The Bad Old Days at Merrill Lynch

我不够老了，可以拥有个人所知的消息。美林，林奇，皮尔斯，芬纳或史密斯，但我确实与曾经忘记了他们的名字的公司进行了简短的调情。

The recent Bank of Americarebranding announcementcame as no surprise to me — in my checkered past I was acquired by the mouthful of a firm known 10 years ago as Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Two years later, the “Smith Barney,” hanging onto its acquiring firm like an ugly barnacle, was expunged. So I guess one question is, why did BofA wait so long to get rid of the ML?

But I digress.

I came to Merrill Lynch through the back door the summer between my first and second years of business school. I’d frittered away the first six weeks of the break in swampy Washington, D.C. on a fellowship at Georgetown studying the relationship between government, business, and public policy. Sounds prestigious, right? It was the perfect program for clueless losers like me who didn’t realize until it was too late that they should have been hustling from Day Minus One of B-school for a summer internship. When I showed up in New York City on Bastille Day, jobless and penniless, my sister generously took me in.

That Monday I applied for work though a temp agency. The next day, I reported to One Liberty Plaza to work as a ‘sales assistant’ in the bond funds department at Merrill Lynch.

With one year of business school under my belt, I had a vague idea of what a bond was, even though Liar’s Poker wasn’t yet a twinkle in Michael Lewis’s eye. (I beat him, technically speaking, to Wall Street by about 15 days.) I might have been able to calculate the price of a bond, if pressed, or explain the difference between duration and convexity, but those skills weren’t necessary. My temp job was not the cushy internship that half a dozen of my classmates were enjoying on the floors above and below where I was stationed — as well as at Windows on the World and in boxes at Shea Stadium. They were earning an astonishing 600 dollars a week to my $3.35 an hour.

In the trenches, I was learning a whole lot of nothing: I failed to find any fun in bond funds. I answered phones and watched weather systems roll in from New Jersey. The managing director I worked under was referred to by everyone in the department as the “Father of the Bond Fund.” He was in his mid-60s, straight out of central casting, and had a girlfriend, a nurse named Pippa, who would sashay across the trading floor into his wood-paneled office for midday closed-door visits. He would holler into the squawk box dictates like, “Ashley, get your pretty ass in here NOW.” Ashley got called in a lot that way.

This managing director had a secret, which he shared with me early in my tenure: He had no idea how to use a computer. He was terrified to turn the monitor on in his office, fearing he’d bring down the entire trading system if he hit a wrong key. He asked if I would come into his office every morning to turn the computer on, and then turn it off at the end of the day. I said yes. He also asked if I would give him private lessons on the setup Merrill Lynch had installed in his Park Avenue apartment. I said no.

One other incident sticks in my mind. On a hot day in late August, the Bond Fund Daddy called me into his office to ask a “special favor.” My mind reeled with the possibilities. He pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a dollar. He wanted me to go to a newsstand and buy him a lottery ticket for the midweek New York State Lotto drawing. The prize had swollen to a record $30 million and he wanted a piece of the action. Yes, I did this for him, standing in line for nearly two hours. No, he did not win.

在那个夏天之后，我发誓我永远不会在Merrill Lynch工作，或者在华尔街上为此而工作。我说，我也不会投资Merrill Lynch。这些原来是坚强的承诺保持。几年后，我实际上对公司进行了小，令人愉快的写作作业，如前所述，旋转（和通过）花旗史密斯巴尼/摩根斯坦利史密斯巴尼旋转门旋转。2005年，我开了一封经纪公司的一封信，我将我的Paltry Fortune停在了发现它被收购...美林林奇。没有逃离它。直到当然，现在。