Inside Information Brings Relief

We are all privy to inside information throughout our lives. The most high profile and frowned upon (read: illegal) relates to trading. Let me just say that everybody knows it goes on all the time in the City still, but is indefensible as what is often forgotten is that there is a victim on the other side of all those trades. However most inside information is harmless, and can be obtained by pure random chance - or capitalising on a situation with some covert research.

Given the importance of the impending cull, I have been naturally keen to confirm that my neck is not going to be on the block when the big day comes. It makes a few spending decisions such as my Spring holiday that bit easier to decide - will it by Cyprus or Great Yarmouth?

Whenever I am the last one in the office, which is a frequent occurrence at present even when not that busy (now is a time to be 'seen', which is bullshit I know, but is the way it works), I often take a moment to go around and turn off some people's monitors. I have a strong green streak within me that hates to see energy wasted, even when I am not paying for it.

To my surprise, when I glanced into my Boss' office last night, he had clearly left for the day, but had left his PC on and completely unlocked. What would you do? Perhaps you would feel an ethical dilemma - wanting to respect privacy and not take advantage. To do unto others as they would do to you.

I on the other hand had no such conflict, given that my Boss probably browses our mails, and would stab any of us in the back in a second to save his own well-endowed behind.

So after moving the mouse to ensure his PC did not auto-lock, I quietly went back to my desk for another 15mins to ensure there was no return. I then scouted around the office to confirm nobody important was still around. After that, I completed a highly efficient turnover of his office and mailbox that would have made a professional burglar proud. Let me add I did not look for or read anything personal - none of my business and frankly I have no interest in his family life. There was no wasting time on anything other than a search for those small items of interest.

It took all of about 30 seconds to open his various folder trees and locate the Budget --> Resourcing --> 2009 folder that was most of interest. There was nothing too obvious apart from a locked spreadsheet attached to one mail - a quick search in other mails in the folder revealed the password. So within a minute, to my surprise I had come across a breakdown of what my entire team earned in 2008 (base and bonus), along with base for 2009.

That only made me feel better because I am amazed how little some of them are earning. If ever you needed proof that a strategic move or two throughout your early career - along with renegotiation on the way - pays better than serving your time at the same bank, then I have it. Put it this way, I won't be complaining too much going forwards. What it did *not* do was answer the more important question: so besides taking a print out to browse for my own amusement on the Tube home, I closed that and sifted his folders. Nothing in there I could see of relevance either, and then I found his notebook under some papers on the desk.

Sure enough a number of pages back from the most recent was a header scrawled 'Resource Review'. Here I could see the Boss had listed the entire team's names (except his own, naturally) with a couple of comments. These seemed to be justification (or otherwise) for keeping each of us - perhaps during a roundtable session with other Desk managers to discuss headcount reductions, who knows? Next to mine were the words "business critical work, high experience", which sounded nicely like a justification. Others had similar comments, and by contrast several others who were in my own 'bottom 5' assessment had comments such as "low experience, low impact", "project coming to end", "issues working with xxxx".

It felt rather like a conspiracy reading through those notes, but I am 90% sure I found what I was looking for. It was further confirmed when I noticed a black line next to the left of two of the names. That would tie in with my view of the percentage reduction required for the cull but he might have been idly doodling I suppose.

One is a nice chap who has just joined in January to backfill a voluntary leaver - for me he was only taken on to keep up our numbers and so is prime cannon fodder. The other was the junior trader who has just quit under those somewhat mysterious circumstances. I have also confirmed the date of the cull through a source, but am not going into any details.

Anyway, suffice to say that I am feeling about as relaxed as anybody in the firm can be right now, knowing not only that I am almost certainly safe (this time), but seem to be doing relatively well on the cash front compared to most of my colleagues. Disgraceful I know, I'll down an extra shot of Ruski tonight with my Hail Mary's.

From Ruski With Love

I had a night out with some colleagues at the bank last week who were over from Moscow, and opted to take them to an excellent Russian restaurant over in Chelsea called Nikita's. It's rather like taking an American to the Texas Embassy Cantina I suppose, but I couldn't resist getting their opinion on London's alleged best for Russian cuisine. Sadly none of this is on expenses anymore - a tragic sign of the times.

Actually we had an excellent evening, and I was introduced to their nectar of choice - a fantastic vodka called 'Ruski Standard Platinum' (aka 'Russian Standard' over here). Apart from eating the finest beef stroganoff I have ever tasted, on the recommendation that "it will make it easier for you in the morning" (presumably because it is such a heavy, rich dish), we polished off two full 75clr bottles of Ruski between the four of us, and it took restraint not to order a third. [note: I have just ordered 4 bottles - a couple as gifts I might add]
To my surprise I not only slept fine, but woke up without the slightest hint of a hangover. This could be my new tipple of choice now that I'm getting a bit too old for beer. Let's face it, lager in particular is devil's piss by comparison to fine wine and spirits, and with the added bonus that it wakes you up throughout the night to continually empty your bladder.

As usual, once we had got through the first bottle, we moved away from tedious work discussions such as the Desk performance (bad), and rumours about job cuts (very bad, for an emerging market heavily reliant on commodities for revenue), and onto the requisite exchange of office stories that can only ever be passed on verbally. On the subject of job cuts, it has already occurred to me that I cannot refer to any details around the timing of the impending cull, because it will be too indicative of where I work. As such I shall likely write some entries at the time but not publish them until some time afterwards.

The best story of the night for me was finding out that one of the senior traders I know on the Moscow desk, whom we call Shriek due to her piercing voice, has a husband known in the office for his odd behaviour that verges on psychosis. He apparently calls Shriek at the office 30 times a day, and it has got to the extent that her team has learned his number and filters it out where possible.

It is presumably jealousy, as Shriek's psycho husband even went so far as accusing her of having an affair with one of my colleagues (at Nikita's with me that evening). Shriek's husband had 'proof' - namely that my colleague's wife "told him of the affair". Since both Shriek and my colleague knew this was utter fantasy, rather than her assuming she had a husband who was bonkers, she decided it was a plot by my colleague to ruin her marriage - and aggressively confronted him in the office.

It ended up escalating until even the regional head MD got involved.. before being hastily covered up. From what I hear, they are now quietly compiling a dossier on Shriek for a range of her own odd activity. This one will doubtless be tucked away in her HR file for use at an appropriate time. Like a round of job cuts for example.