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Career Resources
When I used to work commission I worked a huge sale and finished after 3 hours with a customer to find out I rang it up under someone else's commission code.
Never saw that bonus money
That's awful. They should have let you move it to your name
The company was a bunch of crooks and this was the first of many times that they swindled my money. When I left I never looked back at that place. I feel bad for all the employees honestly.
Oh wow, well on the hindsight, you made someones day
For me the worst fail was telling my boss I would handle a lot of the banking info while he was gone and he gave me the password. Of course the day I was supposed to cover him I forgot the notebook with the passwords in it and he was on a plane for 12 hours. I ended up locking us out of our bank and getting back in was a huge and humiliating process.
On the bright side someone above my boss made the same mistake 2 weeks later so everyone forgot that I did it.
That sounds terrible lol but at least someone else made the same mistake. No one will remember it even happened to you or care after a while
It was terrible. I will never make that same mistake again. It happened a few years ago and I still cringe
I had a funny situation like this, last day of the quarter in an outside sales role, always had us running around collecting checks to get everything in to make sure we hit bonus metrics. My boss calls me in a panic and hes like "(other saleperson) couldn't remember his password and got locked out of the banking app, he's got a $300K check to cash where the fuck are you!?!?!?"
I say "I'm like 4 hours away at the beach"
They were already driving to my city to meet me and get me to deposit the check and my boss starts cursing and screaming at me telling me what a fucking asshole and r-tard I am, I calmly said "guys, take a breath, you're not thinking straight."
More cursing and yelling, then I said "turn your car around, I'm going to text you my log in information dumbass."
Was a bad ass job, lots of autonomy and I could get away with that kind of thing because I was a bit of a rain maker
ordered a salad for seamless.. what a waste of an order
I can only imagine how hard the seamless delivery person laughed
not as hard as me hahaa
Im dead lolol
learned that lesson myself haha
Can someone explain why this is a dumb move please
4 ounces of shit is too much shit.
The deleted answer was how after having earned an internship, I did not see any value the company was bringing to client; forget that, I did not see any value I was bringing to the company. Naive? Definitely. A little late for the analysis? 100%.
I texted the HR guy, I wouldn't be able to continue after the month is over. The month still had two days remaining. The very next morning of the text, I went to the office and was fired.
Moral of the story: Be careful before you give your heart and brains to an industry. And don't text the HR guy you won't be coming after the month is over.
Looking back i wish i was fired from my internships, because those were the biggest waste of time and calories in my life. I mean the sheer amount of pointless work and paper wasted, it sucked, hard.
In retrospect, I did pick up some very valuable skills like writing emails, telling people there's nothing I can do about it because my boss is the one calling the shots, the subtle art of BSing and eventually turning to Mr Google for all the 'orientation' I needed.
I am sure there are more valuable internship experiences out there; at least the ones which don't end up in a response to office failure stories.
I totally agree. I have had constructive ones and others that are just jobs that they don't want to pay people for so they teach you nothing and expect you to sleep eat and breathe the job
Some internships just want to take advantage and have people waste their time. It sucks but it happens a lot. Probably a blessing in disguise!!!
Very true. On the brighter side, I did get a chance to take a swing at it; only to realize I loathed the job. Would've been in deeper shit had I taken a full time gig and realized the same.
The only thing worse than the pennies they paid, was getting to know how pointless everything was. I got scared when I saw my supervisor, who was a decade ahead of me in the same business, was not doing things any differently than I was.
As a first year analyst about 2 months into the job I had my first management presentation. The first meeting was scheduled much sooner than expected so obviously this was a fire drill. The night before the meeting I was up pretty much all night, finishing edits and binding the books until about 4am (worked at a MM bank and had to actually print/bind myself). My MD was going to pick me up around 6am to make the 2.5 hr drive to the meeting. We get there, stop to get breakfast and he asks to see one of the books to prep....I forgot all 20 of the books I spent the last week straight putting together. He was pissed, but the blank / confused / stupid look on my face somewhat humored him. Luckily we were somehow able to have a FedEx print shop print and bind them right in time for the meeting -- though it was extremely expensive. Not the end of the world but a pretty stupid mistake. I now triple check for the materials every time I go to a meeting.
Something similar to that has happened to me many times. I always do that same and make sure to triple check I have everything I need
Mis marked a model and brought 3% off a stock before the ceo personally called to tear our eyes out
As in you published a busted model in ER?
Made an error in my analysis that discounted the value of the U.S. solar energy company by $400 million
First week, big company, still didn't know anyone's names (I'm bad with names). Associate invites me to a meeting in a specified room. I see him in a different meeting room and make eye contact and we give each other an understanding nod as if to say "ah, I get that you have another meeting that conflicts, we'll circle back later". I walk into the meeting room I got invited to and the Market Data team is in there talking about who knows what. Everyone is looking at me expectingly so I'm like, oh, cool, they want to meet the new guy.
Introduce myself confidently and walk around and shake hands. Take my place at the table and everyone looks at me like "what the fuck" and kind of awkwardly ask a few questions about what team I'm on and etc then resume. I have no idea why I'm here but am happy they're taking an interest in me and asking me about my background because I don't mind a good spiel/spotlight. Meeting is running way over the 30 minutes of allotted time.
