When Did You Have the Hardest Time Staying Professional?

We have all been there, some d**k just pushes our buttons to the level where we consider knocking this dude out cold or just being a complete douche and making him regret his entire existence. What did you guys do? When were the times when some bumblefuck gave you the hardest time staying professional?

 

I never really, really lost it. But I went to an interview once and made some other guy lose it. Most epic berating I was ever subject to past the age of 17 (I was 24 when this happened).

On a snowy Sunday morning in December 2013 I'm in a coffee shop with the principal of a private equity research company. Guy runs a 3-person office in midtown NYC, posted an ad looking for an unpaid intern. In the ad, the guy says "make sure you read the full version of Barron's and the WSJ." No sweat - I log in to the WSJ site and Barrons.com and read up. Nice, some good articles to go while I head downtown. I get in, turns out the guy owns the coffee shop and he gets me a free chocolate something or other.

So we sit down, he asks what's on a specific section of Barron's, and my response: "ah, I read the online version! Barron's is impossible to find in my neighborhood, uptown."

Cue prolonged, awkward silence.

Him: "Okay, I get that. What did you find interesting in the WSJ Markets section?"

Me: "I see, I didn't really get that you wanted me to read the pri - "

Absolute top of his lungs: "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR GENERATION!?"

Epic speech ensues. I sit at the coffee shop, humiliated at what this guy is telling me, slowly sipping at my chocolate something as I contemplate what to even do once he's done.

Eventually he slows down, calms himself, and tells me to leave him in peace so he can try to enjoy the rest of his Sunday unencumbered. Needless to say, I got subs to WSJ and Barron's, read them both page-to-page, and emailed him an apology and asked for a round 2. Surprisingly, he acquiesced, and brought me into his office to observe a call with the CFO of some random company. I took notes, he promptly told me I sucked and would never work in the industry, and I left.

in it 2 win it
 

Still a tiny 3-person shop with no coverage. The guy has a couple million in his pocket though so it doesn't matter to him. This is probably his "legacy" or some shit. He's one of those tall, lean, bald dudes you imagine runs 5 miles every morning at 4AM.

in it 2 win it
 
Most Helpful
ironman32:
I always think this is one of those cycle things that are tough to break. MDs berate analysts because when the MD was an analyst, their MD berated them. Tough cycle to break

Not really. I am older than most on here. I was berated by a variety of athletic coaches all the way through college. I was berated on a trading desk, and I was berated as an IB analyst. I have no desire to blow up on subordinates. I yell at my business partner all the time, but that’s different and we’re like brothers.

 
Kassad:
I never really, really lost it. But I went to an interview once and made some other guy lose it. Most epic berating I was ever subject to past the age of 17 (I was 24 when this happened).

On a snowy Sunday morning in December 2013 I'm in a coffee shop with the principal of a private equity research company. Guy runs a 3-person office in midtown NYC, posted an ad looking for an unpaid intern. In the ad, the guy says "make sure you read the full version of Barron's and the WSJ." No sweat - I log in to the WSJ site and Barrons.com and read up. Nice, some good articles to go while I head downtown. I get in, turns out the guy owns the coffee shop and he gets me a free chocolate something or other.

So we sit down, he asks what's on a specific section of Barron's, and my response: "ah, I read the online version! Barron's is impossible to find in my neighborhood, uptown."

Cue prolonged, awkward silence.

Him: "Okay, I get that. What did you find interesting in the WSJ Markets section?"

Me: "I see, I didn't really get that you wanted me to read the pri - "

Absolute top of his lungs: "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR GENERATION!?"

Epic speech ensues. I sit at the coffee shop, humiliated at what this guy is telling me, slowly sipping at my chocolate something as I contemplate what to even do once he's done.

