Mod Note (Andy): This is the first of three book giveaway contests we're having in anticipation of the release of Kevin Roose's new book "Young Money" (out on Feb 18th).
He will also be doing a live Q&A on WSO on Wednesday Feb 19th from 3-5pm ET.
Hi WSO: I'm the author of "Young Money," a new book about junior Wall Street bankers. I'm a writer with New York magazine (formerly with The New York Times), and I've been an avid WSO reader for years. While reporting my book, I heard some horror stories about the banking life – including 120-hour weeks, math mistakes that resulted in huge, embarrassing losses, and all-night pitch book sessions fueled by Red Bull and Adderall. I'd love to hear yours. Submit your best I-Banking horror story and the four stories with the most silver bananas will win a signed copy of "Young Money." Then keep an eye out next Monday for the next book giveaway contest.
Rules: Entries must be submitted by Friday January 31st 11:59pm ET and the winners will be announced next Monday..
CLICK HERE to purchase a copy of the book.
More info:
YOUNG MONEY
Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money-- as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers.
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I once had to stay in the office past 6pm.
Can Moritz Erhardt submit posthumously?
Looking forward to reading (and reviewing!) your book, good sir!
Not even from wall street, but I'll throw this one in there...
2nd day on the job for me, and we had a fire-drill. It was me and one senior analyst still in the office at 4am putting together pitch books to be driven to the airport and handed to the MD on his way out the next morning. I'm not sure if something was wrong with the Binder, or if I just hadn't figured it out yet, but somehow the metal spirals kept getting crunched so A.) books wouldn't turn properly, and B.) almost impossible to get apart to re-bind, and I wasn't going to deal with printing an entire 2nd set.
Without going into way too much detail on the various ways I tried to get the rings out unsuccessfully, I ended up pulling the rings apart (15 or so books) by hand, and by the 10th book it had torn up my fingers to the point I was having to be careful to not get blood on the books.
Had a surprisingly relaxed stint since that one night, but nothing like an all-nighter that leads to bloodshed on the 2nd night to terrify you for what's to come. Be thankful if you have a presentation team...
Reminds me of a time I got a paper cut and didn't realize it until after I was done binding. I had to flip through ~10 thick books to make sure there was no blood. I had to replace a ton of pages.
No offer.
sounds like we are doing your work (telling all our stories so that you can do a second volume of your next book) so not keen on sharing...good luck though
Somebody put $500,000 in my bank account by mistake. I was horrified that they caught their error and took it back out 3 hrs later. I got the bank statement to prove it!
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First day of my SA position last summer when I met the SVP I would be working for, he said to we'd walk and talk. I put my stuff down in his office and we started walking, went down the elevator and down the front door. We ended up walking to Starbucks. He ordered some breakfast stuff, put his Starbucks card on the counter and started talking to someone he knew. They charged it and then it was my turn. I ordered then searched through my jacket and realized I had left my wallet in his office. The line was growing long behind me and they had already bagged up my stuff. I had to interrupt this SVP and ask if he wouldn't mind paying for me since I left my stuff upstairs.
In hindsight it probably wasn't a huge deal, but as a first day SA in a big city, I was mortified.
TL;DR – A summer analyst, located at a satellite office where my deal was, did a printing favor for me. However, he committed a massive printing error in the management presentations that were given by our client to a prospective buyer.
Story below:
I was on a deal that was located in SF and we were in the middle of management presentations (“MPs”). During a MP, the seller (our client) gives a presentation to various interested buyers who have already submitted a first round bid determining their initial valuation of the business. We had eight presentations scheduled across two weeks. We had gone through hundreds of iterations for this MP deck after having gone through hundreds of iterations for the CIM (the document that is released prior to the MP) as the process kept getting delayed, the company was shitty, the team at my IB had slave drivers on it, and the management of the company was incompetent. It was the perfect storm of shit. This deal had ruined my Thanksgiving, Christmas, and entire new year up to this point in June (Aside from xmas week, there were only three weeks between Halloween and Memorial day where I worked less than 100 hours).
