Out of my depthAs a schoolkid, I signed up for a public speaking contest purely as a ruse to meet girls. It haunts me still: in front of 300 people, I started to speak, dried up, stood there for what felt like half an hour staring at the floor and then slowly walked back to my seat. Oh, and the girl I liked laughed.
Have you ever been utterly, completely, devastatingly out of your depth?
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chthonic, Thu 14 Oct 2004, 15:07)
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never work with moneyI work for an investment bank in London, I bi-weekly calculate the amount of items unable to be processed by Equities (a large part of the bank but not all of it) and present the data to the heads of departments, who allocate work to their teams and minimise the banks losses... They are high brow, low moral people who you DO NOT screw about under ANY circumstance.
Sometime in my first month I was witness to great back-slapping and taken under the wing by said group of seniority as I sat in a large meeting room (30 people can sit at these tables and the leather chairs beg for you to fall asleep in them) presenting them with their weekly figures and general analasys on the success of the week.
I had an over head projector and large pointy thing for the graphs which all highlighted a reduction of 9 million Euros... Well, this was excellent news both for those who created it and he who told them about it...
it was only half way through their welcoming that I looked up at the figures on the projector and saw a decimal point in the wrong place.
I had reported 1 million instead of 10 million.
(, Tue 19 Oct 2004, 18:27, Reply)
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