Slacking

Technical difficulties prevented me from booking two necessary trades yesterday. I'd been exchanging emails with the IT team for a week trying to get the issue resolved.

Also, we use SecurIDs here. Maybe you've seen them. Yesterday the ID I needed to login to the broker's website expired. Instead of flashing a random number it's flashing "OFF." We contacted the broker and they're going to FedEx an new one to us tomorrow.

So I've got to book trades and download reports. I'm totally unable to do either of those things. It's five fifteen. So I left.

Slacking? I guess you could look at it that way, if you define slacking as "anything less than over and above absolute maximum effort." I could have stayed an extra fifteen minutes and swept the floors, or cleaned out the floor refrigerator, would I have been slacking then?

Justifiable? Yes. I was getting nothing done sitting in the office, I could get the same nothing done not sitting in the office, and, in the second case, enjoyed it a lot more.

So I left. Fifteen minutes early. Today this was sitting in my mailbox, sent yesterday at 5:27 PM:

From: lazymanager@cantmanage.com
To: Tom@wontwork.com; Bob@insolentguy.com

Tom,

During month end please check in before leaving and see if there is anything that needs to be done. At some point you’ll need to sit with Bob and start learning his other fund. Keep in mind most of our funds are 5 day deliverables. If nothing else try and catch up your 10 day fund as most of us are working late during this week.

Bob when you have time try to make sure to at least show Tom a few things and maybe have him take some notes.

Thanks


Ok, a little commentary: I'd rather not check in before leaving just so you can give me some busy work. In fact, that's the whole reason I didn't check in before I left.

-I'd love to sit and learn a new fund, but Bob's been responsible for training me since day one and I STILL DON'T KNOW ANYTHING. He may be your go-to guy during month-end, but he doesn't have the ability to teach anyone anything.

-I'm not going to work on my Day 10 fund when my Day 5 funds aren't done yet. That's stupid. By the way, thanks for all the help on my Day 5 funds.

-How is Bob supposed to have time to show me anything if you've all got so much of your own work that you have to stay late all week?

-Your managerial skills suck.

He left a barely comprehensible post-it note on my monitor too: "Please look into these september trades + also rollforward your mkt rec, I don't see it so Im not sure how pricing + pos.can be done"

What? And, just so you know, the reason the "mktrec" hasn't been rolled forward is because I don't know what the hell that is! IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEBODY WOULD TRAIN ME TO DO THE JOB I WAS HIRED FOR, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

AUGH
-tgme