"Somedays you are the pigeon, somedays you are the statue OR somedays you are the dog, most days you are the lamp-post."
Most of the time, in my job - I have resigned to being the statue/lamp-post. This feeling is accentuated when you receive comments for your presentation written on what suspiciously looks like tissue paper provided by your sun-tanned VP who returns from his vacation from Bora-Bora.
Or how about the time when you are told after grinding away on a presentation where everything is so urgent and you killed weekend after weekend on it that " hey guys, just FYI - these materials are actually not going to be opened during the meeting but is just for RESERVE" ! Reserve - this means that when the CFO comes running into the meeting to report an emergency that the corporate office is out of toilet paper, the ever willing to impress banker will graciously step in and whip out this glossy, elegantly bound presentation and say " Fear not, this is exactly why we bought this material as RESERVE" and will then proceed to offer you assistance in wiping up.
There are even more entertaining species in banks, the ones who refer to 8pm as " afternoon" and who say it still isn't late to get things done when its sunset - unless their body clock coincides with an owl or a vampire, this is NOT normal. Or even better - my poor tortured friend works for a lunatic who insists on sending emails on numerous occasions saying " Guys - I plan to be working all night, how about you?" . I can just picture this guy hunched over his computer popping pills after pills to keep himself awake, gleefully rubbing his hands together thinking " yes! another all-nighter - cannot wait - Models and Bottles - this is da life " except the only models he will get are the excel ones and the only bottles will be of redbull.
One may wonder if such a scathing indictment of bankers is really true and whether we as the supposedly intellectual creme de la creme of society sitting in these banks are actually just drones/minions who bend over on command. While you are lured into the job with promises of working on transformational, billion-dollar deals - the actual work that you do is infact very mundane.
Your MD's are indeed jet-setting executives with platinum cards and airline miles, however, this happens after you have invested a good 10 years in your career - until then, you should be reconciled to being a mere cog in the machinery (albeit well paid and with excellent formatting skills).
The rigor of being able to draft the right footnotes using font size 7 and consistently using numbers upto 1 decimal point is impressive alright, but hardly worth paying all that money to an MBA for!
Somebody once gave me an useful pointer " Consistency is better than Accuracy". Definitely, worth thinking about.
Most of the time, in my job - I have resigned to being the statue/lamp-post. This feeling is accentuated when you receive comments for your presentation written on what suspiciously looks like tissue paper provided by your sun-tanned VP who returns from his vacation from Bora-Bora.
Or how about the time when you are told after grinding away on a presentation where everything is so urgent and you killed weekend after weekend on it that " hey guys, just FYI - these materials are actually not going to be opened during the meeting but is just for RESERVE" ! Reserve - this means that when the CFO comes running into the meeting to report an emergency that the corporate office is out of toilet paper, the ever willing to impress banker will graciously step in and whip out this glossy, elegantly bound presentation and say " Fear not, this is exactly why we bought this material as RESERVE" and will then proceed to offer you assistance in wiping up.
There are even more entertaining species in banks, the ones who refer to 8pm as " afternoon" and who say it still isn't late to get things done when its sunset - unless their body clock coincides with an owl or a vampire, this is NOT normal. Or even better - my poor tortured friend works for a lunatic who insists on sending emails on numerous occasions saying " Guys - I plan to be working all night, how about you?" . I can just picture this guy hunched over his computer popping pills after pills to keep himself awake, gleefully rubbing his hands together thinking " yes! another all-nighter - cannot wait - Models and Bottles - this is da life " except the only models he will get are the excel ones and the only bottles will be of redbull.
One may wonder if such a scathing indictment of bankers is really true and whether we as the supposedly intellectual creme de la creme of society sitting in these banks are actually just drones/minions who bend over on command. While you are lured into the job with promises of working on transformational, billion-dollar deals - the actual work that you do is infact very mundane.
Your MD's are indeed jet-setting executives with platinum cards and airline miles, however, this happens after you have invested a good 10 years in your career - until then, you should be reconciled to being a mere cog in the machinery (albeit well paid and with excellent formatting skills).
The rigor of being able to draft the right footnotes using font size 7 and consistently using numbers upto 1 decimal point is impressive alright, but hardly worth paying all that money to an MBA for!
Somebody once gave me an useful pointer " Consistency is better than Accuracy". Definitely, worth thinking about.
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