A Two Day Course on How to Deal with Dummies (and Treasury)

This week I went to a seminar on treasury management in downtown for work. (Please don’t stop reading now, I swear, this blog is not boring.) The best part was I didn’t have to be at work and it was all paid for.

I quickly had a flashback to college and realized that as soon as someone starts talking in front of me for a good amount of time, it starts to sound very soothing. I got there, opened my binder of materials, poised my pen in anticipation of learning, and immediately started nodding off. I did every possible body position to stop myself from falling asleep, and decided that propping your head up with your hand is the worst. College seems so long ago and I wish I remembered how I stayed awake back then.

Oh, but back to the actual content of the seminar. The truth is I only started zoning out during the parts I was already well educated in. Our “professor”, if you will, because that’s really the only name I can give to anyone who knows more then me about a subject and is in front of a room with a power point presentation, looked oddly familiar to me. A guy told me later that he looked like the guy from City Slickers. Yes! Thank you, that would have been helpful to hear during the first hour of a two day seminar rather then at the end, so it wouldn’t have driven me crazy.

The course was on treasury management, something I’ve decided I’m really interested in. In my last position (refer to previous years worth of prevalent blogs) I was bored stiff and really started to contemplate my whole existence. Was I going to debit and credit my life away in some cubicle? Accounting is all well and good and unfortunately I’m damn good at it, so it only made sense to work in it. But it’s all a little too logical and stiff to me. But now I’m in treasury and I’ve realized it’s pretty cool and I’m lucky to have had this opportunity. We’re dealing with real money and making decisions that have a great deal of weight and there’s a lot of creativity involved. Plus, it’s the background that a CFO would have to have. So watch out world.

The funniest part of the course (and trust me, there isn’t a whole lot of “funny” when you’re dealing with treasury management) was when we were learning about daily banking practices. Our professor mentioned how, as all of us knew, banks cut-off wiring activities at 6:30PM eastern time, 3:30PM pacific time. OK next slide please. But then this guy on the other side of the class (who I almost sat next too, but thankfully didn’t) raises his hand to ask a question.

Now, as background, when the class first started, we all went around and introduced ourselves. I was surprised how many people were big time, like Assistant Vice Presidents of banks and Assistant Treasurers of their companies. This guy was clearly in love with his voice and had previously announced that he was from the east coast somewhere.

So, he raised his hand. “So about the banks closing at 3:30 on the west coast. Hm.. so I guess I never really thought about it before, but you guys on the west coast here are really at a disadvantage for banking.” “Um… what?” the professor asked. But the guy continued on. “Well, say you’re a bank in San Diego and you’re trying to get a company’s business who wants to make a wire payment late in the afternoon. If they decide to wire money at like 4, the San Diego bank wouldn’t be able to do it, so then a company could just call up a bank on the east coast and they would still be open for business.” Oh my gosh, did he really just say that? The guy kept going on. “Wow, so you banks over here close at 3:30 and all the east coast banks are open another three hours. I wonder if anyone’s ever considered this.” Um, no, they haven’t because it’s total bullshit. Haven’t you ever heard of time zones? When a bank closes on the west coast, the banks close on the east coast at the same exact time. Oh Christ, this guy’s still talking. The whole class tried to convince him he was crazy in the politest way possible, but he just wasn’t having it. I don’t think he ever figured it out. Probably when he goes home, it’ll suddenly hit him and he’ll be like “Oooooh, crap.” But I got a good laugh out of it.

On the first day I sat next to my co-worker who’s just returned from maternity leave. She was in and out of the seminar taking calls from her nanny and worrying about her baby eating or not, or some crap like that. So the woman sitting on the other side of me tried to befriend me. Most people had come to this seminar from out of town, so this lady clearly knew no one. She introduced herself as being from Salt Lake City. So when she kept trying to talk to me, I was like “no thank you, I already have a Mormon friend.” But then the lunch hour rolled around. My co-worker turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, I’d say we should go to lunch together, but I have to go pump.” EW! OK, you go do that. And please never say that to me again.

Uh oh, now Mormony girl clearly knows that I’m alone for lunch. I stood up quickly, grabbed my stuff, and tried to shuffle down the aisle to get out of there before she could stop me. Damn, the fat guy from Seattle isn’t moving fast enough… go, go! But it was too late. “So, what are you doing for lunch?” she asked. So I spent the next hour making friends with this girl at lunch, who couldn’t have been more different from me. She had six kids. Yeah, six. And she mostly just wanted to hear about my dating life. Probably because she’s been married since she was 12.

