Things You Hear on Trains

Your faithful reporter's got a lot of time to kill on his train trip from Manhattan to Washington, DC, and not a lot of burning ambition to tackle these TPS reports, so the Man's loss is your gain. Free-flowing freshly-pressed wine from these mindgrapes follows in the form of a story I couldn't help overhearing from the reasonably loud but generally likable chap who sat in the row in front of me from New York to Philly. I assume stuff like this happens to TR all the time during his commute into the maw of the financial beast, but the DC to NYC commute is still fresh and new to me.

None of these are our guy

The guy in question is a financier-type roughly my age. Given his garb and bearded countenance and a handful of context clues dropped into conversation, he parlayed his first 20 years on Wall Street into his own gig and gets to run other people's money in flip flops and cargo shorts. Like a socially adept Michael Burry. Apparently our hero randomly bumped into a former fraternity brother (Columbia, Class of mid-90-something - I think I heard a Marcellus Wiley namedrop in there somewhere, too) who was traveling for work with a colleague. The fraternity brother convinced flip flop financier to tell the story of his mid-90s interview with Salomon Brothers - the same fixed equities desk made famous by Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.

Seems that our guy had been through nearly a dozen rounds of interviews when the HR Department called him back for one final discussion. He was told that if this last guy liked him, then he had the job. So he shows up at 7:30 am and sits down with a middle-aged exec. After an exchange of pleasantries, the Salomon guy tells the kid that everyone likes him, but the final call is his. He then asks what position our young candidate plays on the Columbia baseball team. "I'm a pitcher," he replies.

After which the Salomon gatekeeper, who's probably pulling down $20m a year or so in that go-go era (check my math, TR), but thinks nothing of fucking with a college kid, opens his desk drawer and pulls out a baseball-sized stress ball. He points across the trading desk to a water fountain on the other side of the room. "If you can hit the middle of the water fountain with that ball, the job is yours. If not, you can go fuck yourself."

It's early, our guy is nervous, and there's a whole floor of traders watching. And he's not entirely sure what's happening. But he does his best, winds up, and lets fly. The ball starts out on a true path, but as those flimsy things do, spins off target and rises high and away, just nicking the upper corner of the fountain.

"Go fuck yourself," says the bondsman.

And so our hero does, leaving the building never to hear from Salomon again.

Things worked out okay for him, judging from many of the other things he had to say, so it's now just a funny story. And a whole lot went to hell for Salomon Brothers not long after this incident, so we can only hope bad things happened to the interviewer, though it's just as likely that he landed on his feet and tortured other young masters of the universe. Hell, maybe TR works for him.