Strangest thing you've seen/heard at work?
One of the things WSO has shown me is to not always judge a book by its cover -- some of you have some real interesting things that happened to you. That said, what are some of the most strangest things that have happened to you while you were busy working away? Or something that's happened while you were out with co-workers?
Perhaps some of the stories will serve as a source for what-not-to-do for the up-and-coming analysts.
Off the top of my head... there was this analyst at my bank who would straight up sprint Naruto style (google it if you dont know) through the office all the time. People would tell him to stop doing it (1) because it's weird, (2) he'd stomp loud af, (3) potentially dangerous, and (4) dude please just stop. And he'd just be like "no man it wasn't me" while still out of breath.... so yeah, if you're looking for stuff not to do - don't do that.
LMFAO was he doing it on purpose or something?? OMG that's funny... I haven't seen someone do that in ages ahaha.
I guess some ninjas just really like finance, huh.
What not to do: use excessive acronyms.
One time I got an email from my MD which said, "Thanks." Not, "thx" or "tx," but the entire word including capitalization and punctuation. I printed it and pinned to my cube.
Thx and Ok are standard answers from top execs/MDs. I would be equally as surprised by this.
Ha, one time an MD sent across an email saying: "Thanks. Have a nice weekend" I think he had a stroke...
One of mine once said "Jah mon" to me, botched Rasta accent and all...
Worked in a BB, the co-head of division used to talk to himself routinely.
First couple weeks in, I was grabbing a coffee next to said guy, said 'Morning', he shot me a look of surprise and continued to go back to muttering to himself.
I immediately thought I had fucked up and he was on the phone with a wireless headset - he was not.
Just goes to show, if you make it rain, no one gives a fuck about what you do.
One intern pointed to his grilled cheese and said "less beef and more cheddar" while a VP was walking by.
beef = having something against someone; cheddar = money; so basically, less drama and more cash. I'm pretty sure the kid got a return though. Maybe the VP appreciated the humor.
It would be really ironic if the only reason he got the return offer was because the VP actually got his grilled cheese with a small amount beef and appreciated more cheddar.
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1) I enter into the (London BB's) bathroom in a weekday afternoon, and summer analyst is WASHING DISHES in the bathroom's sink. The bank has no kitchen, and this intern always had lunch with us (at your classic London's take-away places such as Pret, Wasabi, etc.) and dinner on Seamless. As of now I still have no clue of whose dishes he was washing and why.
2) One guy in the same office (VP) would take the calls from his headset, stand up and start moving across desks while doing yoga / women-weight-loss-commercial-style exercises involving large movement of arms, legs, bending on knees, etc. Most walls of the floor were glass/transparent, so while working on your pitchbook you would see a couple of times a day this guy wearing a full suit + shirt + tie outfit moving through the desks while doing these exercises.
3) In a London Top MM Bank, 4 guys didn't receive a bonus because, after multiple malfunctions to the vending machine, security decided to check the night tapes, and realized these guys would consistently (2-3 times/week) shake the machine to steal a bag of chips which would come out easily. Their total comp: probably >£100-120k, price of the chips: £0.90.
4) (More of a funny story than a real mistake) At a training event, analysts arriving late would have to do karaoke in front of the full class, with a song picked by the other analysts in the class. I still have recordings of i) a guy and a girl singing Barbie Girl with opposite roles (i.e. the guy singing "I'm a Barbie girl..." and the girl "Come on Barbie let's go party"), and ii) a very shy Japanese analyst (who was late because he got lost in London) singing "Boom boom boom - Vengaboys" in a very thick Asian accent
5) New analyst (3 months in) joining the team to a party and gets completely hammered at the pre-party at the VP/staffer's apartment. He tells other people to go ahead to the club, as he needs some rest before going out. A nice female associate decides to stay with him to help him as he's clearly too drunk, so the VP leaves them a copy of the apartment keys and goes to the club with the rest of the team. The associate and the analyst never arrive to the party. When the VP comes back home, he finds his carpet full of vomit, and a set of syringes and other medical equipment on the floor. Basically, the guy fainted shortly after the team left and had no signs of life, so the associate called an ambulance, and paramedics had to inject something to keep him awake/conscious, then the brought him to the hospital for a couple of days. He came back to work on Tuesday and apologized for the behavior, mentioning some family issues as well. The team was pretty cool though as seniors never got to know about the accident, and VP didn't really do anything about it (and also paid himself a £450 professional service to clean his carpet). The analyst left after 2/3 months to become a movie director.
Lmao for some reason I'm imagining Gin Yang from "Silicon Valley" singing boom boom boom and I'm laughing thinking about it lmaooo
Analyst told a female MD he was working with that she reminded him of his mom.
MD once sent me an email that's subject line red "I'm a savant."
Gave the founders of my firm a ride to their hotel from our holiday party. Without warning, they started vaping hash oil in my car.
Did they let you hit that shit?
Seriously, questions that need answers here...
An intern left after-work drinks with a 35yo credit analyst
An analyst was bitched out because "the numbers look way too small" by an MD who didn't understand what scientific notation is
Lmao at #2
single stall bathroom on the floor echoed throughout the whole office really really loud for some reason. New analyst who sat really far away from said bathroom, meaning he must have not realized how loud it was, had to go #3 every single day 1-2 times a day.