Eventually he slows down, calms himself, and tells me to leave him in peace so he can try to enjoy the rest of his Sunday unencumbered. Needless to say, I got subs to WSJ and Barron's, read them both page-to-page, and emailed him an apology and asked for a round 2. Surprisingly, he acquiesced, and brought me into his office to observe a call with the CFO of some random company. I took notes, he promptly told me I sucked and would never work in the industry, and I left.

You should have said “what the fuck is wrong with your generation, killing trees and global warming! Who reads print anymore?”

 

A few years ago, I emailed Howard Rosencrans right after I had graduated. I asked about doing an unpaid internship (economy was tough) and attached some research report I had written to show interest in the markets. He responded by saying the report was terrible, insulted me and said that he had no time for someone like me. I wasn't even offended. It was obvious that he had some superiority complex, and clearly enjoyed belittling aspiring analysts to overcompensate for his tiny firm. I actually felt sorry for him.

 

Why on Earth did you ask for round 2. I was hoping it was some sort of ruse so you could leave an upper decker in his office.

 
DickFuld:
I almost went to blows in the office one time with a dude who was a raging dick and a time waster.

I saw two nerdy 1st year IB associates back in the day at Citi get into a pushing fight just outside the print shop. It was honestly one of the funniest and most pathetic things I've seen in my life.

Neither of them could have hurt a fly...part of the argument literally was about if HBS or Wharton was a better b-school as a supporting point to their bigger argument. They were in different groups on the same deal (one industry group and a product group), and they somehow were wound up about who was more right on assumptions and what was getting printed in the books. I think one of them replaced pages after the other sent the books to print. Sad and funny all at the same time.

 

Consider the following scenario:

You are buying out one-quarter of a company's shareholders for $5mm (implying a $20mm enterprise value). In addition, you will be investing an additional $5mm of growth equity into the business at the same valuation (assume cash-free debt-free; this implies a post-money valuation of $25mm).

In other words, you now own $5mm + $5mm = $10mm out of a $25mm company, or 40%.

I argued with a partner for an hour (LITERALLY AN HOUR) to try to convince him that no, we would not own 45% of the company, because summing 25% (the stock purchase, 5 / 20) and 20% (the equity investment, 5 / 25) was not the correct calculation.

I tried everything. I used simplified examples. I drew it out on a whiteboard with different colors, step by step. To this day, he thinks I did it wrong. I wanted to strangle him and shove whiteboard markers through his ears.

To those saying "no way does someone make partner in PE being that bad at math," the thing is, there are a lot of ways it can happen. There are many, many skillsets in PE, some of them with very little overlap; if you're good at some of them, and you are a smooth talker, or you have great structure around you, you can cover up shockingly severe deficiencies. For a while, at least. And if you bounce around from firm to firm, it turns out this is a small industry - if you do things for people and you make powerful friends, it's unlikely someone will ever pipe up to say "oh, that guy? yeah, he's a moron."

"Son, life is hard. But it's harder if you're stupid." - my dad
 

We had this awful, condescending associate who was incompetent and very insecure. She had no idea what she was doing, so she made us waste a tremendous amount of time printing out all of the documents, etc. that we sourced numbers from for every internal meeting. I'm not talking about the numbers for the company we were meeting; I'm talking about support for peers' historical dividend actions and nonsense like that. I wound up working 100 hours one week primarily on account of a return of capital conversation.

I orchestrated a campaign of passive resistance against her because I knew I had more political capital in the group. She got fired about a year in after receiving only stub bonus, and I thrived. Other analysts in the group felt the same way I did, but I think what did it was really that the MDs didn't respect her. I think she wound up going from BB IB to MM corporate banking to go torment some other poor souls.

 

When I was an intern in Corp Dev, the exec on the team had a "paper clip size" policy, and i think i used a medium sized paper clip when his policy called for a small sized paper clip. So he flicked it off in front of me, yelled at me, and told me "if this is the only thing you learn here, it's going to be what paper clip size to use." And that was on my last day as an intern. Needless to say, I've never adhered to his paper clipping policy.

