Dumbest Thing You've Seen at Work
A few of my favorites:
An entry-level dropped everyone on a conference call during an investor meeting while trying to mute the speaker phone because he randomly laughing/snorting at a comment he misheard.
I overheard a secretary tell a client that so-and-so could not take a call right because so-and-so was clipping his nails. Granted it was true, but use a little common sense and consider that
a) so-and-so can probably put down the nail clippers to speak with the client
or
b) another reason the person can't come to the phone might be more appropriate (perhaps something generic like so-and-so is on another call or stepped away from his desk for a moment). Somehow, the secretary is still employed; everyone thinks she has slept with an exec and/or has a potential lawsuit in her back pocket.
I remember when we started trading these things called Mortgage Backed Securities and made billions. And then we got super crazy and decided to make even more and just started doling out loans to these subprime borrowers! Then we just said fuck risk management and went even crazier. We were levering companies 6-7x ebitda with covenant lite loans. Man, those client parties were FUN!!!
Then we messed up and bro, we got the government to bail us out of this mess. And now they're just cleaning up our mess. Man those idiots!!!!
But yeah..that was the dumbest thing I saw at work. Whooo boy!!
LOL...I love sarcasm.
I have seen a MD cancel a meeting because he forgot to wear socks that day. was pretty funny.
He had a trade go south before the client paid (new client) and all the positions were closed out at a net loss to him of around $12,000. The next day he realized that the back office neglected to close out one short position in natural gas, and nat gas was TANKING that day (this was back in the beginning of nat gas trading when it was still really volatile).
The profits from the short position all but wiped out his personal hit on the other trades, that is until he pointed out the back office's oversight to them. They promptly swept the nat gas profits into the trading errors account and still hit him for the $12,000. If he'd just closed the position on his own, he would have gotten off scott free.
That was the dumbest thing I've ever seen someone do at work.
What made it worse was that the guy was me.
That's awesome.
I remember during my first year, one of my fellow noobs deleted all the files in the data room in the middle of the deal.
we had an intern put the last pages of a book in backwards. Our MD flipped his shit!
I was on a call with the rest of my team, we were waiting for the potential clients to get on the call. Potential client's counsel was already on the call and waiting along with us. They thought they muted the conference line and we couldn't hear them. So they are discussing amongst themselves our team member bios, and making comments about people deal experience and discussing their own strategy... more or else less they had no intention of doing the deal/transaction but they were trying to placate some pain in the ass board members. So they were looking for bankers who could paint the picture they wanted painted. They never did realize they weren't muted, and when the client came on the line, my MD's started talking about their "perspective" of the transaction and pretty much hit it out of the park.
Needless to say, we got the deal and it fell apart 2 weeks in.
on a call someone said something that clearly wasn't intended to be heard by others and an anlyst started laughing and blurted out something along the lines of "what a tool -- he thought his phone was muted." of course, his phone also was unmuted and resulted if him "working from home" the rest of the day.
my desk was out on the very edge of the room next to a guy in his 30's who spent the entire day, every day selling womens' jewelry on ebay, and taking customer calls on his cell phone. I literally saw him spend maybe 30 minutes a day on actual company related work. On the second day when he noticed that I was staring at him with a slightly confused look he basically told me "life is too short to get too involved in this shit" then went about what he was doing. I still don't know how he pulled it off because several people knew...
when i worked on the floor of the nyse...
you would see things in the booths that would put any normal workplace inappropriateness and misconduct to shame... sexual and racial harassment is pretty much the norm.
one funny story...
doesn't really qualify but one of the brokers at my firm wanted me to give him a Gatorade from about 5 feet away, i tried to pass it but it slipped and I gunned it right into the face of another broker, breaking his glasses and giving him a scratch across his nose. Fortunately, I didn't get in trouble b/c I didn't work for him and my boss thought it was hilarious.
Ok, so a few months ago, my firm gave a $1 billion overnight loan to Lehman Brothers on Friday, due Monday morning. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on Monday morning and we were out--and still are--$1 billion. Not a particularly funny story, but it hits on "dumbest things ever seen at work" theme.
That is unbelievable... given the news and speculation surrounding Lehman prior to that Friday.
Yeah, I was in shock. That's 10,000 jobs at $100,000 annually. We only have 5,000 employees! What the hell were they thinking?!
What were the most ridiculous and unprofessional behaviors of junior analysts you worked with? (Originally Posted: 09/20/2017)
Hi Guys,
I joined the WSO community to share some of incredible stories and episodes on this analyst that I used to work with when I was in banking (now I've joined a small food start-up as CFO), and thought to post this to hear your stories too. More to follow regarding my unbelievable story....
Once upon a time, junior analysts of mine have:
The only reason he survived as long as he did was:
Dumbest things you've seen corps do (Originally Posted: 03/02/2010)
What are your most amusing/wtf moments while on a deal/pitch?
Mine:
In the final days of negotiating for an acquisition the sell side CEO got fed up and whispered something to his assistant. 5 minutes later they took away all our cups of water. Everyone was like "Huh? How is that going to make us agree to pay 20m more?
There is apparently a rule that you can't have teeth in prospectus covers for HK Stock Exchange. Our cover for an upcoming IPO was changed about 15 times because the HKSE wouldn't approve various pictures of the client's staff smiling..
^^ Blue where you work
Actually I know where you work - UBS
lol I could tell by your stories that you worked in Asia
some pretty hairy things go on there
This is why you don't work in asia and you don't work at ubs.
Stupidest thing you ever said on the job (Originally Posted: 09/13/2007)
When I said "international relations" to a client instead of "investment relations".
Or when I told someone to "Oxcillate the fan" instead of "oscillate".
but I once fell asleep in a meeting
When I was in the Big 4, a HUGE client of ours flew us to NY for 2 days of meetings/training. The training was awful and useless and I fell asleep right in front of the client's angagement coordinator. She bitched and my firm had to eat all my travel costs and the client wouldn't pay my 8 hours for the day.
At the time I thought I was fucked, but nobody seemed to care too much. Everyone I worked with was zoning out too, I was just in the worst spot.
I once went for an interview (through a contact) for a long only hedgefund, and I was a total noob, still feel like punching myself in the face when i think about the kind of person I used to be. Disclaimer : I was only 1 week into investing(interviewer did not know this though), only had a diploma and undergraduate had not even started Question was what are the factors that you take into consideration when selecting a stock to buy. and i said I solely base it on news. (Though to be fair, i was up 5% in 1 week at that point) I did have a solid example, but still. towards the and of this interview the interviewer said "keep on doing this trading thing" to make things worse, the interviewer was the CIO of the hedgefund. And I actually expected a callback. Obviously, I was never called again *writing this post literally gave me a headache. I still use this incident to get my head out of my ass in case I start to think I'm smart.
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