It got near impossible to keep a straight face when talking to execs, coworkers, clients etc. Everyday we saw him walking to the bathroom everyone knew to vacate!
One time someone tried to do the "vending machine challenge", which is when you try to eat one of everything in a vending machine without stopping... got about 3/4 of the way through and then threw up
Ahh yes, I believe this is called the Amy Schumer diet.
Delete
We would have a Christmas party every year where our section would have a gingerbread house competition. Of the two years I was there one year the winner was a foreclosed summer beach house and one year it was a Chinese pagoda resting on a pile of money.
I happened to work at the Fed....:C
Interned at an AM firm last summer. One of the top execs literally orders EVERYTHING on the menu to feed himself I'm talking like 1500-2000 calories mind you this man is yuuuggeee. Gave him a ride back to the office and non stop kept farting his ass off in the car. It smelled awful but didn't want to roll the windows down to let him know I could smell it. He played it off like everything was okay.
The most sociable (yes, he's actually hilarious when we work together) guy in my office eats lunch in his car every day, even when its 90+ degrees out and no one can figure out why.
Oh man, I hope this isn't me. I have a black car/black seats and have lunch in my car every day even when it's 90+ outside because I like to talk to my wife who is in a different time zone for a year, so that's the only time that matches. I use the bluetooth in my car so it may look like I'm just talking to myself lol
I was coming back to Boston from an offsite trip one evening when I heard that a good friend from the NY office was in town and heading out to dinner with his project team. I asked to join because I wanted a free dinner and was added to the list to go out to Limoncello (the flagship restaurant for a last-minute corporate dinners) in the North End.
At dinner, I meet the team and learn that several of the people at the table are new to the firm, including a few new ops personnel who were in town to visit headquarters for the first time. It was a good dinner, free as expected, and as the meal concludes we are invited to meet up with some of the senior managers for drinks around the corner.
We get to the bar and the senior staff is a notorious crew. One manager who is known to pay for everything, you can walk up to the bar and just assume he has an open tab. My immediate manager is also there, as is a third manager who is known to get a kick out of buying rounds of shots for the analysts (rarely partaking himself) and watching them get wound up and start acting foolish. I suspect this is why we were invited. There were more managers around, but the point is that the senior staff were known to party and were THERE TO PARTY.
The evening proceeds and one of the new ops analysts from NY, a 22-year-old newly graduated male, seems to be at the bar more frequently than the rest of the team. I believe that he was coming from a scarcity mentality and believed that tab would be shut off shortly, so he wanted to get what he could while it was available. The problem with this approach was that he was getting wasted very quickly.
At some point, his attitude shifted from "I'm just happy to be here" to "I definitely want to hook up with my immediate supervisor," which was not going to happen. He was quickly shit down and, in a fit of rejection-induced anger, he stormed out of the bar into the night.
If I was sober I would have been concerned that he had never been to Boston, an already difficult-to-navigate city, and about his current state of drunkenness, but I just saw him leave and assumed he was going to wave down a cab and go home. The night continues. Eventually, my colleague receives a phone call and appears very concerned. He doesn't say where he is going but bolts out the door and I don't see or hear from him until the next day.
Apparently, the analyst who stormed out earlier either found his way to a tough neighborhood or was so angry that he started an altercation. Either way, he definitely lost the fight. He was found eventually by a friendly Bostonian who decided that he was in bad enough shape to take him to a HOMELESS SHELTER, where staff found my colleague's business card and called him to come pick him up. He was not at work the next day.
Nobody told the managers about the incident to spare him embarrassment (plus we like the free drinks and don't want to give them an excuse to stop that policy), but he did have a long talk from a supervisor later to stress the importance of controlling one's alcohol intake and maintaining professional relationships. Everyone felt pretty badly for how things worked out for him, as this did have the chance to end much worse than it did.
TL;DR: Analyst blacks out, hits on coworker, gets rejected, gets in a fight, ends up in a homeless shelter.
If I had a dollar, right?!
You might if you hadn't lost it all in the Ice Juice IPO
An analyst on the floor washes his hands for literally 12 minutes in the bathroom 2-3 times a day. How do I know? I go in to take a shit and come out and this kid is STILL there, rubbing and scrubbing like he's about to operate a surgery. Not sure if this is normal to you guys, but this shit is WEIRD to me.
maybe he fists interns on a regular basis
I love these threads.
I started my career off at this boutique IB where we had a receptionist who would skip out of work in the middle of the day to hit the gym. She never showered before coming back to work.
There is this one lady at my present firm who brings her lunch to work in a standard lunchbox and then lock it. I'm not talking about a small, TSA compliant-type lock, but a padlock. I've never had my food stolen or messed with here.
There is one lady at work who works religion into almost every conversation. I personally don't care what anyone believes, but it is really irritating when I try to be nice by asking someone how their weekend was, and that results in a tirade about how this lady went to church, but most Americans don't, so they're all going to hell.
Shoulda hit the shower, but otherwise good move. I actually know a girl, working in consulting now, who negotiated into her contract the right to hit the gym during the day, assuming that nothing pressing was happening.
Too many companies expect their employees to work extreme hours, especially in finance and consulting, while doing basic physical and mental health activities on their "own time". Screw that, if I'm expected to be at work for 14hrs a day then I sure as hell can take an hour out to go lift or run. I know way too many bankers and consultants who turned into fat, unhealthy pieces of shit because of the job, and it's simply not worth it.