 

During my first year of employment I went on a four day drinking/adventure binge and ended up hanging out with some people who had jobs that don't require professionalism to nearly the same degree as an office job- think construction, managing a ski resort, rafting tour guide, ski bums, etc. A lot of them came in sideways through connections and were hardly educated past high school but still pretty brilliant. I get back to Cubeworld on Monday kinda drunk still, but also completely in the mindset of the weekend and the people I met. Luckily I ran into some of the bros first who told me I wasn't in the mountains anymore and had to drop the language/attitude if I wanted to keep my office job. The mountain life sounded tempting, but I wanted to make $$ first so I sharpened up. I'm still unsure if I made the right choice.

If you're looking for some exciting rage story, I don't have one. To be honest I've never lost my temper at any dumbass in a white collar because I just haven't been able to care enough about anything that takes place in a cube farm. All these stories about people flipping shit over someone hogging the printer make me think these people seriously need to get laid and go outside.

 

Had a VP one time waste my time on a pitch for some BS valuation meeting with a private company because he didn't think about anything until the last minute. Literally stood over my computer telling me little tiny assumptions to change in the DCF we had that made absolutely no difference. At 3am I send the books to print and as he walks out of the office he stops and says, "I want PIBs included on all of the public companies that we used. I want the 10K, most recent 10Q, the last 4 quarters of earnings transcripts, credit rating overview and articles, as well as 5-10 recent analyst reports, please include at least one initiation of coverage report as well. I am leaving for the airport at 7am." We had about 30 different public comps and so I just started printing different things to like 3 different printers on the floor as well as sending stuff to the BO printing guys to print off as large PDF files as quickly as I could. At 6:30 I sent a duffel bag weighing approximately 5 pounds with the actual pitch books in it, as well as two other duffel bags, each weighing approximately 40 pounds each half filled with stapled PIBs and the other half just blank paper mixed in between research reports. I know for a fact that he did not even bother to take the bags due to the weight and he never said anything about the blank papers. Guy was a complete asshole and is lucky I did not go completely ape shit on him for asking for such ridiculous stuff...he was not going to read a few thousand pages of info on the 2 hour plane ride to wherever the hell this company was located. And it sure as hell was not going to win us the deal if he knew that one-off piece of info from some company's random earnings call 9 months ago to justify it as a comp or some shit like that.

He got fired like 2 months later, so fuck him.

 
Funniest

Couple years ago, I was interviewing for a summer internship at a bond rating agency. The subway fucked me over and I couldn't make it to my interview at 9am. I've tried emailing and calling the hiring manager to inform him, however to no avail.

As soon as I got off the subway, I ran my balls off to the office. After checking in at the lobby, I heard the person in front of me was meeting the same hiring manager as I am. So during our elevator ride, we chatted a bit and got to know a bit about each other (e.g. university, major, and etc). After knowing that I was late for my interview, he said "Damn buddy, sucks to be you. Not only you're not from Wharton but also you're late to the interview. I hope you got other interviews lined up".

Long story short, the hiring manager still interviewed me after that arrogant mofo was done. A week later, I got the role and he didn't. I found him on LinkedIn and dropped a message "Damn buddy. I hope you got other interviews lined up".

 
000killa:
Couple years ago, I was interviewing for a summer internship at a bond rating agency. The subway fucked me over and I couldn't make it to my interview at 9am. I've tried emailing and calling the hiring manager to inform him, however to no avail.

As soon as I got off the subway, I ran my balls off to the office. After checking in at the lobby, I heard the person in front of me was meeting the same hiring manager as I am. So during our elevator ride, we chatted a bit and got to know a bit about each other (e.g. university, major, and etc). After knowing that I was late for my interview, he said "Damn buddy, sucks to be you. Not only you're not from Wharton but also you're late to the interview. I hope you got other interviews lined up".

