My endless days of partying have finally come to a halt. I started work two weeks ago, and already I’m back to putting in 12 hours a day at the office, getting little sleep, and waking up early, really early. Not 5AM or anything, just much earlier than my usual 11AM wake up call. I used to wake up, sit around for hours writing, hang out, go to the park or the beach. Not anymore my friends. This girl is back in the game.
I’ve missed my career. I’ve missed the fast-paced, energy filled environment of Finance. Certainly the market is very different in South Florida from that of New York’s where you can hear the hoar coming from trading floors when MSNBC, CNN, or Bloomberg announces something big, phones incessantly ring, hold lights blink, and timing of execution is everything. The pace of a Private Wealth Management office down here is much calmer, there are scarce fires to be put out, nothing is done in a rush, and people have little sense of emergency.
The market in SoFla is polar opposite to that of the North East and the companies I’ve worked for in my career. Hedge Funds, where the company is so small, but grows so fast that you can’t keep up with the daily workload, budgets are maxed-out, and you barely have any time to pee, much less eat lunch, which you must do at your desk. In New York, you don’t go home if your daily work isn’t completed, you stay at the office until it’s done, be it 8PM or midnight. In one of my jobs where I was managing a team of six people in a Derivatives Operations department, I used to come in at 8, work until 7, go home, eat something, watch TV for an hour, then go right back to the office and work until 2AM. My motto was, “Never Leave For Tomorrow What You Can Do Today.” Brokerage Firms, where the sheer volume of transactions will put a wrench even into a well-oiled machine, where you have so much work to do, you think it will take an entire lifetime to complete. Being the issuers of new products and services, these firms must get creative in the game and deliver exciting new products such as Credit Default Swap Tranches, and customized portfolios of Collateralized Loan Obligations. The most problematical of products are difficult to capture in systems which haven’t been built to support them, and the process of confirmation, settlement, and documentation becomes extremely manual (thank you Microsoft Excel, for making our lives a little easier). This wonderful market in New York is full of life and power. Working for companies that are well known and have market presence, being in the game of high finance, comes with its price of long hours, but it also brings in big bucks at bonus time. You make great friends who are in the same wavelength, driven, with a desire to succeed. It’s a power career, aggressive, demanding and steadfast.
I knew that going into Finance in SoFla was going to be different. A calmer pace, 9 to 5, and I was guessing complete fluff compared to New York. In fact I was looking forward to it at the time. I had one of those jobs down here, but it wasn’t challenging enough, and the daily annoyances from unsophisticated investors screaming on the phone because their funds haven’t yet been transferred, to an outside bank mind you, when they sent instructions via fax no less, at 3:57PM when Fed Funds closes at 4, which I repeatedly told them, simply drove me nuts. This was worse than your run-of-the-mill bank. My job as a Sales Assistant was worse than that of a teller. At least at a checking and savings bank, if a client has a question, you know they’re not that sophisticated and you can have patience. These fools were supposed to know what they are talking about since they’re investing millions of dollars in it. I quickly realized that getting paid a quarter of my previous salary to deal with that type of bullshit wasn’t worth it, and that I would rather use my savings and live the life I came here for. So I went on sabbatical for 8 months.
I began looking for work again a week before the Bear Sterns news came out, and once that bomb hit Wall Street, companies stopped hiring and started firing. I even called my head hunter in New York but he had nothing. It used to be where I would be sitting at my desk and the phone would ring with interview offers. I was running out of money, but one fine day I get the call for an interview. On the third round, they offered me the job on the spot and we negotiated my salary. A week and a half later I had my first day. They had vehemently told me during the interviews that this job is not fluff, that there was a lot of work to do so we could catch up to trade date workflow operations, and that it was going to take some long hours, patience and a lot of dedication. After nearly a year away, I felt ready. I was relaxed, I had a chance to party like a rock star, enjoy my new beach, make new friends, and settle into my new life. I’ve completed my second week, and am right back into the swing of things. My brain has been calibrated. I’m learning a ton about this business in particular, getting trained in new systems, and I’m getting things done. I feel good, and though I’m working insane hours (for Miami), I’m loving driving my new car, wearing suits again, and feeling accomplished. This is good. This is very good.
