Ever wondered what the support staff thinks of you investment bankers? (Do you care?) We found a post from "Kev", a 37 year old guy who works at a UK investment banking firm in its desktop publishing group. (He's also writing his first novel, "The Devil's Personal Assistant", which is the main focus of his blog.) You probably know someone just like him, who rescues you when your powerpoint presentation has somehow gotten all screwed up, or who makes it looks all spiffy. In any case, he talks about the banter in his group and makes observations about how people, most specifically women, are treated within the bank in a post called "Boobs and Banking"....
Odd how the world revolves around certain modes of thought in a particular stretch of time. Yesterday I wrote about backsides, today my world was dominated by the reverse angle. For some reason 1 guy and 5 women at work decided to devote a least 4 hours of the working day to disussing wether one of the young female bankers had had a bust augmentation operation or not. There was speculation about her gait, her way of holding her torso, the particular motion her chest made at certain times and according to certain observations. There was even some scientific discussion about the probability of the ratio of her general distribution of body mass to to the size of that particular region of her anatomy. Basically she was skinny and pretty with big boobs, and that was just not right.
It was capped off by one woman's observation "well I bet I know where her bonus went."
Of course, this is just a bit of banter to pass the day. It is not meant seriously really, and I don't blame my colleagues or myself for having a bit of a laugh about something daft, it is a pressurised environment, and like many places with pressure, you blow off steam somehow, and often in a manner a bit irreverant and cheeky.
But part of the inspiration for this conversation is that this young women is usually quite rude and belligerant with the female staff members in the desktop publishing unit of the investment bank I work in. It is an odd phenomina, but it happens. For some reason, while the blokes are usually universally unpleasant if they are going to be unpleasant and difficult at all, the female bankers are generally far nastier to the women I work with than to the men. And this includes the mysogynist young twit male bankers who won't respect women just because they are women. She is not the only one, several others do the same thing.
There is a female banker who always smiles at me, and calmly and respectfully explains her needs whenever I work with her, but a female colleague sitting next to me can march up to the reception desk and get lectured and practically insulted, only seconds later.
It may have something to do with the fact that they themselves get treated like garbage by the men they work with and for. It may be a cultural things, it might be something I cannot quite understand. However, there is one particular young woman I have worked for on a number of occasions whose name I just dread hearing, because it invariably lead to hours of torture as she harasses you every 5 minutes with demands of where and when she will receive the hours of work she has dumped upon you, laced with imcomprehensible instructions, badly worded comments, and personal insults with multiple explanation marks sitting after them.
I could never work out what the problem was. She just seemed like a foul mouthed, nasty little bitch. Then one day I was wandering around on the floor where she works and witness a bevy of macho guys in suits bellowing at her as though she was the house maid, let alone their colleague and equal. This woman had no one to take out that treatment on, as people who are abused sometimes feel the need to somehow, except those lower down the pecking order than herself, which meant cleaners or support staff other than P.A.s, who have personal working relationships with senior managers, and thus cannot be fucked with because they are well used to dealing with big fry far more frightening than the analysts they assist and are usually have their fingers on the strings of vital conduits the analysts cannot function without....
Boobs and Banking - The Devil's Personal Assistant
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