See my associate walk by the adjacent kitchen to grab a drink and he looks at me curiously. Finally I get it. Check my email on my laptop and realize our meeting room got changed. I showed up to the Market Data team's QPM meeting uninvited and completely interrupted them and made an ass out of myself.
They weren't asking what team I'm on because they were interested, they were trying to ask me why the fuck I was there. Never went to that side of the office again. To make it more awkward the entire meeting I was furiously typing up notes about the Market Data teams budget to impress my associate by taking notes of the meeting he couldn't make. They were probably like, "why is this weirdo furiously typing down everything we say?"
I am so dead hahahah. To humor you I went out for lunch once and I guess I left sauce on my cheek bc I only had 10 minutes to eat and no napkin and then I greet a guest and my CEO and they were all staring at me like a weirdo. I noticed people whispering that day so I was already pissed off and I go in the bathroom and see a big ass orange circle on my cheek ALL DAY. I looked like a hobo.
"Please find as attached and let me know your thoughts"
nothing attached...
This... Was your biggest fuck up???
How would that be a fail?
I'm pretty sure this has happened to everyone. Once I was supposed to send someone a rejected terms sheet but I accidentally attached their shitty Experian. I had to follow it with an apology it was terrible.
First deal was a ~$4BN sellside. Super lean team, just me, the MD, and the second-year analyst that was out the door to his PE job.
When the time came to write-up the invoice, I was tasked with doing it. Didn't realize we had to include our legal expenses because it was the first time I ever did an invoice. Second-year didn't care and the MD didn't look at it, so we issued the invoice to the client without including ~$200K worth of legal fees.
We ended up just eating the fees and the MD said it was his fault. It was like a $14MM fee, so at the end of the day it was okay, but still not a great look for me as a green analyst. Still made top bucket both years somehow...
Sounds like a great MD... Stick with that one.
did this to the tune of $400K, thought I was gonna lose my job. Worst thing was I discovered it and I just sat there staring at my computer for like 30 minutes like fuck me. Called my boss and he goes ".... That's like 10 (insert shitty position) salaries..." gulp. Luckily this was B2B and the client was B2C but we managed their end user pricing, over the course of several hours of meetings I was able to recover the money and explain it all to them. Then a week later they fired us... wasn't all to do with this though we were doing a shit job for them anyways.
Got belligerently drunk in the office once. Other people were not impressed.
I feel like this needs more context. Office party? Or just at the end of a tough day in your office?
The latter. Ended up blacking out. Got chewed out by nearly everyone the next morning.
Maybe I was part of a group of degenerates, but this was totally just par for the course in my office. Drunk Analysts making the rounds were a fairly regular occurrence...
Ordered a wrong order of printing products in color instead of non color causing the company to lose 12k in my first week of work. Wasnt fired though but work back up my rep. :)
Totally screwed up a TTM calculation, and I was a few years into my lev fin job. I just didn't pay close attention, was in a rush, was bored - no good excuse. One of the VPs, kind of a loner sad single guy, super genius, was horrified. Complained about me to another VP, who was also kinda shocked and disappointed at that kind of error for someone at my level. I was mortified and never really spoke to the loner sad single VP genius again. It didn't cost me my job, but my pride suffered. #DUH. Needless to say, never made that error again.
As a Chinese my suggestion is do not join the Chinese office of a Chinese company if you are not Chinese.
banking caused me to get pretty depressed. The psych doc put me on antidepressants which made me tired all the time. It affected my performance, and I even ran late to an overseas meeting which I was to attend with a colleague, and she took her own ride. She was not impressed. Not fired but those anti-depressants were a bitch to deal with.
Ooof shit. Hope you're doing okay these days.
Let's just say I hated my first job so much I decided it would be a good idea to email my work email with a train ticket that was paid for by the company interviewing me who I was going to visit for final rounds later that week. Came back from the interview and I was called in to the CCO's office. The email was flagged for "the gift acceptance rule". As uncomfortable as it was with them knowing I was actively interviewing, I somehow was able to keep my job as a trader there until I moved on. To make matters worse, a few weeks later I had to train someone who was going to take over my position so I was showing her how we trade in one of our model strategies. I thought it was a 3% sell for XYZ and then a buy order of ZYZX, however it was only a 1.5% buy for a very volatile industrial stock. Let's just say it was a good alpha generator but not what they had asked for lol! Frankly, I found it strange they had someone who was only there for 8 months training someone rather than someone more seasoned.
I was putting together IOI materials for our client’s Board. We received a decent amount of bids (8 bids) relative to how many buyers we reached out to. I screwed up the updating of the public markets data that populated the side-by-side buyer and bid comparison metrics slide for the bottom four bidders. During the meeting the lead MD caught the mistake and the other MD who accompanied texted me during the break and said there was a mistake and the lead MD was pissed. I was riding high at the time because I’ve been pretty on top of shit on this deal and other projects. I checked the Excel and there was indeed a huge mistake. Luckily the top four bidders were way higher than the bottom four so they were able to gloss over the lower bids, but my heart sank to my stomach for a couple hours. I got reamed, but my MD liked me and was able to sidestep that awkwardness during the meeting.
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