about anything. It may seem like a tough group to crack, but once you earn their respect and are accepted, there’s no better group of people to work with.”
Yeah, especially if they smack me on the ass.
“Other than that, keep your head down, work hard, and stay out of the way. Use your brain, and you’ll be fine. Are we clear?” He finally took his feet off the desk and turned his gaze on me.
“Yes, Chick. We’re clear.”
“One more thing. I’m not your father, and I really don’t give a fuck what you do with your personal life, but I don’t encourage interoffice relationships. You’re a good-looking girl, and it won’t surprise me if half the floor hits on you, but I expect you to be smart. I do not expect you to date anyone on this floor, certainly not anyone on my desk. The last thing I need is a weepy employee fucking up right and left because she’s upset that someone here didn’t return a phone call. Capiche? Let’s go.”
Chick stood without giving me a chance to answer. I had never in my life met anyone who seemed so nice and so completely insane at the same time.
We walked out onto the floor, a giant room shaped like a horseshoe with enormous hermetically sealed windows and ceilings high enough to accommodate a circus tent. I wasn’t expecting the floor to look the way it did. Every time I’d gone to work with my father, I had never stepped foot on a trading floor. Bankers were kept separate from everyone else. They had inside information on mergers, stock offerings, and acquisitions and had to be segregated from the traders to ensure that inside information stayed classified. Banking floors were clean and tidy—all polished wood, plush carpets, and private offices. They even used a different elevator bank. The stories my dad had told me about my new work environment didn’t begin to do it justice. The difference between the Cromwell Pierce trading floor and the Sterling Price banking floor was staggering. This place looked like it was stuck in the ’70s. The walls had probably been white once upon a time, but they were now a dingy shade of cream. The Formica desks were chipped and stained, broken corners revealing the brown cork underneath. The fact that these desks were basically Generation One Cromwell was something I tried not to focus on; because if I thought about how many people had sneezed, coughed, eaten, and God knows what else all over them for the last forty years, I would have to come to work in a plastic jumpsuit wearing latex gloves.
I kept my eyes on the floor as I navigated the obstacle course of rows to our “desk” in the back corner of the room. I could feel the stares from the men as I walked by. The guys surveyed the length of my skirt and the fit of my sweater, just in case I had missed a button or, God forbid, had visible panty lines. It was something I’d have to get used to.
The energy in the room was palpable. People bellowed out numbers, screamed instructions to pick up phones, yelled just for the sake of yelling. The shouting made my ears buzz, and I didn’t know how anyone was able to understand anything above the chaos. There were at least four hundred people on the Cromwell Pierce fixed-income trading floor. Most of them were loud. Most of them were aggressive. Most of them relished the opportunity to mess with the new kids.
Most of them were male.
Chick suddenly threw his hand up in front of my head and intercepted a football that had missed its intended target. Unless of course, the target was me.
“Watch it, Smitty! Hitting the new girl in the face with a football on her first day will get you called to the principal’s office.”
I tried to find something to say to break the awkward silence, and the best I could come up with was, “You guys play football?”
“Sometimes we do. You don’t. You’ll be too busy learning to have time to play. Capiche?”
“Sure. I’m really excited to be here and I’m ready to work hard.”
“That’s good, Alex, because we don’t want you here any other way.”
A slight, pale man with red hair and an absurdly thin blond girl approached us. They stopped, and the guy nodded in my direction. His skin was translucent and his eyes so light they were almost clear. I was immediately reminded of the weakling on the high school football team who had to carry the equipment because he wasn’t big enough to actually play in the games. I had always assumed those scrawny kids bulked up later in life. I was wrong.
“Who’s this?” he asked, his voice almost robotic.
“Alex. My new kid,” Chick answered curtly.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi!” The blond stick figure gushed, as she threw herself on me. “Oh, this is great! I’ll have a friend now! There aren’t a lot of girls to talk to in this place!” she said as she hugged me.
The redheaded leprechaun surveyed me and said, “Chick, yours is cute, but mine is better.” He snorted as he walked away, the girl trotting off quickly behind him. I wondered if he took the train to work, or if he just slid down a rainbow into the lobby.
I held my breath. Chick started walking again and said, “That was Keith Georgalis, more commonly known on the floor as Darth Vader. He’s a prick. He runs the high-yield desk. His sidekick is his analyst, Hannah. She’s a freaking moron, but she’s a treat to look at so we keep her. She doesn’t work for me, so what do I care? If you make even half the mistakes that idiot has made, I’ll bounce you out on your ass so fast your head will spin.”
Before I could say a word Chick stopped in front of a group of people and waved his arm in a sweeping motion as he proudly announced, “This is the desk.”
A “desk” was the Wall Street term for the team of people who worked in a specific product area. My desk, the government bond sales desk, was composed of forty people sitting in three long rows like diner counters—covered with papers, phones, and flat screen monitors. Each person sat in an aerodynamic chair, his specific workspace segregated from the person sitting next to him only by a thin black line of grout, the same way tiles are connected on a bathroom floor. The workstations were so close together that if you extended both your arms you would touch your neighbors. The concept of “personal space” didn’t seem to exist here, and I realized that if I ended up sitting next to an asshole—or worse, in between two—my days were going to be miserable.
I stared at the wall of computer monitors looming in front of everyone. Every single employee on the floor had at least three monitors at his workstation. Some traders had as many as six. In order to view them all, some were elevated above others on stacked reams of printer paper. It was hard to believe that there was enough information to look at on a daily basis to warrant multiple computer monitors, and I quickly began to worry that I wasn’t going to be able to follow everything the way the other guys could. At the time I didn’t realize that someone could sit directly behind you and you could be so busy you’d go months without ever actually speaking to that person, or even know his name. You could. I would.
I was nervous, adrenaline making me so jittery it was hard to stand still. I scanned the men sitting in the rows. They were all on their phones, some of them with their feet up, mindlessly tossing small rubber balls into the air while they spoke. The phones rang incessantly, multicolored lights blinking on an enormous switchboard. The desk was covered with coffee cups, soda cans, bottles of water, and newspapers. The place smelled like the short-order cook station at a diner—a combination of grease, sweat, strong coffee, and burned bacon. I gave a quick glance around and saw a huge box filled with bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches lying on the floor. As I scanned the group, I noticed the one other woman on the desk. I made a mental note to introduce myself to her sooner rather than later.
Chick grabbed my shoulders and began to turn me in ten-degree clips as he pointed to other long counterlike rows filled with people conducting business. “Here’s a brief layout of the floor.” He spun me to the left and pointed to a square configuration in the corner of the room. “That’s the emerging markets desk. They sell bonds issued by developing countries. Brazil, Mexico, Chile. Most of Latin America.” He turned me another ten degrees so that I was facing the middle of the room. “Over to