Countdown to 20/20

On Thursday I’m getting my eyes lasered. I’m not at all scared, I’m totally excited. Well, to be clear, I’m actually only getting one eye lasered. I apparently have obnoxiously large pupils which require me to get this totally different, non-instant-gratification eye surgery where it takes a while to get good vision, so I can only get one eye at a time done. It also has the added benefit of making me self conscious for the rest of my life about the size of my pupils.

I’m taking two days off work to recover. I don’t know how you actually “recover” from having your eye poked at, but I’m glad to have to time off to catch up on my sitting around and eating.
I made sure to request the time off long ago, but in this department, taking time off is like bringing the plague to work, so I had to keep reminding people. It was like “Good morning Kathy. I’m taking Thursday and Friday off.” Then, “How was your weekend, John? Remember I’m taking two days off.” I hope they get the hint, but inevitably on Thursday at around 10 I’ll get some panicked phone call at home (because I was forced to give out my home number for such emergencies) and it’ll be someone from my department, freaking out and asking how to do my job. Luckily I will probably be sound asleep with one eye recovering from being poked around with a laser.

Sidenote: Why is it that everyone tells me I’ll sleep a lot after this eye surgery? Jesus, how out of shape are these patients that sitting in a chair for 2 minutes and staring at a light wears you out? What kind of excuse is that? “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go lie down, I’m just beat. Today I had my eye touched for about a minute. Yeah I know, I can’t believe I’ve been standing unassisted for this long either.”

The other day I was in a meeting with my boss and I mentioned at the end “Don’t forget, I’m going to be gone Thursday and Friday to get my eyes lasered.” And suddenly this strikes up a conversation. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. So do you think it’s really worth the expense to get your eyes lasered?” “Yeah,” I said, “Think about how much you spend on contacts and contact related stuff and all the time you spend with them over a lifetime!” And my boss goes, “Well, I don’t wear contacts. So how much do you think you spend in a year?” And I’m like “I dunno, maybe $300.” He then whips out his financial calculator. “OK say you’d spend $300 for another 50 years of good eye sight. Now let’s assume an interest rate of 6%....” Oh god, how much of an accounting nerd do I work for? “OK, so let’s discount those cash flows back. OK so we get a net present value of around $5000. And you say this costs about $4500?” I nod, begrudgingly. “Well then according to basic finance and all economic indictors, you can’t not do it!”

I left his office mystified that that just happened, that a financial calculator was just involved in the decision over my two day vacation. I’ve got to get out of here.

Boozing with the Bankers

In an effort to make this next post not make all my readers think I don’t actually do any work, I’d like to premise this post with the fact that this month has been unusually fun at work. I don’t usually go on regattas and spend company time gambling at the races. OK, now on to the story.

A few weeks ago (it’s taken me that long to recover and finally write about it) some bankers took my boss and me out to the horse races for the day. If you must know why, I’m not going to tell you, but basically, we’re this bank’s client. Let’s just call this bank Smells Fargo. OK just kidding. But anyway, I was excited to be invited out with my boss to schmooze with the bankers for no other reason then to celebrate our companies flowering relationship with a lot of alcohol.

My boss prefaced our trip in a meeting I had with him about it by saying “Now these bankers like to party. So they’re probably going to want to get you drunk, just to warn you.” Hmm… I don’t think I’ll be a tough sell. But go on. Apparently it was going to be an afternoon of drinking and gambling with strangers. Sounds like a good Thursday.

So we head off in my bosses van, which he drives like a mad man and tells me some of his harrowing stories of the road as we barrel through freeway traffic at 90 miles an hour. I remember now from our boating trip when he drove our whole department to the dock that everyone else lunged for the back seat when we all got in his van and I wasn’t sure why. Now I know.

We screeched up to the gates of the races to greet the bankers. Now, when I think of “bankers” I think of these well-groomed, striped-shirt-wearing, schmoozy, double-tall-decaf-latte kind of guys with business cards in the breast pocket and cell phone to their ear. The guys we I met were like early 30’s, wearing flip flops and were unshaven and I think I heard one burp when he shook my hand. They apparently had just gotten off the train and looked a little embarrassed that we hadn’t gotten to memo about the “casual dress.” Actually, we had, but I hadn’t realized that board shorts were still casual.

They invited us up to a restaurant overlooking the paddock where they parade the horses around. (I’d like to mention at this point that I don’t think I ever actually saw a horse that day. Only blurry, margarita hazed shapes of horses.) We went to order drinks and there was an uncomfortable silence. I looked around coyly, wondering if it we were ordering alcohol. Then one of the bankers kicks off his flip flops and said “By the way, if anyone orders anything non-alcoholic they’re paying for it themselves!” So, OK on the alcohol then! Sounds good, you don’t have to tell me twice. I would like one large souvenir plastic cup racetrack margarita please!

Now, I’ve been to the races before and often had to save up my pennies for a good week to be able to enjoy one giant souvenir margarita. They are so crazy expensive I couldn’t even bring the giant souvenir cup home with me for fear of having anxiety attacks about my bank account balance every time I looked at it. But through the course of this afternoon, the bankers, my boss, and I must have consumed about 50 of them, a good thousand bucks worth of alcohol. Before I knew it, I was standing in a sea of discarded souvenir cups. Clearly these guys were not into the novelty of keeping the cups. (Well, for starters, we would have had to bring an extra car just to take them all home!)

So this outing was highly alcoholic and I couldn’t help it because I never was without a drink in my hand and it was never more than half empty. Various bankers would just appear and replace the drink from my hand while I was talking to someone, without me even noticing. Now, before you start judging, I didn’t get drunk. We were there a good 5 hours, and besides all the drinking, there also were plenty of racetrack foods to partake in. I fleetingly mentioned how I like kettle corn, and within minutes, one of the bankers arrives with armfuls of kettle corn. I ate about a handful.

These bankers were crazy. They kept referring to me as their “client” which, given the large quantity of alcohol and the awkwardly flirty business rapport, could connote a very dirty idea.

In the last race, all the bankers and my boss chipped in about $50 each to go in on this crazy ass ticket that they hoped would win them millions. One of the savvy betting bankers made the bet, and it was some crazy, complicated, sure-fire loser bet and I seem to recall it being that in Race 4 horse #5 had to come in carrying horse #9 on its back in order to win. Inevitably following Race 4 was an awkward moment when savvy betting banker wadded up the now worthless $500 ticket and threw a few souvenir margarita cups around in anger. Bankers have tempers I guess.

We finally left the races, with my boss driving pretty much up the shoulder of the freeway the whole way, and I got home only to be called by some of the bankers. Apparently they were continuing the partying and had called me from the drinking car on the train (or what they single-handedly turned into the drinking car) and wanted to meet up in downtown. I partook. Stories will follow.

Now you may be wondering, was there any business purpose to this event? Well, yes. I decided I want to go into banking.