Long story short, the hiring manager still interviewed me after that arrogant mofo was done. A week later, I got the role and he didn't. I found him on LinkedIn and dropped a message "Damn buddy. I hope you got other interviews lined up".

That is awesome lol did that bum respond?

 

Had a guy semi lost it in email. When I was in university two years ago, I did a lot of networking trying to get an internship. I emailed a lot of PE shops just to try my luck. One guy came back and said they don’t hire interns. Then I thought I’d try harder and emailed back “may I ask why you don’t hire interns?” Guy semi lost it and basically said who the fuck do you think you’re even our most junior analysts are qualified accountants.

He later on added me on LinkedIn ... I didn’t realise who it was at the time. Just some guy with a title “managing director”. I thought oh sweet. Later on found out it was him and he unfriended me on LinkedIn.

 

This is probably the funniest thing I've every seen/heard/been tangentially a part of in my working career:

When I started in CRE at one of the big brokerage shops, there was a woman we worked with that was super intense. To the point that everyone was anxious working with her because she just didn't let up, ever. So one day we are all on this conference call with a very large, well-known institutional client. It was one of those round-table type things where everyone from the brokerage team and everyone from the principal shop nationally discussed what their current pipeline/outlook is, plans going forward, information sharing, etc. So the lead MD on our side spearheading the call is saying something, and all of the sudden you hear this very loud echo which sounds like a very, very wet fart. Then you hear a flush about 45 sec-1 min later, and muffled/echo voice in a marble/concrete room talking about something else. You guessed it, it was this woman in the bathroom and she forgot / accidentally didn't put the phone on mute, and she was talking to someone in the restroom. There's an awkward silence and the MD goes 'hey can everyone please make sure their phone is on mute..' then another awkward silence, you hear her go 'oh fuck'. Then I see her come out of the restroom and she proceeds to yell at one of the other female employees on the team/call in our office asking why she didn't come tell her what was happening as it was happening (as if she could know). I had to actually leave the office for about 5-10 min because I was laughing so hard at the whole situation.

"Who am I? I'm the guy that does his job. You must be the other guy."
 

Happened just today. Was doing a brainstorm with some VPs about helping a drug resist biosimilar threats. We often make a comparison to another drug (say drug Y) in the same therapeutic category but this drug is worse and most VPs from our firm and the client company know that. A principal who recently joined us came from the current client and spent about 10 years of his life working on the shitty drug Y. During the brainstorm I go 'we have to watch out for the comparison with drug Y...I mean it's pretty shitty and a last resort. Not much interest there and not really worth wasting our time on it'. He turns and goes 'I spent 10 years working on drug Y at [client]...'

I had no idea what to say. Mumbled some shitty ass save and we all pretended like nothing happened...yet it did. Let's see how this project moves along...

 

VP who often acted like they had my back and gave a shit about my development threw me under the bus for a mistake I didn't make, the associate owned it and said he made it, and yet i was still left to get run over by all four wheels. Their form of apology was to insult my professionalism and say I "freaked out" even though I didn't--I just fixed the fucking thing in time rather than tell the associate about it so he could. I was also accused of trying to brush the error under the rug by fixing it myself (what?) and that it was a shady thing to do. So much for "responsibility" and "taking ownership." I guess that stuff only matters when they want it to. My efforts to make something correct and save someone time were met with a pretty degrading response, which pissed me off but this stuff happens.

Thats not the point. I was just dumbfounded that after all the late nights, destroyed weekends, no vacations, working around the death of my best friend, and doing everything I can to be a productive analyst and add value to the team, they still couldn't give me the benefit of the doubt. I am by no means a perfect analyst, but I am pretty good, and I bust my ass every day trying to get better--I was led to believe that counted for something. When I had to give one of those fake bullshit analyst apologies where I acted like I'll learn from this or whatever just to make it end, I damn near threw up.

Dayman?
 