At the end of the second day, I started to notice a guy loitering around me at the breaks. I called him hot guy because my co-worker and I had whispered earlier about how buff he was. At the end of the second day, my Mormon friend scampered off catch her flight, and hot guy came up to me. We started talking as I was packing up my stuff and he said he lived a few hours away. I told him he probably shouldn’t drive home during rush hour and he asked if I wanted to do something while he waited for traffic to die down. Oh, hot guy, it took you two days to finally ask me out and you do it NOW? I have places to be. But I invited him out with me to go meet my friends for a drink. They were already propping up the bar down the street from our office. So we went, and dammit, hot guy was totally charming and hilarious.

The seminar was pretty cool, all in all, and a good networking opportunity if nothing else. As usual, I was about ten years younger then most people in the room, but I always feel a little superior when I can hold my own in professional discussions with high ranking people in their 30’s. Plus, if I’m ever in need of a new Mormon friend or a guy who doesn’t understand time zones, I’m set.

Wait...

I just found out that the temp in my department’s name is Lebrandi. That’s Lebrandi.

On Saturday I watched four hours of Sex & the City episodes with my friend. That can really start to mess with your mind. When I finally got back to my place, after talking my friend out of trying to find two other girls to go have cosmopolitans with, I turned on the TV and right there on Bravo was a re-airing of the golden globes and they were interviewing Sarah Jessica Parker on the red carpet. She has started to infiltrate my life. Get her out of here! Otherwise I’m going to start coming home from a night out, sitting down at my computer and starting to write things like “Later that night, I got to thinking about men, women, and relationships.”
On the last DVD of the last season, they have this cheesy montage from HBO where they interview all the cast and show slow motion clips of the show. The cast was all crying and saying how life altering the show was. They even played the song “memories” at one point. I almost barfed into my cosmo.

Today a temp started at work. Not in my department, but she working for another big wig whose office is right next to me. I call him inappropriate guy. His office is at the end of the hallway that everyone walks down and he’s strategically placed his desk so that he can look up and watch girls walk down the hall while pretending to be on a phone call. OK, well maybe he is on a phone call. But he’s also snuck up behind me at the water cooler a few too many times to say hi. And then there was that incredibly awkward time that I ran into him at brunch on a certain hungover Sunday where he overheard me saying I wasn’t wearing any underwear. But that story’s for another time.
The new temp girl looks about 18. I think the alternative to this job is working at Hot Dog on a Stick. She’s only here for a week and I hope it stays that way. Her whole job is to answer the phone when it rings. Literally, that’s her whole job. I heard inappropriate guy say to her “all I need you to do this week is answer the phone. Thanks.” Then he disappeared back into his office and went back to his stance of pretending to be on the phone. So this temp is just a warm body basically. And inappropriate guy isn’t even in the office that much, so her job could be better classified as a chair warmer. I kept hearing her answer the phone and it was hilarious. “Hello, inappropriate guy’s office, this is Tasha.” This would always be followed by one of the longest and most confused “Oooooh’s” I’ve ever heard, as though the person on the other end had just asked to her do calculus. “Oooooh. OK. Wait. OK. He’s not going to be back until 1.” She would always say “wait” when she answered every call, like she had to get her thoughts together. The friekin president of the company could have called and she’d be all “This is Tasha. OK. Wait.”
That is so unprofessional. OK. Wait. I need to get back to my game of spider solitaire. I mean work.

Attention Fireman - Save My Career

You know you’ve been in corporate America too long when you discover an automatic stapler in one your drawers that you never knew was yours and it truly makes your day. Anyone need anything stapled?

I’m no longer the youngest person at my company. This became blatantly apparent when I pointed out to a friend that a certain admin’s outfit was “not work appropriate.” I’d worn a skirt much shorter just a year ago. I’m older and wiser now. I’m 23.

I think my voice has finally started to sound my age. I’ve always had a tendency to sound about 4 on the phone, and more then a few times the person on the other end has asked to speak to my mommy. Even at work. Me: “Um, no, this is Heather in corporate treasury. I wanted to issue some overnight commercial paper.” Goldman Sachs: “OK little girl, put the phoney phone down and let me talk to daddy, OK?”
But yesterday I was talking to one of our traders in Connecticut and he asked me where I went to grad school! Now I in fact did go to grad school. But guys, he thought I sounded old enough to go to grad school! Not to mention smart enough. Wow. I must sound hot.