Once we finalized the MP, we FedExed a giant box of bound copies that would be used the next two weeks for presentations. At least we hoped that was the case. After the first MP, The director on the deal wanted to make some “minor” changes to our already finalized deck. He left a voicemail at 8pm ET. Not giving a shit about logistics, he essentially needed me to get 15 presentations bound and across the country for an 8am PT meeting the next morning when the FedEx deadline had passed.
Fortunately we had an office in SF, so I called an analyst I trained with and told him my situation and asked if he could do me a favor and bind these decks and deliver them to the director in his hotel before the MP tomorrow morning. Dodging mindless work but honoring our friendship, he staffed a summer analyst on the task who was two weeks into the job. After I finished the edits, I sent the deck to the summer analyst in PPT (we had to print PPT vs PDF). He printed, bound, and delivered the decks. All is well…Right?
Wrong. The deck had MS Office objects pasted in it, and the SF SA had access to the drive my Excel support was located on. When MS PPT opens with MS Office objects it prompts you as to whether or not you want to refresh these charts. You learn day 1 to hit “No.” He hit “Yes.” This somehow fucked up formatting on charts on numerous pages of the presentation. Being new to the job, he didn’t have the coveted “attention to detail” skills and didn't flip through the book once it was printed. He just printed, bound, handed off, and went home.
The next day my associate got a call during the middle of the presentation from the director, screaming at him for “ruining any chance we had with [potential buyer being presented to].” The associate immediately threw me under the bus (after not having done shit once we got the changes) and said I must have “taken a shortcut” by getting the SF SA to do this rather than dealing with FedEx Kinkos. Fortunately, another analyst overheard this call and alerted me of the income shit storm, which gave me time to figure out a plan.
I ignored three consecutive calls from my director on my work phone (he fortunately didn't have my blackberry number) and panicked as I kept thinking of ways to cover my ass.
One thing I knew about my IB was that our IT was terrible. We had been experiencing so many issues that everyone across all ranks knew IT was a liability. Knowing my director didn’t know shit about IT, I crafted a story that these PPT chart issues had apparently happened frequently in outer offices and the Summer Analyst clearly wasn’t aware of them. I threw in a bunch of jargon about what changes were happening with IT and how that likely caused this issue as everything I did was flawless.
The director LOVED my excuse because his iPad wasn’t connecting to wifi at the client’s HQ and that issue must have been ITs fault as well. Sure enough, he flipped a shit at the CIO, I got away with this error, the deal closed four painful months later, and the SF SA received no blame and received an offer, which he leveraged to work at another IB. Also, the worthless associate who threw me under the bus was exposed as being an asshole in his 1-year review and was fired. God bless America.
You lucked out on this one... To be honest, the chain of command on this thing indicates a bit of a leadership problem, from Director on down to SA. Your Associate should have been more hands on in making sure that logistics were handled to the letter, especially given this was a management pres. I've been in that situation before, and ultimate delivery of the books is still your responsibility even though the Summer Analyst might have made the error. Expecting an SA who has been on the job for 2 weeks to print a foreign document, bind, flip, and deliver with absolutely no errors is a huge leap of faith, and the fact that you weren't holding his hand making sure that he flipped the books, that there were no changes to the pages, etc. was the oversight here. I totally get it, I've made the shortcut myself and luckily didn't get burned on it, but I knew the risk I was taking. In these situations, you have to hold their hand even if it means that you get less sleep than they do to ensure delivery. That's why you always wait to get the email from your MD/Director saying they received the books before they take off for the airport, because if they never get the books, the past days/weeks/months worth of work were all a waste of time and they are not going to accept that "it was the driver's fault" or whatever. I've literally been in this situation before, and I had to point to the phone calls I made to the driver and the email I sent to the transportation group flipping out and demanding heads roll for the mishap to absolve me of guilt in the situation. Even given that, the MD will likely still hold a grudge and think it was your fault for using a moronic driver, even though you have no control over these things.
All that being said, this is the first semblance of a horror story on this thread and props to you for thinking quickly on your feet and throwing IT under the bus. If I've learned anything from working in finance, it's that even though it's really messed up, at some point there will come a time when a pound of flesh is required. You can choose to be a martyr, you can choose to be an executioner, and then sometimes if you are lucky, you can just deflect a few non-fatal whip lashes to people around you so that everyone survives unscathed. Sounds like you handled this one about as well as you could have!
+1
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