Nightman Cometh:
VP who often acted like they had my back and gave a shit about my development threw me under the bus for a mistake I didn't make, the associate owned it and said he made it, and yet i was still left to get run over by all four wheels. Their form of apology was to insult my professionalism and say I "freaked out" even though I didn't--I just fixed the fucking thing in time rather than tell the associate about it so he could. I was also accused of trying to brush the error under the rug by fixing it myself (what?) and that it was a shady thing to do. So much for "responsibility" and "taking ownership." I guess that stuff only matters when they want it to. My efforts to make something correct and save someone time were met with a pretty degrading response, which pissed me off but this stuff happens.

Thats not the point. I was just dumbfounded that after all the late nights, destroyed weekends, no vacations, working around the death of my best friend, and doing everything I can to be a productive analyst and add value to the team, they still couldn't give me the benefit of the doubt. When I had to give one of those fake bullshit analyst apologies where I acted like I'll learn from this or whatever just to make it end, I damn near threw up.

Your experience is not unusual. I hate working for people who are all about building their empire while leaving a legacy. They'll expect the world and leave you with peanuts. I had a boss pull something like this one me, push the mistake downhill and so forth. I had no 'out' from the spot I was in, but I never forgot and never trusted him again. Meanwhile, I began producing and delivering for his boss at the drop of a hat. He tried something similar and I called his boss who had my back. It's amazing this snakey liar has not been fired yet. Are you still at the same shop? Reputations and trust in the industry are everything. Be known for being shady, and you'll handicap your progression

 

Yeah I'm still at the same place. My relationship with the person of interest has been fine but it's always been in the back of my mind. I began my lateral process in the last month, and while this is definitely not a reason for my decision to leave, it was something that got the wheels turning and made me start looking earlier than I initially planned.

Dayman?
 

SVP wants to bring in external consulting team (think Accenture, Deloitte) to overhaul our GTM Sales Strategy. Boss and I are invited to sit in and provide feedback that will inform end decision; I am the lowest ranking member from my firm in attendance. Consulting team consists of industry-specific MD, an account manager and a strategy associate.

Halfway through the MD's pitch, I ask a question out of genuine curiosity. The MD is visibly flustered, pissed off and most assuredly took my question as a direct attack on his industry credibility. He powers through in his answer, and seemingly the worst is behind us.

About 2/3rds of the way through the presentation, a general question is posed to the table and my boss makes an off-colored joke about me being slow to the punch on providing an answer pertaining to a technical domain in which I hold multiple patents. The consulting team, particularly the MD and the Strategy Associate jump on the opportunity to add in laughs and pile in on the joke. In the back of my mind, unprofessional but I'm a good sport

By the time the meeting was up, the engagement looked like $2M to overhaul our GTM Sales Strategy. The consulting firm felt they had alignment and had won the meeting. Everyone stands up to exchange business cards, shake hands and depart to catch subsequent meetings. I'm the last to leave the room from my team and on my way out I hear the MD make a muffled remark. The Strategy Associate, thinking the MD had pronounced open season on me, then clear-as-day shouted, "See you later, RETARD!"
I'm in shock walking to the elevator bank.

I get back to my desk and total surprise shifts to seething rage. My boss swings by and asks for my take on what they were pitching. I tell him what went down when I was leaving the meeting room and he starts laughing his ass off in disbelief. He goes back to his desk still laughing and tells me to chalk it up as a waddayagonnado??
I ended up shredding the guy's weak MBA, his sluggish career progression and that he should stick to the left and right arrow keys when it comes to presentation execution via LinkedIn InMail. He tried vigorously apologizing via email, phone calls and begged me not to escalate the issue. The opportunity dies after lack of funding. Get fucked.

The true humor here is what earthly spirit compelled this Strategy Associate to shout, "See you later, RETARD!" to the client? I'm a generally professionally imposing dude but my college friends were having a field day with the story and screenshots I sent. "He smelt your weakness", "You're beta and he's asserting his dominance", etc..

Good times, good times.

 

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