directly with the manager. Unlike my supervisor, he is a real manager, who has rules and expect rigid adherence to them. He is fair, I have said in one of the blog. I admire him for being fair but stern. I don't know how compatible my work style will be with his management style. The main reason my supervisor is transferring to another group is that his work style doesn't chime with the rules of the larger group. He believes programmers should be given more leeway even at the risk of damaging important data, an attitude, I think a bank in general does not embrace. I hope he finds what the new environment at the same firm more appealing. But I am here. I am not going anywhere. I have to take over everything. Not only that, I have to interact with more people, both people who use our (or now my) products, but also vendors with whom I do business. It's scary. I am not sure if I can do it. I am not sure if I want to do it. I came here to work, and the money is a secondary reason, the work itself is a secondary reason; the primary reason is to learn finance, to learn the ropes of working in finance. I am learning, however, that much of what we do everything is the same as what you expect in any big corporation: red tape, small details. I never really understood why so many jobs require a finance background when as a programmer you don't think about finance so much. Perhaps I am not in the kind of programming job I should be in.

None of this really matters now. For the next few weeks I have to figure out how to do three people's job in the hours I want to work in. The drama shook me a little I realized I am living in the news. My firm is shedding 2,000 jobs. The stock market is diving, especially against the banking industry. The economy is falling into a second dip of recession. And for the first time, the US government loses its proud status of a AAA rating on its bonds. And this weekend I am going dancing in Baltimore. Something is a little surreal.

I will talk about my weekend another time. I had a good weekend. I experienced human stupidity at the Metropolitan when I witnessed long lines of human beings standing for over five hours to see McQueen's fashion among a sea of people most of whom are as ignorance of fashion as I am. I spent a nice evening with a pianist who told told me a bit of her story. I tried not to make her say too many deep things. I still think, based on my experience with the French girl, that when a girl starts to feel she's in a psychiatrist's sofa with me, she is unlikely to be making out with me in it. It's horrible conclusions because I always want to connect with someone deep. But now I have to be careful. I got her chocolate. She liked it. I was happy, to enjoy the moment, trying not to think about what would happen next. My weekend, more details later.