Working as an investment banking M&A anal-yst at a sweatshop is paradise

You come into the office on a Saturday morning to print decks to review the CIM. You haven’t slept in days. The sweat on your forehead runs down your face. You wipe your face only to feel a pimple, demonstrating the lack of care of your skin and well being. Your resting heart rate is consistently at 110, which is considered good during the times of craze. You show up to work, you don’t have time to clean your shirts because the only time you have is to sleep and shower for the next day. Your shirts smell like sweat and depression, and no matter how much cologne and undershirts you wear it breaks through to your shirt. You have no time to dry clean. No time.

You walk in and you smell the body odor of M&A banking and see others with wrinkled shirts. You walk in and see a junior sitting at his desk. He’s 5’6, he’s wearing black dress pants something that you’d wear at a funeral. His hair is so greasy that you could squeeze the grease out of his hair to make French fries in a frying pan. His eyebrows have developed a unibrow demonstrating his lack of social altitude. His shirt is hanging out as he sits in the corner desperately trying to finish final edits. His soul is permeated with the fists of stress from his vp but he persists as he’s deliriously tunnel visioned to complete his task and doesn’t comprehend his current state. Zero sight of your MD, as he has no oversight of the current jester state of the junior banking team.

You walk over to your desk to print. You notice that your desk is in a standing position for you, as it hurts to sit after getting railed for the past week by your seniors. You get ready to print like a good little junior and begin to analyze the 60 page CIM for possible mistakes. You sit there, and you’re focused; your OCD caused from banking is intensely keeping you focused coupled with the paranoia from taking too much adderall to stay awake. You don’t even acknowledge that the only sex you’ve had in the past few weeks was from your seniors who have fucked your hopes and dreams away of a nice good sleep away with the promise of marquee transaction experience. You’re too tired to recruit, as you’re double staffed on work as the top bucket analyst left for KKR.

You finally finish and go home to get an extra two hours of sleep. You go home to your condo, you see the Uber eats that you told yourself that you’d eat, but you couldn’t as the stress and adderall permeated your appetite. It’s two days old, you haven’t bothered to clean it yet because you haven’t had the time. You walk over to your bedroom and say that you’ll clean it. You lay down and try to sleep. The paranoia of potentially getting pinged by a staffer keeps you awake. You feel the palpitations against your eyes as you lay there, hoping to get a few hours of sleep.

You wake up after a few hours, not from your alarm but from the paranoia of missing something on your outlook. You walk straight to your computer ignoring the left over food you promised to put away. On your way to the next task. You smile as you sit alone in your condo because you believe that your peers and relatives admire you, you’re important, you’re crushing it, you’re in an M&A team at a BB. You get to tell people that you work 90 hours a week at family gatherings. If you’re lucky, you get to go straight to family functions from work wearing a suit and flex on your normie cousins and uncles and aunts. If you’re lucky, they may ask where you’re coming from, and you’d get to say work. They’re in shock whenever you tell them you consistently work 90 hours a week but their pity coupled with admiration is the ego boost you need. That admiration keeps you going, but they don’t know the difference between that and a teller.

M&A banking as a junior at a sweatshop is paradise.