New Years 7 (I Slept In)

Man. Now that was a party. I've read my friends blogs for their wrap ups about New Years and only found Charlie doing it justice. The only kid who refuses to link my blog to his.
So I'll give my own run down. This will require me to pause my Tivo. That means it's serious.

There were so many people at my house. Probably about 40 at one point. Most of them I knew, but some were what I dubbed "randoms." My parents were surprisingly cool about all the crazy people.

It felt like a friekin fun house. On one part of our patio there was a hookah going, on another there was a keg, another there was an ice luge to take shots off, absynthe shots in the corner, the hot tub which went all night (props to our propane tank and James and Drew's determination with a hairdryer to get the furnace to light) and James's eight hour I-Pod New Years playlist made the night complete.

James pulled the annual prank, and we pulled the annual falling for it. Claire mastered the blackberry mojitos and even though all the boys taunted "Those are going to make you sick!", all the girls managed to hold their own. The boys definitely won out on number of people barfing the next morning.

We drained the keg of 150 cups of Newcastle by about one in the morning. One of my favorite points in the night was when my raucous friends and I were in the hot tub and my dad wandered by and found a red cup sitting by the pool, picked it up, and threw it into the pool. We found it at the bottom the next morning and he instisted he would never have thrown a full cup of beer into the pool. It was great.

The evening was then topped off by the Great Salsa Fight of 2005, or by that point I guess it was 2006. All I know is Drew had to get a ladder to wipe salsa off the cieling of our guest house. And a lot of it ended up on James's face and he didn't even wake up.

Then there was the fire alarm going off, which Charlie quickly and deftly disarmed from its perch ten feet above the floor, without spilling a drop of his beer. Then there was me getting hit on by one of the randoms. What a night.

There was the inevitable post-party trauma, but I managed to keep clear from it, mostly by being one of the only people who didn't throw up in the morning. I woke up to a beautiful 2006 morning, with a crisp morning fog rolling down the mountain, the sounds of birds chirping, and then of someone throwing up in the bathroom. I went outside and realized what the world really smelled like, and vowed never to go back into the guest house dungeon of stinky boys, salsa, and post-party puke.

Claire made a great quotable New Years quote when she started heading to the bathroom. "Someone's in there!" someone said. Claire's response was "OK. I'll throw up over the balcony then."

The other ever-present quote of the night was Drew validating everything with "Guys, I know because I go to SLO." Apparently an education at SLO makes you both an expert in kegs and everything else you might come accross. How do you get salsa off the cieling? "Guys, trust me. I know how. I go to SLO."

On New Years Day, Alex, Patrick, Drew, Justin and I went up to the main house and started cleaning up. I'm convinced Drew was still drunk at this point. He'd brought Gatorade as his hang-over cureall and bragged about it all night, how he would drink it right before bed and would feel fine in the morning. I guess that was all shot to hell when he started mixing it with Vodka and created a new drink with Adam called "Gatorka."

We thought we cleaned everything up, until I discovered a red bra draped over a patio chair. What the...? Someone made the obligatory "Wow, this was a great party!" comment until we discovered it was Alex's and it had gotten there by very innocent means.

I found red party cups all over my house and I'm sure my parents will for years to come. Besides the one still at the bottom of the pool that my dad threw, there was one on my mom's sewing machine in her office, one in my bedroom closet, a few on the back of the toilet, a few in random potted plants, and one up a tree.

The next evening a kid even drove back to my house at like nine at night and said he lost his cell phone. I actually couldn't even remember this kid being at the party, and told him politely that everyone has to experience losing a cell phone on a drunk night out once in their lives, and sent him on his way. Whoever he was.

The next morning my friends were all convinced my parents would not let me have another party for at least ten years, considering the sheer amount of throwing up and debauchery that went on. I sort of began to think the same thing, and Newcastle being my Dad's favorite beer could only count for so much.

When the last party-goers finally sobered up enough to leave (around 5 in the evening on New Years Day), I tiptoed up to see my parents. "So, guys..." i said... "Did you have fun?" There were quiet for a minute. Then my Dad said "We should do that every year!" My parents are awesome.