"Chloe, get me Jack on the phone. Now!"
Not TGOGers, though, who would simply laugh off this manufactured TV crisis. The fact is that if you're a fixed income sell-side Bloomberg keyboard jockey who never uses anything but the Forward (3) button followed by the Go button (1), then you've been dealing every business day with a predicament similar to Chloe's, only on a massive scale.
Here's why: because every single person you ever try to reach has gone dark. There's nobody on your entire contact list that can ever be contacted, at least not by you. That's your unique occupational challenge: initiating and maintaining a dialogue with counterparties who have your Bloomberg ID on auto-delete. It's as if Chloe not only can't get Jack; she can't get Tony, Michelle, Kim, George Mason (before he's dead), Ryan Chappelle (ditto), Morris, Bill, Audrey, Wayne Palmer, or President Palmer, and Nina Meyers has just given her a two-minute warning before releasing an airborne STD at Dodger Stadium.
Let's say it's a summer Friday, and you've decided to "work" from "home". Unfortunately, you've left your Bloomberg "B" unit at your sales post. So you lob in a call to your assistant, instructing as follows:
"Chloe (make sure to substitute name of actual assistant), I need you to download my client list to my PDA. Now."
"Sorry, Jack (or whatever your name actually is), but you don't have clients, you have customers. Clients are people who commit to do a certain amount of business on an exclusive basis within a certain time frame. Clients pay fees, customers pay commissions. Law firms have clients. Advertising agencies have clients. But unlike clients, customers can shop everywhere, and yours do. Except they don't shop here, so you never get any commissions. Sorry, Jack. I can't help being honest."
"Don't get technical on me, Chloe. Just shoot me my list. I'm feeling an urge to reach out in a series of futile and pathetic gestures to a large group of aloof and uncaring counterparties."
Your job description is the same as Don Quixote's:
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are to weary
And finally---perhaps when some hedge fund prodigy accidentally hits "2" (REPLY) while wiping up the keyboard germicide:
To reach the unreachable star.
Let's say it's a summer Friday, and you've decided to "work" from "home". Unfortunately, you've left your Bloomberg "B" unit at your sales post. So you lob in a call to your assistant, instructing as follows:
"Chloe (make sure to substitute name of actual assistant), I need you to download my client list to my PDA. Now."
"Sorry, Jack (or whatever your name actually is), but you don't have clients, you have customers. Clients are people who commit to do a certain amount of business on an exclusive basis within a certain time frame. Clients pay fees, customers pay commissions. Law firms have clients. Advertising agencies have clients. But unlike clients, customers can shop everywhere, and yours do. Except they don't shop here, so you never get any commissions. Sorry, Jack. I can't help being honest."
"Don't get technical on me, Chloe. Just shoot me my list. I'm feeling an urge to reach out in a series of futile and pathetic gestures to a large group of aloof and uncaring counterparties."
Your job description is the same as Don Quixote's:
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are to weary
And finally---perhaps when some hedge fund prodigy accidentally hits "2" (REPLY) while wiping up the keyboard germicide:
To reach the unreachable star.
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