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.