If your trading room is anything like mine… And I’m sure it is, it’s not uncommon for somebody in trading to buy lunch for the room. Usually it’s management after a big trade or a nice week… sometimes it’s the winner of an office pool sharing his good fortune, but mostly it’s just one the guys being generous.
Where things get irritating is when the seagulls from other departments start hovering even before the people who the food was intended for get a chance to have lunch. It’s amazing – it really is. Rats start coming out of the woodwork as if the Pied Piper himself delivered the food. It’s not about being cheap it’s about there’s something being really wrong with these people. I’m not talking about the hard working people in the back office, or the support staff (that makes our job possible) – we’re happy to get lunch for those people and they’re and a big part of the reason why we do it.
Remember the Jawas? I’m not a big Star Wars buff but I remember them (probably because I work amongst them). They were these little rodent-like natives who spent most of their time stealing and scavenging the desert in search of scrap metal and mechanical parts. Only here they don’t hide in caves… Instead they creep out from cubicles, crawl out from under IT rocks and some of the research sales pikers try to slip in undetected camouflaged in nantucket red pants, animal print ties and fish belts (This isn’t Fairfield County – we see can you.)
These shameless alligator-armed research salespeople are without a doubt the biggest offenders. To them, the idea of buying lunch for the room is right up there with working a full week – it’s never going to happen. You don’t get heads up when your biggest client gets shut out of a management meeting, you don’t find out until three weeks later that we fell off the research list but these sqeakers are first in line for a free fucking slice of pizza.
As for the unknowns and as a rule of thumb, if you’ve worked for the firm over five years and never exchanged so much as a “Hello” with anyone in the trading room then how is it you feel comfortable walking out on the trading floor and taking an entire pizza pie back to cuburbia? And besides mooching free pizza, what the fuck do you do for this firm anyway?
We’ve got a couple of late to the party non-english speaking foreigners that we refer to as the clean up crew. Nobody has any clue who they are, where they sit or what they do but they always travel in two’s and show up a little too late or towards the end of the feeding frenzy. Together, like a team of raccoons they brazenly rummage through the empty pizza boxes collecting anything they can find… stray pieces of abandoned pepperoni, coagulated lumps of cardboard cheese and usually salvage the half-chewed looking slice or two and that nobody else wanted.
All the above mentioned moochers hate eye contact. When you do, some of them start to play the sincere thankful game but never follow through. You give them a look in the eye while their trying to squeeze three slices of pizza onto their little paper plate follow by a “How’s it going?” and after he licks the grease off his finger you usually get an uncomfortable, “So who paid?”. Clearly it doesn’t matter who paid so why bother asking. You try to do the right thing and instead of saying “Nobody you know” you give them the name or point the buyer out. You know what he does with that information? Nothing. They ask the question like they were considering dropping ten bucks on the guys desk or maybe throwing a “Thank you” his way – but nothing. You turn back around and the guy’s half way across the room back to his department.
It’s about the little things,
Dopey
